Adoption, Stardate 111008. This morning we threw our names to the universe via domestic and international attorneys for a baby, whether that baby be black, yellow, or white, boy or girl, we made no distinction, we just said to the universe and anyone listening that here in our home and hearts, we have all a baby needs to thrive.
Now, we wait for the wonder of what comes next.
When we got to mom’s apartment last night, the men from Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador were sitting around the parking lot with beer and cigarettes. We went up the stairs and found my mom sitting there with candles lit all around her, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bourbon.
I wondered later as I was falling asleep if she takes comfort in the night air there, overhearing the man to man conversations in Spanish, listening to the dogs whimpering in the yard across the fence, if there is something in her that romanticizes this existence over coming over here to the bayou to live with a view of the water, the pelicans, around neighbors and family who would care for her, to be in the familiar that she seems to have been running from all her life.
I rode my bike to the Lakefront this morning. It was the first time I had been on the bike since the MS 150 ride. My playlist was God on Sunday, a tweaked version of a playlist I had made to visit friends years ago in Ponchatoula on Easter Sunday. It’s actually a great compilation – from Why Me Lord, by Kris Kristofferon, to God Makes No Mistakes by Loretta Lynn. The criteria is the singer has to say God once in the lyrics.
As I rode towards the water, I thought about Proposition 8 and the signs I saw people carrying as they picketed the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake (apparently the Mormons were hugely behind the effort to defeat same sex marriages and had marshaled all their troops) – some of the signs said “God is Love” and “I love my Gay Son” and “Love One Another.”
Years ago, my brother, who considers himself a rabbi, even though he should spend more time familiarizing himself with the law rather than religion, told me the story of a Torah student who asked what the Talmud teaches. The rabbi told the student to stand on one foot, to put the Torah on his head, and to rub his stomach at the same time and memorize the following “do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”
In my wanderings away from Judaism, I retained a few ticks and a few keepers. One of the ticks are statues of gods, which always make a me a little uneasy. One of the keepers the do onto others part. Imagine how you would feel if tomorrow you woke up and a group of people decided you were not conforming to a standard that needed to be met for you to marry the one you love, raise a child with your partner, and leave your inheritance to your amor.
Imagine; also on my God playlist.
It seems like the world is on Xanax or Atavan these days and a doctor friend was telling me that these are the WORST drugs because they are like cigarettes – one you have one, you need another one because you have withdrawals when it leaves your system and so you are always craving more.
What I’m trying to figure out is why is everyone so depressed to begin with? A friend was telling me she spoke with her dad on Wednesday and he asked, “Are you going to any election parties tonight?” And she said, “The election was yesterday, dad.”
Mom is in a black hole where her income does not equal her outcome and this is cause for despair. What to do? We’re headed over there with cans of Tecate, a check for two months rent, ads for part-time nursing jobs from Craig’s List but maybe dementia ain’t a bad place to be when getting old seems to be fraught with fear and loneliness, or is it?
What makes you happy? I feel like Steve Martin when he was leaving his big house, I just need my slinky, this chair, and … I’m happy in the face of god knows what, but I just wish I had the happy pills or the magic wand to bring everyone I love into the glittery snow globe of joy with me.
I find myself thoroughly intrigued by the house that used to stand on the corner of Moss and St. John Court. I was getting my teeth cleaned the other day and, again held captive by my garrulous dental hygienist, I learned that she used to live in this neighborhood, right behind me. She said she moved after Jack Bartlett died. She said, she lived in a house she loved with her husband and two children, who rode their bikes down the street by themselves every day. And she said, on Moss lived an architect or they were both architects and they had three boys, or twin boys, I can’t remember, and she said Jack’s mother lived down Dumaine and every day he would ride his bike after supper and go see her. Much in the same way I’d like to do if my mother were closer by.
One day, some boys had robbed the little store on Carrolton across from the snowball stand, and they were running down Dumaine and Jack was riding his bike towards his mother’s house and for some reason these boys thought he saw them rob the store and they chased him down and shot him dead.
She said she couldn’t bear to have her kids riding their bike in the streets after that and so they left and moved to Lakeview, where they were one of the few streets that missed the water from Katrina by the hair of their chinny chin chins. But she said, I remember the great big beautiful house on the corner of Moss and the Court, it had a gallery that went all the way around it. It was one of those old beauties.
