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I was getting gardening stuff at the Feed Store and two big bags of alfalfa pellets which make awesome mulch for roses, and the check out girl said, “Your teeth are purdy.”

I said thanks (thinking for a mere twenty grand you could have these teeth).

She said, “I wish I had teeth like yours.”

I said “Let me see your teeth.”

And she smiled a little.

“Those aren’t bad teeth.”

She said, “Well if I didn’t smoke they’d be better.”

I said, “A pretty young girl like you shouldn’t be smoking for a lot more reasons than whiter teeth.”

She blushed and said, “Thanks.”

I was walking out of City Park this morning and passing General P G T Beauregard’s statue when I heard crunch, the sound of a car plowing into another car. I looked to my right and made eye contact with someone watching and then heard another crunch to the left, the sound of another car running smack into another car.

The city is redoing the surface of Wisner and there are cones up everywhere and a big drum blocking the right lane – only everyone who travels this road wasn’t prepared for any of this, much less a big orange drum in the middle of the road, and so it created a series of fender benders.

I kept walking and as I was almost to Magnolia Bridge, I saw a police car and tried to wave it down, and it cruised passed me with the police officer waving back at me. So then I shouted, Hey! Stop! and he pulled over and I ran over and told him about the accidents.

He said, “Alright dahling, I’ll go check it out,” and then winked at me as he drove off.

Yesterday, after completing my yoga practice and lying prone on the ballroom floor of NOAC with my pink, caught three years ago, Muses’ eye mask on, I listened to Love is My Religion playing on the stereo and drifted off into an unconscious world of joy. I was day dreaming about all that I don’t know yet and all that remains to be seen, heard, tasted, smelled. Here is my horoscope this morning:

January 16, 2009
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Immerse yourself in a different culture today, and you will give yourself a wonderful new learning experience. Getting in touch with foreign food, music, dance or art will all invigorate you — and make you aware of other philosophies that you may or may not want to adopt to your own life. It’s up to you to take every opportunity you can to grow as a person. You are always a work in progress, so don’t ever think that you have finished your education.

Several years ago I was in New York for a Women in Media Summit and the penultimate speaker was a motivational speaker who talked to the audience about finding opportunities. I was sitting in the second row and had her brochure in my hand as there was one on every seat. In the photo of her brochure she had blonde hair but at the podium she had chestnut colored hair. After she finished speaking, she came to sit down and sat down right beside me. I whispered to her: “You’re hair looks better brown.”

Later, when we adjourned and were getting a glass of wine and chatting, I told her I was impressed with what she was saying about finding opportunity in change. Her theory is that life is like swinging from a trapeze, the greatest opportunities are when you let go and before you grab hold. I asked her what she thought about applying that to daily life, because sometimes there are momentous occasions in your life and sometimes they are just ordinary events. She said, when you leave the house tomorrow, look around you, look to the left, to the right, look up, look down, this will help you see what you haven’t been looking at before.

Today I was walking Loca in City Park and we ran into the usual suspects – Sugar Pie (the skittish Katrina rescue dog), Sally (the giant Airedale), and others. I got to speaking to one of the dog owners, just normal chit chat, and then she said she had to go because she had to drive to the Westbank. I said you poor thing. She said for ten years her life has been peaceful – she has worked at the same place, three miles from home, and now twice a week she has to drive to the Westbank.

I said well you know, take it as an opportunity to explore something new. I said I would love to go to the Vietnamese market over there but I swear I can’t force myself to go to the Westbank on any given day. I can barely make it to Metairie where my mother lives. But sometimes you are in a rut and don’t know it and change brings an opportunity that you didn’t know you were looking for.

She thanked me for my pearls of wisdom and said she honestly believed in this as a philosophy – the unknown.

And then we went on our merry ways and I thought about all of the things that have come into my life that I was not looking for – and oh what a difference to me.

I was speaking to a friend in the neighborhood who used to live in the Luling Mansion when it was apartments. Remember this is the big mansion I discovered on Leda Street for the first time (how could I not have seen this before?) just the other day.

Luling Mansion
Address: 1436–1438 Leda Street
The massive three-story Italianate Luling Mansion was designed by architect James Gallier Jr., and built in 1865 for Florence A. Luling. When the Louisiana Jockey Club took over the Creole Race Course (now the Fair Grounds) in 1871, it purchased this nearby mansion. For the next 20-odd years, it served as the racing organization’s clubhouse. It is not open to the public.

My friend told me that living in his apartment paying $120 a month was pure magic. The other apartments were populated by friends and they lived like they were in a commune. None of them made money and they paid ridiculously low rent and his apartment opened to a balcony that overlooked the Fairgrounds. His soon-to-be wife and he used to sit on the balcony in the morning and drink their coffee while the horses ran around the track. What a life!

I remember living uptown on General Pershing, Uptown, in 1988 and paying $250 for a half double with a camel back. I remember returning after six years in California to a half double on Napoleon Avenue in 1995 and paying what I thought was an exorbitant amount of rent, $800, and now living on the bayou and paying, well I won’t even say what my mortgage is because it is WAY too much, but the fact is you have to pay to live in paradise these days, that’s why there is a huge real estate correction going on because there was a time, two decades ago, when you could live like a queen in New Orleans on a waiter’s tips.

