Tis the season for pecans to rain down on your head – there are a lot of towering pecan trees on this side of the bayou and the nuts fall like little bombs and sometimes scare the shit out of me when it is dark outside. And of course, Loca goes after the smashed ones like they are crack. Speaking of which, the best Loca is a sleeping Loca – it’s the only Loca you can trust:
You have to think of these holidays in terms of abundance – which was starting to feel to me like too much, but whose to argue with excess? My new name is Poca, as in Pocahontas – there are now 25 guests showing up for Thanksgiving dinner and thank god someone is providing the headdresses – I will be Poca, and Daphne will be Pokey, and the rest are anywhere between pilgrims and single feather squaws. I’m going to get up early and do a rain dance to keep away the bad weather because we need a day on the bayou – pristine weather for an outdoor meal and boat ride afterwards instead of the usual Thanksgiving walkabout.
Once you start thinking like a nut it helps to make all of this start making sense – sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don’t – finally I am getting well enough to believe I can be a nut.
You know what six sense is? It is when you are responding to an email, talking on the phone, and also getting pinged on IM by another colleague, when you feel this sense under your skin that something is amiss – you sense Loca is not tearing apart a plush toy near your desk and you’re not quite sure where she is but you hear some monotonous continuous sound. So you peak downstairs and see her ripping to shreds the circular IKEA rug that you have just put down because she has pee’d on the remnant rug so many times it stinks no matter how much Nature’s Miracle you rub on it and so it had to be thrown away. BUT you can’t yell at the top of your lungs because you are speaking to someone about a project so your insides which were whispering to you are now yelling and ready to kill this dog – but instead you quietly hang up the phone and look the dog in the eye and remind her she is a rescue dog and just like she came into this house, she can go out of this house, so she has one more chance and THAT’S IT!
Hosting a presidential debate here in New Orleans is a no-brainer – after we hosted the event of the century – but the committee opted to forego holding the event here citing New Orleans is not ready for prime-time – do tell? – maybe they should have told the other conferences who are meeting here and having a damn fine time.
My intimate Thanksgiving dinner – the first at the LaLa – has expanded and expanded to now have 25 “orphans” attending. I pray for a sunny day so we can set the tables up on the bayou and have room to eat and move around. I’m deep frying two turkeys and making a big dish of stuffed mirliton along with pecan pie. Everybody and their mother is bringing something – so it should be a feast.
I could have sworn this was a quote from New Orleans in the NYT this morning:
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
“I feel happy, but my happiness is not complete. We need more people to come back. We need more people to feel safe.”
SUHAILA AL-AASAN, on returning with her family to her otherwise empty apartment building in Baghdad.
Yesterday morning, Pied-billed Grebes bobbed along in the lagoons of City Park. An immature White Ibis sat on the trunk of a soap nut tree overhanging the lagoon. Brown pelicans and a lone large white pelican dominated the bayou scene. Great egrets like giant origamic glided along the tops of trees leading into the park. Then late into the gloaming, a Great Blue Heron sat in its iconic heron pose, as we motored down the bayou another appeared and took flight spreading its blue-gray wings and squawking its familiar cry.
By nightfall, another kind of fowl was on my mind – the American Butterball Turkey – the one that is going to end up in my deep fryer on Thursday. I have two 14 pounders in the refrigerator defrosting and ready for their Cajun spice rub before they get immersed into a boiling cauldron of peanut oil.
Tuesday last week, I woke with a thunk – the sound of me going down big time in this whatever it is I have – Tuesday night C called and said she had just been to the doctor and had the same thing and I needed to take antibiotics. So I found some Amoxicillin that I had from when I had gotten an infection on my newly operated toe – because my then newfound puppy had bitten it – and started taking those. I kept getting worse. Last night, I was telling everyone how bad I still feel and there were two nurses in the room and turns out I have been taking an antibiotic for a skin infection this whole time.
Who knew? Well, I didn’t.
Between two people there they had the equivalent of a ZPack which has six pills – two the first night and then one a day to knock it out. I took two last night and the headache that has been like a vice grip around my waking moments finally eased back a few notches. Perhaps by Thanksgiving, I can resume my healthy life.
We took two boats and tied them together and powered by J’s newfangled quiet motor we began to cruise to Park Island, but Fatma drove by with Suleyman and she jumped out of the truck and into the boat with us and we took the boats all the way to her house. Her huge house was destroyed by Katrina and now through some interesting alterations from Terri and Ian, the raised floors and opened ceiling and added courtyard add an interest to a house that otherwise might have seemed big and dark. A good symbol that some things have been improved upon by Katrina.