Mallory's Camera

Hung out with the kiskas and the chickens yesterday, staying as horizontal and on ice as possible. The kiskas have forgiven me for my brief road trip. (They are very odd kiskas, as I have written before; they don't like to be picked up and snuggled, even though I explain to them: This is how you earn your Friskies! I do think they love me after their odd kiska fashion but it's hard to judge that boundary between love and tolerance.) But the chickens were pissed! I had to offer them three corn tortillas before they would deign to take them from my hand.

###

I read a very trashy novel about JP Morgan's librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who was a very fascinating woman:



JP Morgan's library is now a small museum well worth visiting, with its enormous collection of illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, drawings, & prints, original manuscripts of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Keats' Endymion (among others), and three Gutenberg Bibles, but its chief attraction, in my eyes at least, is the library itself, which is like every fantasy you ever had about a fabulous library in an old mansion:



It is just fuckin' amazing.

And Belle da Costa Greene put it all together.

She was a Black woman (who claimed to be Portuguese) and expert both in illuminated manuscripts and the evasion of custom duties. She and Morgan were very, very close. When asked once whether she'd been Morgan's mistress, she laughed and replied, "We tried!"

(For such a straightlaced capitalist pig—he is said to have inspired Mr. Monopoly in the game Monopoly—Morgan kept some outré company. He was similarly close to the astrologer Evangeline Adams and paid her handsomely for merger and acquisition consultations. And he never signed contracts while Mercury was in retrograde!)

###

In the evening, I noticed that Criterion had some early movies by my director boyfriend Sean Baker.

I watched Starlet.

Starlet is very, very good, and it was very interesting to note how even that early in Sean Baker's career (2012), his signature style was fully intact. Baker makes movies about how innocence prevails in contexts that mainstream culture condemns as morally repugnant. I find his films intensely moving.

Starlet is about the unlikely friendship between a young porn actress and an 86-year-old woman. It stars Ernest Hemingway's great-granddaughter and Sean Baker's actual dog.

At one point, the dog runs away—and I immediately began crying and ran to Doesthedogdie.com to check and see if the dog comes back because if the dog didn't, I would have to stop watching the movie.

Alas! Starlet flies too far under the radar for Doesthedogdie.com!

So, I steeled myself and kept watching—and the dog does come back, and the film has the most beautiful, luminous, poignant ending...

###

My knee feels much better today though it is still far from 100%. In a few hours, I will toddle off to the garden, finish my planting, and put up the solar-powered lamps kindly gifted me by R & J.

On Tuesday, my nervous system told my body, Babe you cannot do this anymore.

My hands started shaking while I was doing taxes in the Middletown office.

Shaking? That's actually an understatement: My hands thought they were conducting an invisible philharmonic orchestra.

Mister and Missus McGoo were sitting in my cubicle. My hands shook so hard, I couldn't input their driver's license numbers.

Oozing apologeticness, I ushered the McGoo's to another tax preparer, expressed remorse to Leslie, and took off.

Not sure which of the many, many straws was the one that broke the camel's back.

Was it panic over impending nuclear cataclysm? Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!

Was it watching a fox break Grey Chicken's neck in the golden hour, the afternoon before?

Or knowing I wasn't going home in any true sense of the word "home," but only to some place where I'd parked my stuff and cats (I hoped) temporarily.

###

This episode happened following about 36 hours off, which I tried to turn into quality time by going to the New Paltz Community Garden and breakfasting with real-life Flavia.

I planted peas and put some strawberries and marigolds into one of the upraised beds the previous plot tenant had conveniently left behind:



Following morning, I motored up to Ellenville for breakfast with real-life Flavia, who may have found a good home for Brian's beloved piano:



It's sad that nobody seems to want Brian's beloved piano. It's an awfully good piano, though real-life Mimi's tenancy with its wood fires, clouds of marijuana smoke, dust, and Japanese beetle infestation has been hard on it. Still. It managed to plong in tune when the head of SUNY New Paltz's music department came up to play some notes.

And real-life Mimi surprised us both—pleasantly!—by actually finding a campsite where she can live in the camper Brian helped her buy, come May. That was a relief!

