Carp Diem at the McNay

I love the old mansion, and the landscaped grounds at the McNay - sometimes it seems that any town or city with a certain level of accumulation of old money admixed with cultural appreciation has such a museum: a sprawling mansion, in a park-like setting, an eclectic art collection - or a collection of something - purchased by an original owner with sufficient taste and income. Southern California, for instance, has the Huntingdon, Descanso Gardens, and Indianapolis has the Lilly House  - and San Antonio has the McNay, at the corner of New Braunfels and the Austin Highway.

The mansion that Jessie Marion Koogler McNay Atkinson built is one of those splendid Jazz-age Spanish-style colonial piles, pale ivory plastered walls with a roof of pale rust-colored tiles, with lots of interesting little porches, balconies and loggias, built around an interior courtyard, and ornamented with all the hand-painted tiles and lacy iron-work. The grounds and the courtyards were further adorned with fountains and semi-tropical plants - this was the ultimate in residential style in 1920, especially in the southern part of the US.

The inside was adorned with her collection of original art, some 700 pieces of 19^th and 20^th century European and American pieces. Alas, the extension of the McNay, and the means of displaying even more art - is one of those brute modern arrangements of glass and geometric slabs, appended on to the back of the house, like some kind of ugly orthopedic brace. I have never figured out why those in charge of expanding aesthetically pleasing period buildings prefer to deface them by slapping on something so eye-bleedingly different in style. Didn't anyone ever consider that extension built of similar materials, with the signature ornamental elements pared down a notch or two might be sufficient and aesthetically pleasing?

She came from Ohio originally - a fabulously wealthy heiress to an oil fortune, with excellent taste and an accomplished artist in her own right. But she came to San Antonio first in 1918 - not as an artist or a traveler, certainly not as an art collector - but as a war bride to Sergeant Don Denton McNay. Alas, very shortly afterwards, he died in the horrific influenza epidemic which most particularly scourged military camps in that year. She married again, in the mid 1920's - but when that marriage ended, she reverted to using her first husband's surname.

That was the name she used for the rest of her life. One wonders if it were a tragic and romantic gesture, a little way of holding on to a memory of love. Eventually the art collection, the house and more than twenty acres surrounding it, and a substantial endowment to support it were left to establish a museum of modern art, open to the public. It is a lovely and peaceful oasis, in the middle of the suburbs. My daughter's favorite is one of the ornamental ponds - in which there lives a collection of perfectly monstrous ornamental carp. My own favorite is the interior courtyard, which reminds me of those old houses in Spain, all built around just such a courtyard, with a trickling fountain and a bounty of plants in urns.

Adventures in Old Lamps

I can't remember when I discovered that it wasn't very hard to re-wire table lamps, or replace plugs and swap out one-way sockets for three-way, so that an ordinary lamp would become reading lamp. Stripping half an inch of insulation off the ends of the wires, threading them through the lamp-base and securing the bare wires around the little screws in the socket base; it's not rocket science.

More recently, I discovered that all the little bits that hold a lamp together and attach a shade are a standard size and thread. We've bought lamps at the thrift-shop or at yard-sales because they have a pretty base, and been gratified with how much better they look with new hardware and a nicer shade - and upgraded wiring. A while ago my daughter bought a pair of inexpensive 1930's era decorative lamps that I didn't dare plug in. The wiring was so crumbly; it looked like a picture of an example of dangerously faulty wiring in a brochure handed out by the fire department. New hardware, new wiring, new sockets, all the way around; amazing how much nicer they looked!

I have a whole basket full of essential lamp pieces, scrounged from various broken lamps. Never know when you will need an essential bit, you see. Since I took up the carpets and painted the concrete floors in the house, some of my favorite lamps have bit the dust - including one made from a blue and white Korean bowl I spotted in a market in Itaewan and had converted to a lamp.  Not to fear - I salvaged all the non-china parts, the bases, tops and shades, with the socket and all the metal bits.

Almost at once, my daughter, the Queen of All Yard Sales, spied three replacement lamps, at a San Antonio neighborhood garage sale - all blue and white painted china bases, all vaguely Oriental in design, in good shape and all three for a mere pittance. One of them most particularly resembled the Korean bowl, and as it was approximately the same dimensions, I thought I would be able to remove the brass base and top to it, and replace them with the wooden base and fittings from the Korean lamp - and I would have something that came very close in looks to it.

Only the hex-nut that held the whole thing together at the bottom was apparently tightened on at the factory by Godzilla himself. Not even with a crescent-wrench could we get it to budge - and Blondie and I tried separately and together, and with a spritz of liquid wrench.

There was only one thing to do. And that was to take it to Pep Boys. Really, any garage would have done, but Pep-Boys was open on Sunday. Where else do you find the strength and the technology to separate metal bolts from the threads they are apparently frozen onto, than at an auto mechanics? But the manager did look at me and ask, warily, "This is at your own risk of course. It's not a priceless Ming vase, is it?"

"Five-dollar yard-sale special," I said, "Have at it."  It took one of the mechanics about two minutes and all the other mechanics came to look, shaking their heads.

The manager did say afterwards that it was the weirdest request that anyone has ever come to Pep-Boys with.

(Some pictures of what an easy job this can be. Of course, I had feline supervision. The lamp pictured was picked out of a trash can - because the cord was damaged, and the light socket knocked askew.)

