Ruby's Hallowe'en

The most effective licensing procedure is self-licensing, so I am granting myself permission to indulge in an unapologetic essay in paedolatry—a neologism conveniently covered by the same license.  It means “kiddie-worship”, of course.  Given the number and adorability of my grandchildren, and in light of the remarkable restraint I have exercised in slobbering over them in public, I have commissioned myself to write a little essay about Ruby Dixon Fleming’s first active Hallowe’en at the age of one year and eleven months.

            Ruby appareled herself—one could hardly use the word disguise—as Ms. Liberty, the “mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.” Ruby is on intimate terms with the real Ms. Liberty, a near neighbor who brazenly rises next that part of the “golden shore” of New York harbor a scant distance from the Dixon Fleming household on Coffey Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn.  Ruby had set out with a splendid torch of “imprisoned lightning” crafted of tissue paper and a flashlight by her cunning mother; but she set it aside in the excitement of her first candy-grab.  This was her initiation to Hallowe’en, and she may not have fully grasped the finer points of theory, such as that one gathers one’s treats from the house-residents rather than from the paper sacks of the other kids.

Some of us need no mask to scare little kids

            Your average gray, straight, male Episcopalian geriatric who owns two suits and speaks in, like, complete sentences may at first feel a little self-conscious when dropped among the young and the hip of waterfront Brooklyn.  I have the impression some of these people may not have voted for Mitt Romney.  But Hallowe’en on Coffey Street dissipated my secretly held worries that they constitute a potentially revolutionary force intent on undermining the Establishment.  The thing is, if you own or are buying a house in Brooklyn today, you are the Establishment.  Once one moves beyond the first impression born of possibly odd attire, a more family-friendly, community minded set of real estate stake-holders would be hard to find in the dullest suburb of Houston.

         Variations on a theme   / the splitting headache

        Indeed they probably would not be found there at all, because Red Hook has preserved (or created anew) a vital sense of neighborhood from the rapidly vanishing American past.  The anodyne anonymity of suburbia is definitely not the vibe.  Still, nobody seems to know just who organized the Trick-or-Treating.  Photocopied notices simply appeared announcing that traditional Hollowe’en activities for very young Red Hookers would concentrate on three blocks of one of the neighborhood’s longest unbroken residential stretches  (including by chance Ruby’s own house) between five and five-thirty.  If you build it, they will come.  I haven’t seen a critical mass of trick-or-treaters at my house in Princeton in about twenty years.  We’re lucky to get a pitiable trickle, but there in Brooklyn a tide of kids in the toddler to pre-teen range, together with at least an equal number of parents and other supervisory adults, ebbed and flowed along the street in carnivalesque spirit.  The costumes, including those of many of the elders, were great.   There were sidewalk highjinks galore.  Mikhail Bakhtine would have approved, but so would T. S. Eliot.  Here was a richly imaginative event exhibiting the union of “tradition and the individual talent,” skillfully orchestrated chaos riotously fun and at the same time comfortably safe and wholesome.   And to think that the star of the whole show was our own blond-haired, blue-eyed, torchless Lady Liberty!

Lazarus breaks free, crosses finish line 

  Weird White Female seeks freshly manufactured Monster for possible matrimony   

   

 I was not present to see another recent manifestation of the Red Hook spirit.  But Rich and Katie provided me with some photos.  Two years ago the neighbors would have been able to celebrate Hallowe’en only in rowboats or diving bells.  In the wake of Hurricane Sandy (29 October 2012) the whole place was prime “Section A”, among the hardest-hit sections of the city—under water and actually under order of evacuation by Mayor Bloomberg.  This year, to mark the second anniversary of their spunky civic comeback, the locals mounted a spirited allegorical pageant, the Barnacle Parade, in which the grimacing villain Sandi was once again bested by the super-hero Sanito, as I would name the personification of the New York Sanitation Department, the city’s unexpected saviors two years ago.  I don’t know whether there were any literary scholars on the Parade’s planning committee, but there may well have been.  Perhaps Red Hook will be the cradle of the Next Big Thing in Theater.  It was exactly such secularized “morality plays” in the late Renaissance that ended up giving us Shakespeare!

 The Barnacle Parade: Sanito versus Sandi

            For dear Ruby and the other youngsters of her neighborhood the Hallowe’en highjinks on Coffey Street in 2014 may become a part of that substratum of childhood memory that, depending upon its positive or negative thrust, goes so far to vindicate Wordsworth's claim that “the Child is the Father to the Man”.  Surely these will be memories of delight.  But even happy memories come in different shades and tones.  So long as our English language and its literature live on, genuine glimpses of the old Christian culture will not be entirely expunged.  What does the word “Hallowe’en” mean?  It means “All Hallows Eve”.   Hallowe’en is the vigil of the Feast of All the Saints (Old English Hallows, as in “hallowed halls” or “this hallowed ground”), a day of reverent remembrance.  All Saints’ day is November 1^st, and it is followed by All Souls’ Day on November 2^nd--a generalized memorial of all the dead.  In several European cultures, including the Castilian imported to the Hispanic New World, All Souls’ Day (Día de los muertos) became the more prominent of the two.  I just saw a newspaper article about the complicating influence of Hallowe’en on the traditional Mexican customs of the Día de los muertos.  Sitting there on a Brooklyn stoop, passing out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from a rapidly depleting basket in my lap, I missed none of the fun.  Yet my mind did turn intermittently to some of the faithful departed, and especially my grandparents James and Cora Louise, Samuel and Dell, as I hope that Ruby’s, seventy years hence, might turn for a moment to memories of her grandparents.