"So, I'm going to spend May cleaning out the house, and then I'll put the property on the market," Flavia said. "Tim seems to think I can get a lot of money for it?"

"How much?"

Flavia hesitated for a moment. But in the nine months since Brian's death, we have become intimate friends who can talk about money. "Million or so."

"And the first thing the new owners will do is pull down Brian's house," I said.

"Probably," said Flavia.



I had a Shlock shift in Montgomery after hanging out with Flavia. I didn't want to be there, but when I got back to the casa after work, I didn't want to be there either since Icky was in residence, and my antipathy toward Icky just grows and grows and grows. Icky marches around the house talking to people on the phone or alternately haranguing and cajoling the Spawn in a loud voice, pretty much ignoring me. It's like he thinks I'm invisible, and when I'm around him, I pretty much feel invisible. Fortunately, he's only up 10 days out of the month.

Anyway, I was keeping Sonia and Sunny company in the Patrizia-torium on the glorious couch Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed gifted me with when I left Dutchess County, when I heard loud squawking from the back lawn.

Looked out—

A fox had the grey chicken in its mouth.

Ran downstairs and out onto the porch.

Icky had heard the squawking, too, and had raced out onto the lawn. The fox dropped the chicken and leaped—its fur golden in the golden light of the late afternoon sun—before running into the small copse of trees that mark the property's boundaries. But either it had broken the chicken's neck, or Icky had broken it, carrying her back to the porch.

The grey chicken was the shyest of the chicken GurlZ. I liked her. I appreciated her hesitancy. So, this was very sad.

But fox is gonna fox. And I have told Icky at least 50 times: There are too many predators around here to let the chickens free-range! You have to build them a run!

He ignored me, of course. Like I say, I am completely invisible to him.

But that essentially means that Black Chicken and her sole surviving companion, an almost identical black chicken, are Dead Chickens Walking. It's a bad situation. And frustrating. Because I can't do a damn thing about it.

I didn't sleep well.

Is that why my hands started shaking so badly in the Schlock office?

I don't know.

###

Before Schlock, I did taxes for a handful of friends every year through TaxBwana. One of those friends is my good pal Tom, whom I first met on LJ back in the Jurassic. Anyway, Tom contacted me that evening: Could I...?

Yes, but Schlock won't let me do freebies, I said. So, I'd have to charge you.

He described his tax documents. They were pretty basic. But Schlock would have charged him a minimum of $250, which seemed like highway robbery to me. So, I snooped around online for a bit and found a site that lets you do and file your federal taxes for free-eee-eeee! and only charges you $20 for filing your state taxes.

"So, you'll set up the account," I said to him over the phone, "and then I'll use that account to input your tax stuff."

"Good show," he said. "But how are you? You sound down."

I described what had happened at the Schlock office that morning. How my hands started shaking, how I couldn't control them, how Mister and Missus McGoo had gawked at me in horror with their big, googly, cartoon eyes.

"Honestly, I couldn't blame them," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted me to do my taxes either at that point. But it would have been less embarrassing if I had taken a big dump and begun fingerpainting on the walls."

"God, that sounds awful," Tom said.

"It was," I said. "But working there has been awful from the start. What you won't do, you'll do for money."

"Has it been bad?" he asked.

"Really bad. And housing insecurity plays into that in a major way. You and I should be housemates! We'd have a good time and save a ton of money."

I said this in a random, joking way. But the minute the words came out of my mouth, I thought: Hmmmm... That's not a bad idea.

Tom has a house. Since his daughter moved out, he lives there alone.

Tom and I are very much in synch psychologically. We both subscribe to the Larry McMurtry ideal of friendship. We are not romantically attracted to one another. We are both more-or-less in the same financial situation.

The more we talked about it, the more appealing the arrangement sounded.

But there is one major caveat: Tom lives in Holland, Michigan. Where I have never been. Holland, Michigan, ranks high on Architectural Digest and Forbes lists of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. It's a college town. It has an arthouse cinema! But it is also Trumpy, plus it has brutal winters.

At any rate, I am probably gonna fly out for a visit sometime in the next couple of months.
If I like what I see, the plan becomes a possibility.

I'm also going to book a consultation with a neurologist. I've been assuming the hand tremors are stress-related. But who knows? Maybe I have Parkinson's disease.