I’d love to find a photograph of this house – I’ve only known it as an empty lot which before had cars from the Court residents parked on the grass and now has these stupid fence poles stuck up all the way around it. I worry what might go up there because I’ve seen imitations of the past and I’ve seen preposterous attempts at the new.
I went to take Loca on a long walk this morning and was thinking the whole time about my socks that were slipping off my heel and making me nutty. Then I thought why not think about other things and I started focusing on the moss on the oak trees. It’s beautiful in the park. And a guy walked by and he said, “That dog’s hyper!”
Loca was hopping which is what she usually does. The other day a friend told me a way to get her to stop – it involved cheese slices from Terranova and lots of time with the “leave it” command. But I kind of like to see her hop – it reminds me of me.
As I was contemplating the moss and watching Loca hop, a guy went by on roller skates and he was talking into a blue tooth earbud, almost dictating, and he said, “Up until I turned 30 years old, I believed…” and suddenly he was out of hearing range and I started to run to find out what he was saying, but Loca was hopping and then she thought I was playing and we got all tangled up.
I came home my usual way walking the path between City Park Avenue and the lagoon where the fountain is and where the canopy of the oaks is so prehistorically huge, and a guy was walking towards me very serious like in a pair of black warm ups and he was also talking into a blue tooth device and he said, “Well, blacks have been doing it that way, but whites go for…,” and suddenly a big truck went by on City Park and I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
As I rounded the corner and started along the bayou, I saw the woman who walks backwards around the bayou every day. She talks on a cellphone mostly except for yesterday, when another neighbor joined in her in a backwards walk and they chatted away like that endlessly.
I looked at my affirmation today and it really didn’t speak to me. My horoscope was about some eclectic party I was supposed to attend and have a great time.
It’s getting dark early now. The pelicans are circling the park but haven’t settled on coming down a few more blocks to my end of the bayou. There is a slight chill in the air. I’ve gained weight – I feel it in the drag of feet, in the tightness of my jeans. My hair grew about four inches overnight and my haircut appointment isn’t for another three weeks.
I say all this to tell you that I’m sick to death of what I read about Prop 8 passing in California and one Christian Right fanatic saying at least it will make it harder for homosexuals to adopt. Good grief – where is my gun when I need it?
I don’t own one but apparently a lot of new gun owners do since sales have spiked 17% because there are those that feel Obama will take away all of America’s guns and make this a socialist state. Good lord.
But I digress, what I was trying to say is this, the world is complex and the ride is bumpy, but if you are always bracing yourself white knuckle for the next hit, you’ll miss the times when you are soaring off the tracks. It’s these moments when you are gliding when you ought to connect the dots, these are the occasions when you say, I’m living, wee hee, ou la!
Ran into a friend whose mother has Alzheimer’s – she said she is going to paint her car so her mom doesn’t think it is hers anymore. She had taken to putting her mother’s purse by the door with nothing in it since her mother was in the habit of grabbing it and running out the door to wander the neighborhood.
My mother told me tonight that she has sunk to the lowest low of self-esteem and knows the world doesn’t need her and that no one has any use for her. I told her that was simply not the truth – that she has all the wisdom and experience of a lifetime to offer – there are people who are terminally ill who could use her bedside manner.
Why is getting old so sad? What about the golden years? Where’s the fun to have when you finally don’t have to adhere to other’s schedule?
By the New York Times no less:
November 7, 2008
Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question
By C. J. CHIVERS and ELLEN BARRY
TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.
Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.
The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.
President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.
Senior Georgian officials contest these accounts, and have urged Western governments to discount them. “That information, I don’t know what it is and how it is confirmed,” said Giga Bokeria, Georgia’s deputy foreign minister. “There is such an amount of evidence of continuous attacks on Georgian-controlled villages and so much evidence of Russian military buildup, it doesn’t change in any case the general picture of events.”
He added: “Who was counting those explosions? It sounds a bit peculiar.”
The Kremlin has embraced the monitors’ observations, which, according to a written statement from Grigory Karasin, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, reflect “the actual course of events prior to Georgia’s aggression.” He added that the accounts “refute” allegations by Tbilisi of bombardments that he called mythical.
The monitors were members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E. A multilateral organization with 56 member states, the group has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s.
The observations by the monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belorussian airborne captain and a Polish civilian, have been the subject of two confidential briefings to diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, one in August and the other in October. Summaries were shared with The New York Times by people in attendance at both.
