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Three more days till we leave – yahoo! Last night on rooftop at Reata I told S about a conversation I had had with the other S about how there is all this hitting on going on at the company and how she said I intimidate men – funny I thought I was demure and approachable – said that is why I only attract strong men and S said does that mean you think I am strong – I’m like what goes on? The rest of the conversation could be encapsulated in one statement – our differences are exaggerated right now – but there is a measure to wait until flood waters recede and one home leads to another home leads us to the home we’ve been trying to create and then there we will stand and evaluate whether we are home to each other.

Meanwhile there is my conversation with L who said to me that I need to ask myself hard questions and he was kind of annoyed with my silliness at August – said he has never seen it to that pitch. “Are you trying to embrace all things adolescent?” and I’m like oh forgive me old wise one but I thought I was titillated to the point of passing out because of how happy I was to be back in NO with people I love and eating at one of my favorite restaurants. Is that not allowed beyond a certain age?

And then N who said she was glad to go back to the camp and get away from her house in midcity – said no reason to be there. They’re having the big bash for B on his birthday this Saturday at the camp – L says that means everyone is forced to drive there and he has the dogs and it is all so overwhelming.

Good grief.

The next five are going to be interminable but soon will be home. The morgue is alive and well in the meantime – silence on the point of … – meanwhile since I took all my Vs for recreation now don’t have them for medication, which of course I totally need today. Trying to gather momentum to at least go out and take a run but difficult when you feel like organs are being compressed in a vice grip. We watched the home made movies last night with W who is visiting from NY – you might think that all’s right with the universe by watching but like all home movies there is a lot of back story that is lacking in the script.

N and L are both depressed about midcity even while I receive mostly upbeat missives from the Faubourg group emails. Just got one a minute ago that says they might not have gas in our area for a long time. N says you can’t even buy a newspaper in the hood. L says no one in the hood. It’s all so daunting but think it will be fine.

One week away and almost home – meanwhile some people want me just to themselves, some want me as an addition to their group, some want me to play 24/7, some just want me to pick up the phone when they call but what I say is when is that time that I get to sit on a porch alone and think about the things that I want? The time alone in my life has grown as rare as the smell of night blooming jasmine outside of New Orleans. I remember M saying she thought the smell was cloying and I knew then instinctively she wouldn’t stay. The other night, on reconnaissance we stopped at the Milan and smelled it going in – such a nice reminder of what New Orleans can yield.

Last night S said he is tired of the show and I know what he means and feel for what he feels and yet the big distraction goes a long way to camoflauging the stuff none of us want to deal with. There it is – you want it to be compelling but sometimes it just makes everyone weary – so you seek alternate routes of entertainment – S is headed to the Adams opera this Thursday.

We arrived in New Orleans after a not so long car ride that included a stop at PreJeans for lunch. N asked the waitress and anyone else that would listen if they had a car to sell as Mom had called crying and said her car was dead. The waitress asked if he had a house to sell as they had lost theirs in Rita. What goes on? It just is so invasive Katrina, Rita, the rains in New Jersey now for 8 days – the finance guy at the Ford dealership said it’s biblical. Well it has biblical proportions but certainly not end of days type stuff.

Meanwhile this roadtrip was actually wonderful or won’rful depending on who is saying it. The first day was somewhat disorienting as we were looking for an epiphany and it was hard to come by and then we started going around the city in different increments – S and N went to get coffee and rediscovered Magazine and I went for a run to the park and saw such varying degrees of repair that it gave me heart. The decision ended up being to come back and the how and whatever is still being figured out but it lead to me going to the Ford dealershp and buying the truck I’ve been wanting while I gave the Volvo to mom who was in need of a well running car.

The city was hard to digest – one block perfectly in tact, the next trees felled and houses regurgitating stuff. Then the smell – no one has collected garbage and it was all out there but when they started getting it it disturbed the protective seal of being there for a period of time and the stench appeared. The refrigerators sit there like white vertical coffins – with notes on some that say “Free” or “Buffet Inside” and then there was the rumor but now confirmed story of Zara’s throwing their meat on the sidewalk and as it rotted the stench causing the entire hood to fall apart – they are now and foreever boycotted because of their total irresponsible actions. But there were also fifty egrets sitting up from the bayou on the neutral ground – hovering near home like the rest of us.

