Sparkle Week

It’s Sparkle Week in Lambertville. The city has promised to take away whatever we put out. All over town attics are being emptied, cellars are disgorging their contents onto the sidewalk, scavengers are collecting treasures, dreams are ending, and marriages are breaking up. Fortunately I have just been reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo, and so my marriage is safe. As Harold trundles curbward with armful after armful of formerly beloved craft supplies, decorating objects, building materials, and broken furniture, I am able to smile serenely. I thank the objects for whatever they brought to my life, and I let them go. My soul is Japanese. Sort of. Anyway I successfully resist the urge to grab them and haul them back.

Serenity is not the attitude everywhere in town. Some residents are suspicious and resentful of the scavengers, who come from far and wide in broken-down trucks to carry away our unwanted stuff. One resident complained that they root through the piles of discards like bears, throwing what they don’t want into the street. Well, that won’t do. Our streets are narrow enough as it is. Others mutter darkly that things you do want might be carried away along with your unwanted things. Better clear off the porch, just in case. Nevertheless all my porch furniture was still here this morning, along with my cookie jar. Somebody ate the last cookie, but I think that was Harold.

It’s good that people are taking this stuff away and keeping it out of the landfill. And there's no telling what scavengers might want. One box that Harold put out was clearly marked, “Broken Junk.” There were hard drives in there which he had beaten on with a hammer. Heaven knows what else. I didn’t dare look. What if I wanted to keep one of the junk things? Let it go. Wouldn't you know, that box was one of the first items to be taken. Harold had a good laugh over that.

I wouldn’t let him get rid of the puppet stage. Most likely I’ll never put on another show, nor will the children or grandchildren be interested in marionettes, since marionettes aren’t digital, but I loved it when he made it for me. It’s such an elegant thing. This is one of the problems with throwing things out. Yes, it’s useless; yes, it’s taking up valuable space; but it represents a dream of future achievement. I could put on a great show sometime. (Or not. Some of the pieces are missing.)

As for the crumbling marriages occasioned by this annual ritual, the signs are everywhere. Things carried out to the curb only to be carried back in again. Things carried in from other neighbors’ piles only to be carried back out and put back. I shudder to think of the arguments that must be taking place behind closed doors. In the back yard, I overheard this:

“Does Mommy know you're throwing that chair away?” “It's broken.” You know there will be trouble over that.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Little Dogs

I left our little town of Lambertville, aka Dogburg, last Tuesday to go and party with Annamaria Alfieri at the Mysterious Bookshop in the big city, aka Gotham, in celebration of the release of Strange Gods, her latest book and the first in a new series. This time I took the bus, since driving home from Hamilton in the middle of the night seemed more than I was willing to deal with. The bus goes to the Port Authority Terminal straight from Lambertville. No worries.

I've started calling it Dogburg because so many dogs live in town these days. We have more dogs than children. I find that sort of sad. But, be that as it may, the close proximity of all these canines enables me to observe their social interactions. Have you ever noticed the way a small dog on a leash or behind a window will bark hysterically at passing big dogs? "Arf! Arf! I'll kill you! I'll kill you! If only my human would let me off this leash I would tear your throat out!"

I was minded to think of this as I stood on a street corner in New York City waiting for a light to change. A young man was crossing in the crosswalk, strolling along, intent on the music playing through his earbuds. The weather being warm, he wore a wife-beater shirt that showed off his extraordinarily well-developed body—somewhere between that of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and Hulk Hogan on extra steroids—and his tasteful, monochromatic tattoos. He may have been humming to himself. I couldn't say. You know how noisy it is in the city. You can hardly hear anything.

Suddenly a small red car came tearing around the corner intending to drive where the muscular man was walking. This was not possible, due to some basic law of physics. The driver, a weasely little fellow, became enraged at the sight of the big muscular man and began to curse at him loudly, hanging out the window and shaking his fist. It was a startling exhibition, the sort of thing I've not seen in Lambertville, at least not from a human.

The muscular man ignored him and strolled on. If he'd wanted to he could have picked up the little red car, driver and all, and flung it someplace out of earshot. But the big dogs don't have to do things like that.

You'll be happy to know that I got to the launch party safely, enjoyed myself, and went home again with a signed copy of Strange Gods. Now I'm going to settle down and read it. Looks like a winner.

