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I was listening to Bill Moyers interview Louise Erdrich as I walked through City Park this morning with the dogs. As we crossed the always dangerous intersection of City Park and Carrollton, tourists from South Carolina joined behind me as I held my hand out to the oncoming traffic. One turned to me and said, “If not at a green light, then when would we cross?” Good question, I responded, then went back to listening to the interview.

I noticed as I was walking how the white geese huddled together, the black coots swam together, the cormorants perched together, the green-headed mallards congregated together on the Cajun Santa Claus still in the lagoon. It’s bird paradise right now in City Park, but more interesting is how birds of a feather flock together. And how appropriate was it that Erdrich was speaking about her fractured inner life being a Native American and a German, a writer and a mother, right at that moment.

Interestingly enough before she arrived at this conversation, I was thinking about my upbringing as a Spanish Jew and the language of Ladino because I had been listening to Tin speaking Croatian this morning and was smiling as I thought of what he told me the other day. I was tickling his naked body and saying, where did this little knee come from, where did this thigh come from, where did this shoulder come from and he said boldly, “CROATIA!”

And I thought about how he would grab from the cultures that Tatjana and I are bringing into his own cultural being and he would identify with parts of them much as I had identified as strongly with my father’s people because there is where I found as Erdrich calls it, my community and my peace and my language. Yet, at the same time, I had as strong a tie to my mother’s people and the country and landscape they were from. I see myself as one part cathead biscuits and gravy one part black beans and rice and one part kibbe.

But different from the fowl in the waters of City Park, I feel most at home in a mixed environment, with a Jew, a European, a Catholic, a Buddhist, black, brown, white, yellow and red skin, kinky hair, flaxen hair, curly hair, and still more types to come with languages running together like tributaries to the great unknown.

Tin and I had dinner last night sitting at the copper table in our latest LaLa edition, the Euro kitchen, and there we listened to Brazilian songs and spoke about how beautiful the language sounds and how musical it is at its core.

When I think of the worlds contained inside of me, I could burst forth like a cornucopia of rhythm, roots and riotous revelry – how grateful I am to be a gumbo gal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.