Details were then confirmed by three Western diplomats and a Russian, and were not disputed by the O.S.C.E.’s mission in Tbilisi, which was provided with a written summary of the observations.
Mr. Saakashvili, who has compared Russia’s incursion into Georgia to the Nazi annexations in Europe in 1938 and the Soviet suppression of Prague in 1968, faces domestic unease with his leadership and skepticism about his judgment from Western governments.
The brief war was a disaster for Georgia. The attack backfired. Georgia’s army was humiliated as Russian forces overwhelmed its brigades, seized and looted their bases, captured their equipment and roamed the country’s roads at will. Villages that Georgia vowed to save were ransacked and cleared of their populations by irregular Ossetian, Chechen and Cossack forces, and several were burned to the ground.
Massing of Weapons
According to the monitors, an O.S.C.E. patrol at 3 p.m. on Aug. 7 saw large numbers of Georgian artillery and grad rocket launchers massing on roads north of Gori, just south of the enclave.
At 6:10 p.m., the monitors were told by Russian peacekeepers of suspected Georgian artillery fire on Khetagurovo, an Ossetian village; this report was not independently confirmed, and Georgia declared a unilateral cease-fire shortly thereafter, about 7 p.m.
During a news broadcast that began at 11 p.m., Georgia announced that Georgian villages were being shelled, and declared an operation “to restore constitutional order” in South Ossetia. The bombardment of Tskhinvali started soon after the broadcast.
According to the monitors, however, no shelling of Georgian villages could be heard in the hours before the Georgian bombardment. At least two of the four villages that Georgia has since said were under fire were near the observers’ office in Tskhinvali, and the monitors there likely would have heard artillery fire nearby.
Moreover, the observers made a record of the rounds exploding after Georgia’s bombardment began at 11:35 p.m. At 11:45 p.m., rounds were exploding at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between impacts, they noted.
At 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 8, Gen. Maj. Marat M. Kulakhmetov, commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave, reported to the monitors that his unit had casualties, indicating that Russian soldiers had come under fire.
By 12:35 a.m. the observers had recorded at least 100 heavy rounds exploding across Tskhinvali, including 48 close to the observers’ office, which is in a civilian area and was damaged.
Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that by morning on Aug. 8 two Russian soldiers had been killed and five wounded. Two senior Western military officers stationed in Georgia, speaking on condition of anonymity because they work with Georgia’s military, said that whatever Russia’s behavior in or intentions for the enclave, once Georgia’s artillery or rockets struck Russian positions, conflict with Russia was all but inevitable. This clear risk, they said, made Georgia’s attack dangerous and unwise.
Senior Georgia officials, a group with scant military experience and personal loyalties to Mr. Saakashvili, have said that much of the damage to Tskhinvali was caused in combat between its soldiers and separatists, or by Russian airstrikes and bombardments in its counterattack the next day. As for its broader shelling of the city, Georgia has told Western diplomats that Ossetians hid weapons in civilian buildings, making them legitimate targets.
“The Georgians have been quite clear that they were shelling targets — the mayor’s office, police headquarters — that had been used for military purposes,” said Matthew J. Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state and one of Mr. Saakashvili’s vocal supporters in Washington.
Those claims have not been independently verified, and Georgia’s account was disputed by Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain who was the senior O.S.C.E. representative in Georgia when the war broke out. Mr. Grist said that he was in constant contact that night with all sides, with the office in Tskhinvali and with Wing Commander Stephen Young, the retired British military officer who leads the monitoring team.
“It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” Mr. Grist said. “The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”
Mr. Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia. In August, after the Georgian foreign minister, Eka Tkeshelashvili, who has no military experience, assured diplomats in Tbilisi that the attack was measured and discriminate, Mr. Grist gave a briefing to diplomats from the European Union that drew from the monitors’ observations and included his assessments. He then soon resigned under unclear circumstances.
A second briefing was led by Commander Young in October for military attachés visiting Georgia. At the meeting, according to a person in attendance, Commander Young stood by the monitors’ assessment that Georgian villages had not been extensively shelled on the evening or night of Aug. 7. “If there had been heavy shelling in areas that Georgia claimed were shelled, then our people would have heard it, and they didn’t,” Commander Young said, according to the person who attended. “They heard only occasional small-arms fire.”