Or there was going to August and seeing John Besh and Michael and having the best best best meal of our life. And just being there brought everything into focus – they are back, they are making it work and they have been trying to be there for the community to the point of John handing out red beans and rice when it was all going down. Is this the best restaurant in New Orleans? If you don’t believe that you are dead. Along with the company – L and N joining us – and the wine Napa Valley Napanook – what could go wrong – everything was perfect. Then going to the Gold Mine to see Bill who we missed and hear the poets come out of the woodwork to support or tell the story of our fair city.

Then we returned – I fear coming back to the morgue but P and W were here to assuage any sullenness that might have tainted our road trip. And we are so on board with leaving on Saturday or Sunday to go back and reclaim our New Orleans life. So many things about yesterday were very nice – and so very hard to put in words – running to Audubon Park, having a crying session on a park bench there, being close to those we love, having moments and hours of utter delightful joy – life sometimes can be so utterly rewarding it is hard to think of what is wrong with it all.

Husband says to his wife in bed – you don’t love me anymore – I feel adrift and depressed. Wife says I love you deeply. Husband says I watch you with the boy and see unconditional love there, I want that love from you like it used to be. Things are different now, says the wife. I’ve been changing. I’m overwhelmed by what goes on and so I move to the nonserious, to the ephemeral and joyful. When life was simpler I clung to the serious – we paired well – you being so serious and cerebral. As I move away from that world and trivialize its icons, you cling tighter and our rift grows. Husband says I feel like a third wheel at times and see your eyes sparkle for others – in the late night sitting close and watching inane canine massages on tv – too close when you’re actually sick. The co-advil makes me wired, says the wife. I try to move back to you but you distance yourself on your island and look disdainfully on my chatter of friends goings on, my choice in music, my desire to have fun and be carefree. It’s not about those things, it is about love, he says. And I do love you, she says. But not like before, he retorts. There are too many things happening externally for me to know whether I can go back to where we were or whether we can pass through this to a better place. I can’t know that right now, she says. I want to feel your sparkle, your passion, he says. If you had to choose you would choose the boy, he says. She responds: I chose you 15 years ago, 10 years ago and again 5 years ago when it was about a boy. But, he says, you wouldn’t make that choice now. She sighs. Most likely not if I had the choice. A discussion of what fatherhood is or is not ensues (ad lib) and then who is or who is not a good father and whether he would have been one or the other. She says, you can’t know that now. I feel unrequited love, he says. I just don’t know what to do anymore, she says. I try to show you love in my actions – fixing your eggs in the morning, folding your clothes neatly for your drawers. I don’t care about those things, he says. No, you never have, she sighs. Again he reiterates he longs for the passion of her. The wife says, it has to come naturally or not at all.

S, N and I are driving to New Orleans tomorrow to check it out and see if we can go home yet. The Can isn’t letting anyone in for two months but S and I could stay at T’s house till the Can reopens. Meanwhile, L is back and he says the first day Max rolled in a dog carcass on the bayou and that was his welcome home. He’s bitter without having had a lot of damage – just bitter about how his world has been disrupted and how it seems overwhelming to get the city back up and running. “I can’t even find a fucking sandwich” was his complaint on his way to teach a remote class for UNO.

Meanwhile today is N&V’s 13th wedding anniversary – and the rest of us in full cowboy regalia went to All Good with P to eat dinner and afterwards went on stage to do some W original tunes (Do Not Enter, I Care About You, Cowboy and Cowgirl, Hey Zeus) – the staff came out to cheer us on. Sent G an email and he wrote back “love you to the moon” – this is the kind of connection you don’t get in California – ever – it won’t happen – and we sent G an architectural book because he lost everything in the flood. Mold is crawling up the sides of his house – his Landcruiser is rusted in the front yard with a note from someone saying they’d buy it off of him just as is. But he threw the complete works of Louis I Kahn into the yard when he found his library water damaged.

Was thinking about the Dylan Thomas quote heard yesterday – my heart is under your hammer – and thinking about A’s notes today about her woes with G, and about S’s woes with M, and L’s woes with K, and all of the woes combined. We are all actors, strutting and fretting across the stage. And the band played on in L’s words.

Right now I feel tempted to tuck and run – save my sanity – spare my heart – learn another way of life – unhinged – I have no room in this life to spread my wings and bask in the glory of the day.

But NO bound we are, to see for ourselves the devastation and restoration progress and to see if it is fit for us to return. Some cosmic joke played on the best city in this country. As if it weren’t precious before, now made more so by coloring the green brown, letting the sky shine through the missing trees, dead carcasses littering the ground, the silence that is not serene, the parties postponed.