The Zoner Speaks

As you may know, I serve on the Board of Zoning Adjustment for the City of Lambertville. I did this as an alternate some twenty-five or thirty years ago, until it became more than I could manage with a full-time job and a small child. I re-upped five years or so ago when it appeared that I was needed. We are seven, not counting the alternates. Five votes are needed to grant a variance. We serve without pay, reviewing the submissions of those needing a variance, showing up for monthly hearings, doing the best we can for the people of the city.

Ordinarily the hearings are without drama. News reporters don't even show up to cover them. Every buildable square inch of the town has already been developed, and who cares, after all, if Joe Citizen needs a variance to put an apartment for his mother-in-law over the garage? (An extremely hypothetical example, by the way. Most homes in Lambertville have no off-street parking, still less a garage.)

But every now and then something important comes up. Someone seeks to build on the hillside, for example, which is not buildable, and is protected by the city's steep slope ordinance. To grant a variance in such cases would worsen the already bad storm water runoff problems up there, in the worst case sending a mudslide onto Route 29.

Or someone comes into town with a marvelous plan for turning the old Baptist Church into an exciting music venue where food and alcohol are served.

Since this plan sorely impacts the already difficult parking situation, and since it threatens to draw a crowd not normally seen on this side of the river (or this side of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, in the minds of some), passions are running high among the locals. Middle-class people live on the street behind the Baptist Church. The rumors alone are said to be affecting property values there.

Meanwhile the Lambertville Music Hall (a non-profit) has been pouring money into the church building for months now. Repairs and renovation were badly needed. The church looks good.

Members of the Zoning Board have been snowed under with letters begging us to turn their application down, and not just from immediate neighbors and competing restaurateurs. The mayor said at the last city council meeting that the Zoning Board of Adjustment alone was in charge of accepting or rejecting the Music Hall's application, and was free to ignore all the mail.

There are people in town who like the whole idea. Art. Music. What's not to like?

Last week the application came before the board. Actually it was a continuation of the application, which first came before the board last month. Over a hundred members of the public turned out in weather so bad that the board chairman opened the meeting by warning us that it might get worse. We should think, he said, about evacuating safely. But a hundred dripping wet, enraged people weren't going anywhere.

I took my seat on the dais with the rest of the Board, but only long enough to answer the roll call. Since my house is within two hundred yards of one of the parking lots the Music Hall proposed to use, I was forced under the law to recuse myself from the proceedings. So also was another board member, who lives out behind the church. And so was a third member. He had just discovered that he was involved in a business arrangement with one of the principals.

I went to the back of the room, where my facial expressions could not be seen by the other board members and possibly influence their decision. They told us to do that in Zoning Board school if we ever had to recuse ourselves. The crowd fell silent.

The lawyer for the Music Hall appeared nervous. He challenged the credentials of one of the members, who had been appointed and sworn in before the last meeting but had missed that meeting, getting up to speed by listening to the four-hour tape. The lawyer wanted him sworn in publicly and then forced to listen to the four-hour tape again. Our lawyer, the lawyer for the board, pointed out that this was unreasonable. I must explain that the reason we seemed so short-handed was that our chairman died suddenly two months ago and another member moved out of town and was thus unable to serve. And then there were the three of us who had to recuse ourselves.

Seeing that there were, in fact, enough people on the board to legally rule on the application, the Music Hall lawyer asked for five minutes to confer with his clients. They went out in the hall while the people in the room began talking and growling among themselves. When he came back he said that they were unwilling to go forward with the application with so few board members and asked for a postponement until next month. This request was granted. But it came from him, not from the board, and only after an attempt to disqualify one of the members and reduce the board still further.

Newspaper coverage of the brouhaha has been vague and inaccurate. The headline on the front page of the Beacon read, "Zoners unable to hold music hall hearings." Zoners. We're Zoners. I sort of like that. It sounds vaguely sinful. Maybe I'll have tee shirts made.

One of the members of the public asked that the next meeting be held in a larger venue, so that more than a hundred people could attend. The Music Hall offered the church for the meeting, but their offer was met with what I can only describe as a roar of rage from the public. The board chairman made a few calls, without success. The announcement of the next location was postponed. The meeting was adjourned, and we all went back out in the pouring rain.

A few days ago the board secretary emailed all of us Zoners the information that the Music Hall's architect had let her know that they were withdrawing their application. I thought this was interesting news, and I went to the Lambertville Facebook site and posted it, so that interested members of the public might know. It isn't as if they would read about it in the papers anytime soon. Or anyway not the real story, whatever that is.

