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A friend told me that on a recent visit to New York, the shops had less holiday decorations, there were few people on the streets, and that overall the Big Apple looked bleak. I was walking this particularly beautiful morning along the entrance to City Park. The street that leads to New Orleans Museum of Art or NOMA (if we might be so hip to call it) and I was looking at the stands of crepe myrtles and oaks that are barely out of buggy whip stage. The huge oak canopy of trees that used to line the street were all felled by Katrina – the true mother lode of storms.

Now the grand entrance looks a little barren but not bleak – when I walk down it, I just think to myself that in a decade or so, these trees will grow to be grand and produce branches that form again a canopy that is enviable.

But, I guess I am a little nervous about the economy and what this means. A friend sent me a note that she must have had her head in the sand because it seems like in the last six weeks everything went to hell – my response, “uh duh.” But I said, I think because we went through Katrina, even the end of the economy as we know it doesn’t seem to be insurmountable.

We rose from the ashes once, certainly we can muster the strength to weather a prolonged downturn in the economy or am I overly optimistic and my head is in the sand? Why is it that despite everything I know that is happening, all I noticed this morning was that certain quality of fall, pre-storm, light that was sneaking through thick cloud cover. Sunshine on a rainy day.

My brother called today to tell me he is going to be a grandfather – the family keeps expanding – just my immediate family is 11 nieces and nephews, 5 great nieces and nephews, 2 great twin nephews enroute, and one gender unknown now on the way. Counting the child we adopt – wow, that’s a lot of kids. My family is having its own little population explosion. Also, my brother mentioned his business is down 40%.

I was speaking later to a friend over a cup of cay and we’re talking about friends who have a rug business, friends in the restaurant business, and potential businesses that could survive in a downturn and there is definitely a reverberation happening around the world as business is slowing, slowing, slowing and no one is talking about growing, growing, growing.

Flat is the new up. Maintenance is the word of the day.

The best we could now hope for is that we all weather this storm – but batten down the hatches because this one looks like the mother lode of storms.

Arlene now sleeps in our bathroom with the door closed. This keeps her pacing to a much smaller venue. Inevitably, she wedges herself between the toilet and the wall – the evidence of her there is the nose line along the white wall. This morning she got underneath the stool and dragged it clanging and scraping the hard floors. What possesses a dog to wedge into a corner, to pace endlessly, to drink maniacally?

For mom, there is a well worn path by her kitchen counter, where she moves from phone, to Ceiva, to cigarettes and ashtray. I saw the path through hordes of magazines and bags when I went by there to bring her some groceries. How small must our world get for us to feel comfortable in old age?

We drove Loca out to the lakefront yesterday morning and walked from one end to the other. There was hardly a soul out there. It has been sparse since Katrina but it was almost dead on such a beautiful day. Loca romped up and down and tried to climb down the slippery algae steps into the lake while pelicans in a group of five sailed by, and coots and cormorants hung out near the shore. In the distance were red spinnakers and sailboats and blue water with light flashes dancing off the surface.

“Wow, this is beautiful!” T said.

You think about the landlocked, those off the bayou, or who don’t drive to the lakefront, the ones uptown – do they know we live in paradise?

I was driving down the I-10 the other day and was looking at the billboards along the highway as I cover out of home advertising and was noticing a lot of blank boards. Then I saw Lamarque Ford’s ad and thought wow, Ronnie Lamarque got old. Which of course means, I got old. Ronnie’s hair is almost snow white, while mine remains semi-naturally red. Hey Ronnie, I’m bridging the gap with hair color!

As Loca and I rounded the Marconi side of the park, I saw the familiar inscription on a concrete pad by the lagoon – WPA 1936 – 1937. Obama is calling for a public works project the likes we haven’t seen since the highways were laid, but I’d say more like since the WPA set out to build infrastructure across this great country.

What I’d like to tell O is to start here because W wasn’t paying attention to much, but in case nobody was listening – one of the greatest cities in the world was underwater as W fiddled. Now that O is conducting, I’d say send representatives from each state in waves to help rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans. That way these people can return and tell their own country mates why New Orleans matters.