The Twig - Planted in a New Place

If you call San Antonio home and love books, and cherish independent bookstores, want children to love books - then of course, you know the Twig Bookstore and it's twiglet offshoot, the Red Balloon. They were on of Broadway, north of the HEB Central Market, but now they are in new and roomier quarters in the Full Goods Building at the Pearl Brewery. I always loved the Twig - especially since I had done signings for my books there - but the premises they were in on Broadway always seemed a bit cramped, three eccentrically shaped rooms with the shelves of books crammed in wherever they fitted. At the Pearl, they have one large, airy room - and it didn't seem to be the least cramped, even though it was full of children and parents, and books, upon books upon books. The odds of being re-ended as you back out of one of the parking places in front are probably reduced, although perhaps Saturday traffic at the Farmers' Market may still afford the same fender-crunching thrills previously experienced when trying to back out into traffic on Broadway.

Yes, the Twig is now adjacent to the weekly Farmers' Market at the Pearl, which we visited a while back. We paid a return visit, purchasing some relatively inexpensive food items - a loaf of dense and luscious bread, some olive tapenade, which made me seriously re-think my decades-long dislike of olives, and a pound of incredibly fresh mushrooms. Yes, some very fine artisan foodstuffs on offer; but not what I became accustomed to in the regular farmers' market/street market in Greece and in Spain. There, the freshness was glorious, the fruits and vegetables, eggs and specialty foods were straight from the farm, and piled up in plenty - but they were also appreciably cheaper than a supermarket - a large part of the appeal to the ordinary shopper. Buy straight from the producer, shave off a few pennies by cutting a distributor and retailer out of the loop - alas, the goods at the Pearl Farmers' Market are wonderful, top-quality, but not all that much of a bargain. It's a sort of HEB Central Market in the open air and with live music and lots of dogs on leashes.

For our bite of lunch we took refuge from yuppies and puppies in an eccentric and divvy place on the other side of 281 - Sam's Burger Joint, at the corner of Grayson and Broadway, or as I realized, at the metaphorical corner of Trendily Expensive and Gloriously Low-Rent. The faint smell from the grill at lunchtime wafted to us from a block away. Although there is plenty of outdoor seating, it was a bit chilly, so we chose to sit inside and appreciate the rustic décor, which seems to have been assembled from yard-sales, thrift-shops and the oil-change place on the corner of Nacogdoches and Judson, which also features a lot of old license plates. Sam's Burgers has live music in the evenings, a line out the door at weekday lunchtimes, swing-dance lessons in the adjoining dance hall out in back, and burgers the size of a restaurant-sized bread and butter plate. Mine arrived so fresh from the grill the meat was still sizzling. My daughter had a chili-dog; no ordinary chili-dog this, but a brat with a scoop of home-made chili poured over it, and the chili wasn't made with that tasteless, cheap skillet-mix meat that usually features in fast-food chili-dogs, either. It was glorious - and neither of us had any appetite whatsoever for dinner that night.

Click photos to enlarge

Possum Kingdom!

Although my Texas back yard is tiny, a veritable scrap, a pocket-handkerchief of a back yard, it somehow feels much larger, because it backs on a green-belt, and is alive with birds; not much out of the ordinary, though; the usual brown sparrows and wrens, great flashy blue-jays- the glam rock-stars of the backyard-bird world- a mocking bird now and again, the returning cardinal pair and a flock of very fat grey doves. If I wanted, I could hunt them from the back porch; it would only be easier if they walked up to the door and committed seppuku on the mat. My own indoor cats see the birds as entertainment; Cat Television, the Bird Channel. And the visiting cats did know their limits; they never tangled with Wellie the opossum.

Wellie came to the back porch one summer afternoon, a couple of years ago, drank deeply from the outdoor cat's water dish, and then ate his fill of kibble, as the visiting cats watched lazily from a sun-warmed place on the rock pathway. Then, he calmly waddled across the porch, underneath the chair that I was sitting in, and curled up in the corner cupboard, among the garden sprayers, containers of plant food and the long loppers and went to sleep. I was never able to decide if he was fearless or as dumb as a box of rock, or why- other than a fearsome collection of needle-sharp teeth and claws-the outdoor cats were tolerant about Wellie. I suspect cats see opossums as merely another sort of ugly mutant cat.

Those cats and Wellie have since moved on  from my San Antoino home, but all year round, wild life in my garden burgeons: the toads come and go, and the lime-sherbet-green lizards inflating their pink throats on the wisteria branches are always there. A couple of evenings ago, I heard something crunching away at the kibble in the cats' dish, a tiny kitten-sized thing that skittered away and hid among the potted plants when I opened the door. Not the neighbors' escaped pet ferret again, but a miniature Wellie, an opossum-kit with a white face and black ears. Yesterday it was there again, joined by a second, and a third, who crept cautiously down the lattice, or from between the pots. They crunched nervously, sometimes balancing on the edge of the dish. Two of them fled when a hungry dove landed, and stalked up and down with an indignant flaring of tail-feathers and wings, but the third kit kept possession of the dish. The disgruntled dove hopped away off the porch and the two shyer kits crept out from between the pots again, and ate and ate until they were quite full. I assume they are living on the flat porch roof, under the shelter of the main roof overhang, and come and go by the lattice and the wisteria vines, and that the cat-opossum truce still holds. The man at the pet store says he had a semi-tamed one for a while, and they will eagerly eat slugs and snails, which is a good reason to tolerate them, even aside from the fact that they are rather amusing to watch.

I do wish I had a turtle in the garden, though. I have rescued two from various busy streets, but both times I was too far away from the house to take the time to bring either one of them home. I left them both in green pastures, out of the traffic. But a turtle would be cool - the next one I find in the road is coming straight home and joining my own little wild kingdom.

Satxproperty Pressroom