N believes the wee wee wee cannot come first, of course he was the one who told me how the piggies really go – you do the wee wee wee by moving past the little piggy and scaling the rest of the leg – makes total sense but I had it just at wiggling hard the last piggy and that was wee wee wee. I was driving down the freeway and thinking to mysel why can’t you start with wee wee wee??

Meanwhile this has been a busy travel week – Portland, Boston, NY and SF and in the meantime a trail of something left in the wake – an earring left here, a coat left on the plane (always for me a sign of disorder in my mind when things turn up missing) – I’ve steeled myself against all matters of the heart so that nothing disturbs me from the path of self actualization – right – okay but here is what I came across in the novella on the plane that gave me pause – this is from William Trevor’s Two Lives –

Sister Hannah’s the wise one. A person’s life isn’t orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.

S&N missed their flight home and so we are driving to NO on Wednesday – thankfully – want to be there, Mom will be there if she isn’t in Baton Rouge, N will drive in, L wants to have dinner as he is returning with dogs since UNO is supposedly starting up on Oct 10 – The Milan is open, Slim Goodies, as well as the F&M and I’ve heard people are getting coffee at Degas – not to mention S heard that August might be opening soon. We are all so ready to be back.

I keep going back to how confusing a day can be – where you think something’s going on but it’s really something else and you just don’t know and it all gets convuluted but you can’t do anything about it because you really don’t know and then all you can do is just try to enjoy your day and bring that kind of happiness into the world. But it leaves you with a feeling like you are being cavalier while all is not right in the universe – I guess you can’t help these feelings of guilt, anxiety and all the other things that seem to fall in line with this. So we went to Dallas and met P for a drive through a neighborhood he discovered – an old 50’s Dallas neighborhood – and then we ended up at old shopping area with little boutiques and Vera Cruz where we had this delicious lunch that still makes me feel full.

The travels to NE were punctuated by a sudden abundance of good food and like a squirrel preparing for the winter we stocked up on all that was presented now making my limited refugee wardrobe tight to say the least. Arlington is so sucky when it comes to food – it really is a like a mote of hell in contrast to what we are used to – NO, SF, NY, Boston, Portland – on and on.

What a strange day all the way around. I told A to turn her back on G and to make sure D was in perspective. While in SF I spoke to M on account of S and she cried after too much sake because B told her that M wasn’t edgy and possibly not the right one, learned that L is pregnant, and still believe there is so much that is missing from the picture that I will never really understand but all in all good to see familiar places and faces this past week – helped me get a little more grounded.

Translates into don’t be impressed by anyone else’s version of the future, you have all the perspective you need right now to fulfill your day. This day has exhausted me because it started with a hurricane (alarm didn’t go off) and it has been thick with trying to stack the piles in their appropriate places and not making any headway. Traveling seems to wear down my defenses so I need to get my guard back up – because it’s like you are going along and then you realize your shields are down and bam, sharp objects poke you and make you bleed. Wonder Woman be my guide.

Some impressions from recent travels to Portland, Boston and New York:

T is a thin Donny Osmond with small teeth. He remembers when he was 11 and I told him to go out and engage with real people because that is where he would learn his best stories – as Eudora Welty said “Southerners live their narratives” – he’s now 14 going on 19 – adorable.

Casco Bay on Saturday morning with D who has started running again and was in Portland for the opening of the Gulf of Maine Research Lab – thoughts of my blessed body remembering how to run again – along the bay, across the old railroad tracks with diamonds dancing on the cold water.

A walk through the Commons in Boston with O – such a bright girl for 27 – reminded me of a year or more with J walking the same speed and having the same type of convo – the ability to have undisturbed serious conversation – provides a perfect venue.

Weather is outstanding

Dinner in South End at Stella – nice looking moes when we walked in and food fabulous – tagliatelle with bolognese – JW and S sitting at next table – Julie’s survivor package she pulled together for us because of Katrina – mojitos, stress mints, relaxing lotion, bath salts.

S laying out on O’s sofa at Custom House snoring up a storm while O and I try to drink bourbon and smoke cigs.

My laugh has changed to a throaty he he he than the higher pitched laugh I used to laugh.

Thing I learned – you can’t recall a sigh.

Or that F tells me he has moved passed lonely and he claims to be a homing device for architects – he looks like one of course which must be reason number one.