Let the buck stop here. For a change.

Carmac would hold the envelope to his head and say what the question was, before opening the answer. Last night, a woman said her breast cancer has moved to her lymph nodes, stage 2. I reached out my hand to touch her on instinct, although I barely knew her.

This morning, Obama said in so many words, the country is sick (we knew that) and it is going to get worse before it gets better (we half ass expected that) and the prognosis cast a pall over the general joie de vivre we have been feeling.

Maybe the only answer is a collective ommmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yesterday evening as the balloons were set free in the party and floated to the ceiling, one person came this close * to getting over the blues. And later in the evening when we went to the annual Prohibition party, a few of us were able to let our hair down the way we haven’t in a while. Mom was on the mend by yesterday evening, up and about the apartment and did not spend all day in bed as she has for the last week. Instead, she ate fried chicken from Popeye’s with honey on it because she remembered there used to be a restaurant we went to when we were kids in New Orleans that served fried chicken with honey.

It seems like you can’t turn on the news or pick up any magazine without talk of the recessions or the depression or whatever we are going to call this period in time. I was coming out of the parking lot of Party City on Veterans in Metairie, where I had to go to get the balloons yesterday, and there was a car with a bumper sticker that said “Geaux McCain!” – a Louisiana stamp on a bumper sticker that is so curious. Why is that the Democrats produced a smart woman and a strikingly charismatic black man and the Republicans had a blue haired, out of touch, white man? Well, is it possible that the people who vote for Bush, McCain, for Republicans in general are the part of America that is clawing, clinging, cloying to its desperate last gasp?

Wake up America, the world is much more colorful and diverse than you might expect.

Which then brings me to this, I was reading the NYT this morning and Obama announced plans for the largest public works spending program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half-century ago. We all knew that we had to move into some WPA type program to right the country, and so his announcement did not come as any surprise.

A long time ago, when I lived in Abita Springs with my first husband, I went to work during a transition period, at a seafood restaurant called Richard’s. There was a woman who came into the restaurant every evening to eat by herself. She had a fascinating past, having followed her husband all over the United States as he laid down the same highway system that Obama refers to. There was a quiet fascination about this woman, although she had not done the work herself, she had gone all over the country because of it.

It made me think of friend’s of my first husband’s family, who one day when we were sitting around talking, the wife said that she could remember the lean times when they had had their first kid and had to eat potatoes and eggs at every meal because they were so broke. She said she often now thought about those times fondly, at how they had nothing, but they were happy.

I think about the having nothing part and as philosophical as I would like to be about money, success, and all of its trappings, I realize I buried the bohemian part of me when I left Spain in 1989 and decided instead to move back to the US and out to California. Go west, young woman! And west I went and there found a hamster brass wheel that felt like the right fit and I got on and have not taken a breath yet.

And like the chubby little hamster that paws the wheel with no end in sight, the Sisyphus of the rodent world, I keep turning the wheel but all of a sudden I am wondering if by clinging, cloying, and sticking fast to what I have for fear of losing it, that I might be missing the wide open road and more from less.

I was feeling a little low about life – about working so hard and always the brass ring seems to move further and further out ahead of me. About not being able to do anything for my mother who spent the last week in her bed 24/7 because she was feeling weak (and scared). I brought mom groceries yesterday and was full of good advice about how she could feel better, but then I left blue just seeing how shaky and frail she appeared.

But today, just an ordinary day, I was headed out to buy a bottle of champagne for a friend’s birthday, who has been feeling blue and told me today, “I haven’t felt right since Katrina,” and I ran into a friend who introduced me to a woman who is opening up a place called Liberty Cafe, which is going to teach inner city kids about the workings of a restaurant as well as give them a hot meal. Then I was coming home with a truck full of balloons I offered to pick up for a neighbor and came across another neighbor who is canvassing the neighborhood to start an elementary school here. She also told me she is pregnant with her second child and she hopes that by the time they are ready, they can go to this school.

Of all the things in the world to focus on – maybe the fact that people like you and me are taking the time to make this world a better place is just one of the many things to be grateful for today.