Those were the days my friend.

I was walking Loca briskly through the park this morning, thinking about a few things like T’s past two afternoon walks with Loca where she encountered raging dog owners shouting profanity at their dog or our dog or what have you. Then I was thinking how City Park is considered the fifth largest park in the nation and guess what, one of the safest. About the time when all these thoughts were swarming through my mind, I got to the latest art installation at the bend of City Park to Marconi where Shannon Lansing Hanson has erected a mosaic archway with all sorts of figurines and beautiful tiles and there was the mayor of the hood so I stopped to chat. Along comes this guy who is all smiles and radiating joie de vivre and after he leaves the mayor tells me that he is always like that – just shining from the inside out.

Got to love these people because they are the ones that put a smile on your face. So when we parted, we both agreed to release our inner Doug for the rest of the day so that we could take a little of the shine within us and throw it out to everyone we encountered.

Two days at the dentist is enough to make you never want to see one again, except now I have a million dollar smile – or rather a $20,000 smile – and so I’m happy I went. I didn’t have my teeth done because I wanted whiter teeth – I had chronic tonsillitis as a child and a doctor for a father so I had more than the usual dosages of Tetracycline and as a results my teeth were permanently discolored and weakened.

The weird thing about the initial studies they did on teeth damage from Tetracycline was that they couldn’t get what was happening to children to reproduce itself in lab studies because they were testing on rats. And rats’ teeth continuously grow, unlike humans (one of the reasons rats are always gnawing is to keep their teeth filed almost like fingernails). It took researchers a while to figure that one out.

In the meantime, as I said I was part of the first tests with bonding because I was used as a model by an expert witness in the case defending American Cynamid 25 years ago – the dentist actually painted porcelain onto the tops of my teeth. Eventually they started wearing around the edges and cracking on my front top teeth – so I had my tops replaced with veneers at San Francisco State Dental school 15 years ago. But after cracks, wearing, partial bonding on three teeth, among other issues from the old bonding and older veneers, I finally bit the bullet and had my entire mouth redone, which included two partial crowns, cutting of gums on one tooth and lots of other maneuvering not to mention 19 veneers and WALA – a Hollywood smile.

When I visited Croatia last summer a man told me he was glad to see that I didn’t have white, perfect, American teeth. So make that a $20,000, Hollywood, American smile I got going now.

Before:

After:

Ah, the conflict of just who “we” means. When 9/11 happened and Bush got tough in his edited and second address to the nation and world, the dove in me was overshadowed by the hawk who wanted to tell the world that we won’t be a target for these terrorists. I didn’t support a war in Iraq – not at all – and in time, I made a clear line of distinction between Bush’s hawkish policies and procedures and my inherent dove philosophy. As the began, I couldn’t help feel the sting of embarrassment to be an American around the world and Obama’s election went a long way in assuaging those feelings and made me proud to be an American again.

Similarly, being brought up Jewish usually means you were told from knee high on that Israel is a country that exists to allow Jews to live in peace, but as long as I’ve been aware, Israel has rarely been in peace. When I was there thirty years ago, I met Jewish teenagers like myself, who had conflicted feelings about being conscripted into an army to fight against their neighbors as well as disagreement with the factions who tried to impose religious laws on their daily life.

In my twenties, I remember sitting in Stephen Ambrose’s history class and him saying right before an exam that Israelis behaves like Nazis and storming out of his lecture hall and then confronting him the next day. Again, conflict over whether Israel is defending or being the aggressor. And conflict over whether I’m a we, or it is us and them.

When people throw out handily that “Israel does this” or “Israel is that” – it’s the same as when they say “Americans does this or Americans do that.” What Bush does is not what America believes 100% no more than what Olmert does is backed by all Israelis.

Israel, like America, is a melting pot of a myriad of beliefs and philosophies. There are woman’s groups in Israel helping women’s groups in Palestine. There are boys and girls who don’t want to fight, and men and women who don’t want to children to be bombed. Just like in America there are people who believe gays should have the same rights as straights, and America should focus on internal affairs and participate in other countries only on an as needed basis – Am I American, Jewish, female, gay, Southern, babyboomer – yes – but who are “we” and how do I exclude “me” when my group behaves differently than me?

I was in the middle of the second day of my dental ordeal when the equipment broke and I was left laying there, mouth agape, waiting. While there, the hygienist came in and said one of the patients had fallen in her kitchen on New Year’s eve and hit her head and died shortly thereafter – 46 with two young children.

Meanwhile, I was reading obits in the last People magazine of 2008 and was surprised at how many youngsters had died ranging in age from 30 something to 70 something.

As I went to check out and pay my enormous tab for all of the work, the receptionist looked at my chart and said, “Having a big birthday this year,” and I said oh yeah. And right after that I’m having a baby – I turn 50 on May 2nd and my baby is born on June 9th – and then tears of joy just came to my eyes.

It’s that old plant your garden while you can adage – 50 shmifty – I got great teeth and a baby to raise. Now all I need is a helmet.