The chicken flock waits beneath the porch to say goodbye to me when I trudge off to the office because I always give them tasty tortilla treats.

Only yesterday, when I went out, there were only three of them instead of four.

I went back inside and asked Icky, "Do you know where the other black chicken is?"

Icky shrugged, unconcerned. "She probably wandered off somewhere on her own."

When Icky is in residence, I leave the chicken wrangling to him. They are his chickens after all.

Still, this was weird. The chickens travel in their flock of four. Icky had only let them out of their coop about an hour earlier when presumably, there had been four. I hadn't noticed any feathers around, as one might have had a predator grabbed the other black chicken.

###

I went off to the Montgomery Schlock office where I literally spent three hours gabbing to Gary, my 350-pound coworker, and doing absolutely nothing else because there were no clients. Gary showed me the journal in which he chronicles his weight-loss journey and his financial transactions. He is 29 years old and has already accumulated $40,000 in investments, working Schlock and another job as a residential counselor at a home for adults with developmental disabilities. Gary is very, very smart—and very, very sweet.

"By the time you're 35, you'll have your life entirely where you want it to be!" I told him. "You'll have lost the rest of that weight, and you'll have someone who loves you and a house—"

###

Back at the casa, I puttered. And when twilight came around, I looked out the window and thought I espied all four chickens pecking for insects just outside their coop.

Icky was out.

So, I waited another 15 minutes and then went outside myself to shut the chickens up for the night—

Except there were no chickens at all in the coop.

I left the coop door open, ran back to the house, and began one of my weird, atavistic prayer rituals: Please, Universe, please! Make the chickens be okay!!!

How could this be?

Where could they have gone?

Frantically, I texted Icky.

When he got back an hour later, I accosted him equally frantically: "Did you get my text?"

"No. What?"

"The chickens!"

He went back outside, returning five minutes later, frowning. "Only two are in the coop."

Two?

But that was two more than had been there when I'd checked.

So maybe the other two were still around somewhere? Nesting on a brood of eggs they'd laid in some underbrush?

###

I spent the night reading up on Reddit on True Tales of Amazing Poultry Runaways & Returns. There are a lot of them.

Molly ran away for an entire month shortly after you moved here, I reminded myself. And you didn't see any evidence that a predator got the chickens.

Still, my heart feels broken this morning.

I don't hold up The Umbrella of Protection very well.

I can't take sufficient care of innocent little creatures that depend upon me.

I can barely take care of myself.

Why can't I live in a Universe where innocence & a pure soul are valued? Surely, in an infinity of parallel universes, such a Universe exists! Why am I trapped here in a world where competitiveness is baked into the evolutionary process so that only implacable indifference and occasional cruelty prosper?

###

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I'm lucky to have a sense of humor and an obsessive creative project that functions as a background process. Otherwise, life would seem pret-ty grim and absolutely meaningless just about now.

At least, it's warmer! Temps have been above freezing for the past few days and are forecast to be in the 40°s all next week.

On Monday, when it was -4° overnight, I woke up to a freezing cold house because Icky, once again, had neglected to order heating oil, and the furnace had run out of fuel.



Yes, again.

Icky, in NYC, was not answering his phone, so I called the Ulster County Sheriff's Dept to come and do a welfare check—hey! A 73-year-old woman, alone in a 36° house during sub‑zero weather??? Not safe!!!

I mean, I had a space heater, struggling to keep the ambient temps in ny bedroom in the 50°s, so with a coat and a hat, I wasn't gonna expire imminently of hypothermia, but c'mon.

The Ulster County Sheriff's Dept dispatched two officers who were very nice but could do nothing.

"You could try seeing if an oil company will do an emergency one-time delivery," one of the officers suggested.

"And call social services," suggested the other.

I sighed and said, "I didn't think you would be able to do anything. I just wanted this on record in case I die of hypothermia and you need to find the perp to accuse of negligent homicide."

"I will personally pull the electric chair switch on that one," said the first officer. "What a prick your landlord is. The rent market around here is horrifying."