It was like dropping a piece of meat in the piranha tank. So many with opinions, so few with understanding of the issues. People get really nasty sometimes when they think they're talking to strangers. Social media reminds me of the way some folks drive their cars. If you can't see people's faces it's okay to honk at them and give them the finger.

Anyway, without honking or giving the finger, I'll sign off for now, promising to keep you posted on what happens next, whether our little town collapses into a sinkhole of urban decay for lack of an exciting music venue in the middle of town or suffers a fatal influx of cars and drunken rock fans, putting an end to life as we know it. The Music Hall people may have withdrawn their application but they are still doing major landscaping in the church's back yard, located in the R2 zone. (That's residential.)

Kate Gallison

Settling in for the Summer

Harold and I have been back for a week or so now from our trip to the southland. We are expecting visitors, beloved family members, at the end of June and again at the end of July, so my plan for the summer is to hang around the house, entertain friends and feel swell about things generally. I do plan to put in an appearance at Deadly Ink, but since that's the weekend our son John will be visiting, I won't be staying overnight in New Brunswick.


Summers are great here, in spite of heat and humidity to rival that of Mississippi. The joys of summer in Lambertville include a ten-minute fireworks show every Friday, a delivery of organic vegetables every Saturday (at least for those of us who belong to the Honeybrook Organic Farm), and the opening of the Marshall House to visitors every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. This year it will also involve a senatorial campaign by Rush Holt, right now the smartest man in Congress (okay, the field of comparison is nothing special but he really is an extraordinary person). I would love to see him in the Senate. So maybe he will win the Democratic primary and it will be a totally wonderful summer.

In the meantime I bought some new porch furniture. It was reasonably priced and it's very nice; I got it online from the Wicker Warehouse. The old furniture had seen its day. The plastic wicker was rotting off, it was intractably dirty, and the chair had little spiders in it that used to creep out and bite Harold on his arms and legs while he was trying to read. After I finish cleaning the attic I plan to spend a lot of time lounging in the new rocking chair and catching up on my reading. On June 26 I might take a break and go to New York City, there to dance the tango at four o'clock in Dag Hammarsjold Plaza with Annamaria Alfieri and her flash mob.

Kate Gallison

Living in One Place for Thirty Years

While I was growing up my family used to move every four years. Like Stephanie and Thelma, I read a lot and learned to rely on my own company as a result of this. I had an odd view of other people, too. Four years isn't long enough for people to change very much, so I had a sort of flat view of what other people were all about. When I think of my sixth grade teacher, for example, I see him as he was when I was in sixth grade, handsome, charming, fresh out of the Navy, with his cleft chin and sparkling eyes. We left town at the end of that year, so I never had a chance to see him grow old.

Now I've been living in Lambertville for thirty years, longer than I've lived in any one place. (And in the same house, too. You can imagine what my attic looks like.) The townspeople are all thirty years older than they were when Harold and I moved here. (Good heavens! So are we!) The babies in diapers who used to run around underfoot at the tee-ball games where our son played have all grown up. The young cheering parents have gray hair now, or dyed hair, or no hair, and a few of them are no longer with us. Some of the young children of the town have left and become wildly successful. Some of them are stuck. Some have gone to the bad. Babies. I think of them all as babies.

There was a little girl living down the street when we first moved here, a thin, waif-like little creature who came over to visit sometimes to play with John's toys, one of those little girls who makes you want to take a hairbrush and get the tangles out of her hair. I didn't think much of her mother, who used to stand in the street making out with strange men. They left town about the time that real estate values got so high. A lot of the locals couldn't afford to stay here.

In yesterday's paper we read that a man had tried to snatch some woman's purse on Bridge Street, in broad daylight, and when he failed, jumped into a car, driven by some woman, and sped away. Since there were plenty of witnesses the police had no trouble apprehending the pair on Route 29, headed for Trenton. Their eighteen-month old baby was in the car. Drugs were involved. The moll was my old neighbor, the little waif. That makes me feel really sad.

Kate Gallison

Another Sleepy Day

So little is going on in our little town of Lambertville that I scarcely know what to write about today.

Son John has come back to spend the summer. We don't see a whole lot of him, because he's still on West Coast time and in any case is a nocturnal fellow, prowling and knocking over heavy objects while I'm sleeping. Or perhaps it was the cat.