The O.S.C.E turned down a request by The Times to interview Commander Young and the monitors, saying they worked in sensitive jobs and would not be publicly engaged in this disagreement.
Grievances and Exaggeration
Disentangling the Russian and Georgian accounts has been complicated. The violence along the enclave’s boundaries that had occurred in recent summers was more widespread this year, and in the days before Aug. 7 there had been shelling of Georgian villages. Tensions had been soaring.
Each side has fresh lists of grievances about the other, which they insist are decisive. But both sides also have a record of misstatement and exaggeration, which includes circulating casualty estimates that have not withstood independent examination. With the international standing of both Russia and Georgia damaged, the public relations battle has been intensive.
Russian military units have been implicated in destruction of civilian property and accused by Georgia of participating with Ossetian militias in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Russia and South Ossetia have accused Georgia of attacking Ossetian civilians.
But a critical and as yet unanswered question has been what changed for Georgia between 7 p.m. on Aug 7, when Mr. Saakashvili declared a cease-fire, and 11:30 p.m., when he says he ordered the attack. The Russian and Ossetian governments have said the cease-fire was a ruse used to position rockets and artillery for the assault.
That view is widely held by Ossetians. Civilians repeatedly reported resting at home after the cease-fire broadcast by Mr. Saakashvili. Emeliya B. Dzhoyeva, 68, was home with her husband, Felix, 70, when the bombardment began. He lost his left arm below the elbow and suffered burns to his right arm and torso. “Saakashvili told us that nothing would happen,” she said. “So we all just went to bed.”
Neither Georgia nor its Western allies have as yet provided conclusive evidence that Russia was invading the country or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, as Mr. Saakashvili insists.
Georgia has released telephone intercepts indicating that a Russian armored column apparently entered the enclave from Russia early on the Aug. 7, which would be a violation of the peacekeeping rules. Georgia said the column marked the beginning of an invasion. But the intercepts did not show the column’s size, composition or mission, and there has not been evidence that it was engaged with Georgian forces until many hours after the Georgian bombardment; Russia insists it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation.
Unclear Accounts of Shelling
Interviews by The Times have found a mixed picture on the question of whether Georgian villages were shelled after Mr. Saakashvili declared the cease-fire. Residents of the village of Zemo Nigozi, one of the villages that Georgia has said was under heavy fire, said they were shelled from 6 p.m. on, supporting Georgian statements.
In two other villages, interviews did not support Georgian claims. In Avnevi, several residents said the shelling stopped before the cease-fire and did not resume until roughly the same time as the Georgian bombardment. In Tamarasheni, some residents said they were lightly shelled on the evening of Aug. 7, but felt safe enough not to retreat to their basements. Others said they were not shelled until Aug 9.
With a paucity of reliable and unbiased information available, the O.S.C.E. observations put the United States in a potentially difficult position. The United States, Mr. Saakashvili’s principal source of international support, has for years accepted the organization’s conclusions and praised its professionalism. Mr. Bryza refrained from passing judgment on the conflicting accounts.
“I wasn’t there,” he said, referring to the battle. “We didn’t have people there. But the O.S.C.E. really has been our benchmark on many things over the years.”
The O.S.C.E. itself, while refusing to discuss its internal findings, stood by the accuracy of its work but urged caution in interpreting it too broadly. “We are confident that all O.S.C.E. observations are expert, accurate and unbiased,” Martha Freeman, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “However, monitoring activities in certain areas at certain times cannot be taken in isolation to provide a comprehensive account.”
C.J. Chivers reported from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Olesya Vartanyan contributed reporting from Tbilisi, and Matt Siegel from Tskhinvali, Georgia.
A friend sent an email this morning saying she is concerned about assassination attempts on Obama. Believe me, the thought has crossed my mind more than once, but I don’t want to give into worry because worry begets worry. If I start to worry about something happening to Obama it will lead me to worrying about the economy and about our country and about well, the list is endless.
What is for certain is that Hope won this election. Yes, Obama is eloquent, handsome, charismatic and the one, but the truth is that America voted for a change from the reign of error that has ruled over this country for the last eight years. Americans voted for someone who represents them – a black man from a white mother raised in another country. The U.S. of A. voted for our health care system to be given a shot in the arm, for our children’s education to be paid attention to, for our service folks to come home from a war that NO ONE WANTED TO GO FIGHT, and the country voted most importantly for Hope. And Hope won.