Photo credits to Ambrogio Bergognone, Katie Dixon, Rich Fleming, and Joan Fleming 

The Jubilation at Red Hook

 [Photo: Allen Murabayashi]

The Dutch heritage of old New York is memorialized in a dwindling number of socially prominent family names, in some place names like Harlem, and in a few anglicized geographical terms such as kill (a stream or watercourse) and hook (Dutch hoek, a promontory or corner of land jutting into the sea.)  So it was geography that gave Red Hook, the semi-peninsular waterfront neighborhood of Brooklyn just south of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, its name.  Brooklyn is rapidly effacing Manhattan as the most happening borough of New York, and Red Hook is rising rapidly among the more happening Brooklyn neighborhoods.  It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that Red Hook should be the venue for the wedding of Katie Dixon and Richard Fleming, both Red Hook householders.  The nuptials of the bloguiste’s eldest child would doubtless have had a measurable effect upon him in any case, even had the celebration not been, as in this instance it in fact was, the event of the season.

           

            The religious ceremony was performed al fresco, according to the New Zealand Anglican rite, in Valentino Park, with its matchless view of the Statue of Liberty.   Valentino Park is named not for the heart-throb of the early silver screen, but for a heroic New York fireman, Louis Valentino.  Ancillary heroes on this occasion were young relatives of the happy couple--Lulu and Cora Fleming-Benite, flower maidens, and Wyatt Dixon, ring-bearer.  The officiant, the Rev. Canon Joan E. Fleming, delivered a brief homily that won appreciation (and a few laughs) from the gathered friends and family.

Valentino Pier on an ordinary day...

and on one not so ordinary

            Though a ceremony of such blessed simplicity hardly needed a rehearsal, there of course was one.  As we milled about with half an eye on the principals, the ocean liner Queen Mary II, big as a mountain, eased past us on her way from her Brooklyn berth to the open sea and some romantic cruise.   That alone justified the rehearsal, which was in any case necessary to legitimate the statutory rehearsal dinner.  That event took place at Sunny’s Bar on Conover Street, roughly midway between Valentino Park and the newlyweds’ home on Coffey Street—described to me by a realtor I later met at the wedding dinner as “the Gold Coast of Red Hook”.  Here was a description that varied somewhat from that of H. P. Lovecraft in his classic tale “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), where he writes of those waterfront streets as a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence.”

an expression of local pride

             Whatever it may then have been, Sunny’s—which advertises itself as “the oldest continually run bar on Brooklyn's waterfront”—is today the hip venue for bibulous poetry readings, blue grass bands, and art happenings, all supported by a young and enthusiastic local clientele.  Sunny’s is a bar, not a restaurant.  The delicious and abundant Chinese dishes, together with the requisite paper troughs in which to serve them, were the work of a neighborhood caterer.  Musical entertainment was provided by the Red Hook Ramblers.  (This was, in fact, an All-Red-Hook event).

            The rehearsal dinner was a comparatively intimate affair;  the wedding celebration itself was something else again.  To call the blast that followed the ceremony a “reception” would be an insult to the English language and to the Red Hook neighborhood alike.   A very large contingent of the fascinating friends and colleagues of the bride and groom were in attendance, not to mention dignitaries from afar.   Though young John Henry and his mother were understandably impeded from coming, Rich’s brother Luke was able to be there with all other immediate family nuclei.  The venue for this spectacular event was the site of the former Pioneer Iron Works.  A hundred years ago and more this place turned out locomotive parts, steam rollers, and other high-precision implements of heavy industry.  Today the huge brick factory building is in the midst of a brilliant conversion to an arts complex, its old open industrial yard transformed into an eccentric garden.  Beneath the soaring ceiling of the old foundry room more than 200 people sat down to a sumptuous repast prepared by the chefs of the famous Good Fork Restaurant of Red Hook, who had set up a field kitchen in an out-of-sight corner of the old machine shop.  The generous and charming hosts for this fabulous dinner were Dr. John Dixon and his wife Betty, the bride’s parents.  John Dixon also offered a beautiful toast, the harmonious elements of which fully confirmed his reputation as the “Sage of Murfreesboro”.

among out-of-town celebrities were James and Hester Magnuson from Austin

            Our new daughter-in-law, who would look gorgeous wearing on old flour sack, was dazzlingly beautiful in her simply draped white wedding gown.  And I must offer a word of sartorial praise also for my son Rich, who cut quite a figure in a mode of attire one might have thought obsolete since the days of Simon Legree or, at the latest, Rhett Butler.  This beautiful couple, now three hours married, stepped out upon the dance floor, and, as they say, things really began to happen.  Let the Wild Rumpus begin, indeed!  The late afternoon had been hot and humid, and heavy with the threat of a storm.  But the heavens themselves could not fail to respond to so joyous a company, and as night fell all threat of precipitation vanished, and the revelers were free to drift freely between the culinary delights of the iron foundry and the ample beverage stations of the garden.

            Your bloguiste cannot report on the party’s last hours.  He and some others exercised the septuagenarian option and drove back to the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.  But one knows even at the time they are happening that certain happy experiences will never fade from the retina of memory, and this was certainly one of them.  To beloved Katie and Richard, God’s blessing, life long and fulfilling, and happiness undiluted! 

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Song of Solomon 1:2

...not that the wine was bad, mind you.