A dedication ceremony took place yesterday evening in the park down the street (Mary Sheridan Park, named for the late mayor) in honor of the new brick sidewalk, the one where you could buy a brick and have your name put on it. The ceremony was a rouser, including a contingent of Civil War re-enactors from Philadelphia, who fired their guns, and the Lambertville Brass Band.

The ruckus they raised coincided with our choir rehearsal at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church half a block away, and confused us while we were singing. Or our singing confused them while they were playing, drilling and shooting. In any case it was Charles Ives meets the 1812 overture, especially when they began testing the fireworks for Friday's display.

Harold and I did not buy a brick, partly because I'm too cheap but mostly because he feels that Mary Sheridan Park these days is little more than a dog bathroom, in spite of the diligent efforts of civic-minded gardeners. Nearly every morning on his way to get the paper he sees SUVs pull up to the gates of the park and disgorge dogs, who madly rush to relieve themselves in the park. What, buy a brick for dogs to pee on? Not him.

Speaking of dogs, the Mary Martin memorial dog biscuit station is no more. The new tenant in Mary's apartment, as we feared, refuses to get with the program. If you leave biscuits on his doorstep they will be taken away and given to his dad's beagle.

We got our sample ballots for the primary election in today's mail. I could riff on that for a few paragraphs, but I won't. No talk of politics. Can't stand it anymore.

Lambertville. People come, people go, and nothing ever happens. (Grand Hotel. Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and a cast of similar luminaries. If you haven't seen it, see it.)

Kate Gallison

Chatting About the Weather, and What the Prize Was

We are back from the Gulf Coast. Here's a picture I took when we were there of a bird standing in waters roiled by Hurricane Lee. I think it was a great blue heron; I think it was expecting fish.

I promised to tell you what the prize was that I won. It was the annual fiction award given out by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, and they gave it to The Edge of Ruin for its depiction of New Jersey history and its highlighting of Fort Lee as the center of early movies. I couldn't be more pleased. I really did a tremendous amount of research for that book, something like ten hours of research for every hour of writing, although I lost my bibliography and looking back it feels as though I made most of it up. Well, come on. It is fiction, after all. Now I'm going to have to be on a panel with a bunch of real historians, the winners of the various non-fiction awards given out by the NJSAA, and try to look halfway knowledgeable.

Hurricane Lee, having organized itself almost before our eyes as we deplaned in Gulfport, bashed on Louisiana for awhile and then scuttled northward to flood Lambertville and New Hope for the second time in two weeks. We arrived home shortly after the last rains. The locals are mighty annoyed, some of them looking around for somewhere to fix the blame. I would say George W. Bush was responsible, for failing to sign the Kyoto accords, if I didn't think it was already too late to do anything by the time he got in office. Others will no doubt find a way to blame Obama. Or the water company. Whoever.

But even though the world is warming, and strange species of tropical mosquitoes have been sighted in town – we didn't see any in Mississippi, due to the summer-long drought – tonight the temperature in Lambertville is plummeting. Last time I went out on the porch it was 59. (That's Fahrenheit, for you Canadian and European readers, almost chilly.) I like this weather. It wakes me up. It wakes up the characters in my work-in-progress. When I returned to the computer to get going on my suspense novel I found my heroine falling in love, exchanging witty badinage with the object of her affections. It was energizing.

Stay dry. Keep warm. Better times are coming.

Kate Gallison

More Hurricanes

Having escaped the ravages of Irene, unlike a number of our neighbors, Harold and I thought ourselves lucky to be able to catch a plane out of Philadelphia and make our way to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a visit with relatives. We touched down in Gulfport, picked up the rental car and drove east along front beach. Out over the water we could see a boiling soup of many-shaped gray clouds. It was kinda pretty.

The soup was busy forming itself into Hurricane Lee, or tropical storm Lee, later tropical depression Lee. Jim Cantore, whom I had last seen on the Battery in New York City before the lights went off in Lambertville, popped up in Biloxi and began to be storm-tossed. We began to be storm-tossed. Several days of wind and rain ensued, which were not unpleasant, at least for us, since the brunt of the storm's fury went off to Louisiana and points north. Foaming surf is quite unusual for Ocean Springs. People like it. It's exciting. For the last few days the weather has been sunny and mild here, ideal vacation weather.

