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I’ve been trying to find a reason why the women who reside on the bayou live to such old age – I count three I can see their houses from my window who are in their nineties and walk around the bayou every morning – they are lucid and not far from perky.

This morning, I ran into the self-proclaimed mayor of Bayou St John and he yelled to me across the bayou, “Did you hear?”

What?

“It’s all a big joke. Didn’t you listen to the news this morning?”

Yes, but…

“Well the whole Wall Street thing turns out it’s all a big joke!”

Then he and his Catahoula walked one way, and I with Loca another, heading into the park.

I’ve had hell to pay on my right side – my lower back, my psoas has atrophied, I’m convinced of it, since I am in such pain most of the time. Since going back to Lara, I’ve realized that this is my masculine side, the one that delivers, performs, does and that it is in a war for control with my feminine side, the one that receives, takes, and simply is.

Luckily yoga practice this month is about aligning the right side with the left side through breathing and balance and stretches. I’m working towards the middle.

Summer’s heat gave way to fall in the past forty-eight hours and this morning brought all the good feelings that autumn always gives me. I came home from walking Loca briskly through the park (all the while noticing the clean up, which has gone smoothly and quickly post storm) and waiting for me was lipa oil simmering on the paper mache elephant from Croatia, my tea piping hot on a table setting, and a beautiful woman served me breakfast with a smile.

These kinds of mornings are worth savoring.

Between evacuations and the threat of Wall Street hyper exploding before my very eyes, I missed the fact that David Foster Wallace committed suicide last week.

I read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again during the summer and while the book serves as a treatise against nostalgia, the passages about the Great Depression were to me the most haunting. The land grabs, the greed of investors, the neighbor turning against neighbor for the almighty dollar all that preceded the worldwide economic downturn which started in 1929 and lasting through most of the 1930s, is too reminiscent of what I came home to from Eastern Europe.

Like the 30s, the great depression centered in North America and Europe, but had damaging effects around the world. The most industrialized countries were affected the worst, including the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Canada, and Australia. Cities around the world were hit hard, especially those based on heavy industry. Sound familiar? Look at today’s headlines:

NYT – Wall St.’s Turmoil Sends Stocks Reeling

Yahoo! – Meltdown in US finance system pummels stock market

NYT – In Europe, Concern on the Faces of Investors

Back in the summer of 1995, I took a job at Brigtsen’s waiting tables while getting freelance jobs writing. I remember a woman came in with her father, a frail man who looked as if she had just sprung him from a nursing home. They sat at one of the tables on the front porch and she was wearing a power suit and was describing to her father her recent accomplishments. He just kept nodding. She continued to try to impress upon him that these were indeed accomplishments and he kept nodding his head. Much in the same fashion Arlene does now when she walks into a corner and stares in the outer limits nodding.

On Saturday, at our regularly scheduled mom and daughter lunch, I was telling my mother a story and I could see that she was trying to listen, to pay attention, but she couldn’t follow the story. Instead she kept nodding her head. The more I tried to get her to understand what I was saying, the further away her mind went from the story at hand and the more she nodded her head.

Lehman’s collapse.

Gustav and Ike.

Palin.

Woke this morning to grey skies and rain. Loca and I tried to walk anyway but were quickly soaked despite rain gear. A pall hangs over the sky that is greater than the weather. On Saturday, Abby, who has been hanging on with a will of steel started faltering again as the tumor came back. Of all the things you could wake up on a Monday and contemplate, the death of your daughter should not be one of them. Her steel will comes from parents whose strength resides in the realm of epics not real life. I wish her godspeed.

MS sponsored a training ride through Tammany Trace and the back roads in Tammany Parish. Our route took us along horse farms and rolling hills. I noticed a preponderance of lawn statues – Jesus, angels, Virgin Mary’s, rabbits, dogs, deer, and birds and even a bouquet of flowers, not to mention horses – stone statuary is all the rage on the North Shore.

We ride almost 62 miles and my roadkill count is:

2 dead rabbits
1 dead possum
1 recently dead raccoon
1 dead cat
3 dead snakes
2 unidentifiable