I was due to go into Schlock, but of course, going into Schlock would have meant turning off the space heater because you cannot leave a space heater untended; the risk of house fires is just too great. And turning off the space heater would have meant returning to a bedroom that was 37°.

So, instead, I spent the morning calling around to 10 different heating oil companies and every Ulster County social services department that seemed vaguely relevant to my needs. Interspersed with calls & texts to Icky.

The heating oil companies were downright hostile. Heating oil deliveries? Get on line, be-yatch! And put down a $1,000 deposit! The Ulster County social services departments were bored, dismissive, & condescending. They too wanted me to get on line.

Finally, Icky called back. Wonder of wonders! He was even vaguely apologetic. And arranged a delivery with his regular provider. By mid-afternoon, the house was back up to a chilly but habitable 60°—which is where I keep the thermostat because heating oil is expensive but sweaters and sweatshirts are cheap.

###

The experience took its toll emotionally.

'Cause this is the third time it's happened, and fool me twice... So, I felt like a moron: I should have moved, right? Except if I had moved, I would not have had access to the Schlock revenue stream, which is coming in useful.

But more, I felt brutalized because I was old, scared, and met with a tone that said, You’re just one more annoyance. I grokked the bureaucratic flatness was more about their overload than my worth or legitimacy. Still. I felt very marginalized & hopeless & as if I was of no importance to anyone.

Didn't help that I had to trudge out 100 yards through the snow twice to bring the chickens water. Icky still hasn't dealt with that. No, the chickens are not my responsibility, but I'm not gonna have innocent animals suffering on my watch.

Crumwold Hall on fire in Hyde Park.

Crumwold Hall was built by Archibald Rogers, a minor railroad tycoon, in 1886, making it one of the few local Gilded Age mansions without a Livingston family connection. It's named for Crum Elbow Creek, which flows into the Hudson hereabouts.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor considered moving there once. FDR's mansion is right next door; he played there as a boy, and the soldiers assigned to protect him on his trips home during WWII were garrisoned there.

New York was not interested in adding Crumwold Hall to the state's portfolio of historic landmarks, so once the original doyenne croaked, the mansion passed from hand to hand, eventually ending up in the possession of an obscure religious cult called the Millennial Kingdom Family Church.

Belinda's house is part of the subdevelopment that was built on the original 5,000-acre estate, so I've often viewed the mansion from afar.

Here's what the mansion looked like in its prime:



Practically nothing is known about the Millennial Kingdom Family Church. They have a Facebook Page, but it hasn't been updated since 2015. Belinda thinks there couldn't have been more than 12 people living in the 75-room house. Their water had recently been turned off since they stopped paying their bill a year ago, which made the firefighters' job all the more difficult.

Anyway, I am thinking: Perfect! Grazia will join the Millennial Kingdom Family Church! And Neal will rescue her after the building catches on fire!

###

Shortly, I must gird up and hike out to check in on the chickens. Their coop is about 500 feet from the house. Icky rigged up a network of extension cords to power their fountain, but that grid has failed, and the water in their fountain is frozen solid, so I have been trekking in every day with bowls of fresh water, hoping this will keep them from dying of thirst.

I tested the outlets with my phone charger: The extension cord relay is charging at its source in the basement, but not at its destination at the coop.

The culprit is likely a dead extension cord segment, currently buried under eight inches of snow.

Fond though I am of the chickens, the prospect of spending half an hour narrowing down the dead extension cord does not attract: It is 20° out there with a "real feel" of 8° 'cause there's wind raising mini-snow squalls.

Maybe when the temps rise back to seasonal (supposedly Tuesday).

###

Frigid temperatures also kept me from my New Year's Day plan: a vigorous tromp across the Walkway!

I have this superstition that the way you spend New Year's Day is a template for how you are going to spend the year, so naturally, I wanted to fill my New Year's Day with as many wholesome activities as possible!

But an hour and a half in the cold?? With Hideous White Stuff all around me?

No, thank you!

I did remain happy & occupied all day long, reading, delighting, communicating with friends. So, perhaps that will be the auger. Had a marathon phone conversation with my pal Tom in Michigan that was quite entertaining.

Didn't do a single scrap of useful work, though. And didn't exercise.

Those would be unfortunate augers.

Off to the gym as soon as I deal with the chickens.