Now that we're getting ready to go home I see from the internet that the wretched Lee has washed out Route 29 both north and south of Lambertville, dumped enough water upstream to flood the Delaware again, and closed most of the bridges. Philadelphia Airport was said to have been under three inches of water. We hope it's okay by the time our plane lands. From time to time we pull up the web page of the USGS streamflow data for Lambertville, hoping the Delaware River hasn't gotten into our house.

Meanwhile I won an award. I'm very pleased about that. I can't tell you what it is until Monday.

Kate Gallison

Hurricane Irene in Lambertville: How it Went

Here's how the hurricane went in our little town.

As regards our private lives, in the interest of full disclosure I must reveal that Harold, my spouse, grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and knows from hurricanes. It's a rare year when they don't get a tropical storm coming on shore there. So he was an anchor of calm in the wish-wash of uncertainty and fright. I bid goodnight on Saturday to Jim Cantore as he stood on the Battery predicting disaster and laid an untroubled head on my pillow, there to fall asleep lulled by the pleasant sound of wind and rain.

But the public life of Lambertville was going nuts even as we slept.

In the morning the electricity was off. This meant, first of all, no coffee. Secondly, no news. No TV, no internet, nobody in the family had an Iphone or even a battery-operated radio. Church had already been called off, a first in the history of St. Andrews, as far as I'm aware, and there were other inconveniences, other wants, but no coffee and no news were the worst. What of Jim Cantore? Was he standing there still, the water now up to his chin? What of the threatening Delaware River? What of our little town of Lambertville?

Eventually we suited up and went out in the rain and gusty wind, careful not to stand under trees. We looked at the Delaware, high, fast, and full of tree limbs, where the ducks were struggling not to be swept clear down to Trenton. Fly, you ducks! Fly! After we saw the river we walked around town. People were standing together in knots, hanging onto their hats and swapping gossip. We stopped and talked to them. They said, "Did you see the boat?"

The Bridge. Note the urn-shaped posts.

At the bridge where Union Street passes over Swan Creek a startling sight met our eyes: a motorboat on a trailer, upended in the middle of the bridge, on the upstream side of which a ten-foot length of the concrete bridge railing was pushed over and broken in pieces. Police had blocked off the street. The old urn-shaped posts and the newer, oatmeal-box-shaped posts were scattered here and there. Apparently a flash flood had come down the creek, sending debris-filled water into the city parking lot and up the sides of people's houses. High water marks could be seen.

No journalists were anywhere in evidence. As a result, exactly what happened there may never be known. As we continued to wander around in the rain talking to people we heard many accounts of the event, most involving greater or lesser degrees of incompetence on the part of the water company and various city officials. It was generally agreed that a four-foot wall of water had come down Swan Creek from the city reservoir, looming above us, confined by an earthen dam. Either water was released from the reservoir to ease pressure on the dam, thereby saving the city from the much worse fate of a burst dam, or water somehow spontaneously erupted from the reservoir as a result of the heavy rain, or incompetent water company minions lost control of a controlled release. People in the streets screamed and ran. "What were they doing in the streets at one-thirty in the morning in the middle of a hurricane?" "Screaming and running," was the reply. Many people had to be evacuated from their homes.

The water swept the boat and its trailer out of a yard that backed on the creek and hurled it into the bridge railing, which broke.

And at that point, Jersey Central Power and Light cut off the power and the city of Lambertville went dark, to remain so for three or four days, depending on what part of town you were in. The water went down an hour later, but there were still problems with the power lines.

When daylight came a tourist with New York plates was seen collecting one of the urn-shaped pieces of the bridge railing and putting it in his car. If ever you wonder why the locals here are sometimes hostile to tourists, this is the sort of behavior that brings it on.

I would love to see this story covered in a newspaper, just like they used to do in the old days. I would love to hear the thump of a newspaper on our porch, open it up, smelling the fresh printer's ink, and read a cogent account of the Swan Creek flood. But it isn't going to happen. In a few months we may read that some of the irate residents are suing the city, or the water company; houses got water in them that never had water before. It must be somebody's fault.

As for us, we remain dry, and hope you are the same.

Kate Gallison

A Cool Place to Live, Right Here in New Jersey

Here's a video about my beloved home town. Harold appears in it, standing in the Lambertville Free Public Library holding up a book and advising the viewer to read.








Kate Gallison