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Last night I took a friend to dinner at Iris – a restaurant I have been to three times now – and I have to admit, I’m sort of done with expensive dinners. August for a chi chi lunch – I love. Meaux Bar anytime for dinner. But this is the third time I’ve gone to Iris and I just didn’t find the food all that. I mean it’s not bad but there is nothing scrumptious about it. Sort of bland actually. And at the end of the day, I just decided I won’t go back and that frankly, I’m sick of paying a fortune for less than earth moving under my feet food.

I visited with mom for a good while this morning and she was more responsive but still the wear and tear of the now almost three months in the hospital was showing in her eyes. I asked her if she knew my name and she said, “My baby.” I told her she was something, keeping us all on pins and needles like she has.

You know how you sit back and you just don’t see the future – that’s how it is with my mom right now. To have her come out of the hospital with a trach and voice box and not be able to do anything but exist just seems like anathema to me. I wish the future looked clearer so she would be aware of what awaits and make her own decisions internally.

I had cut out the part of the calendar that Flower had made me that has my mom on it – it’s the August page – where there are some photos of my mom that Flower took on one of her visits. The three of us had gone to Commander’s Palace for lunch and when Flower went to the bathroom, mom said to me, “I like that girl!” I said I know, I do too.

Looking into mom’s eyes this morning the lyrics to Dave Alvin’s song kept playing over and over in a continuous loop.

The man in the bed isn’t me
Now I slipped out the door and I’m running free
Young and wild like I’ll always be
No the man in the bed isn’t me

I drove over to the Quarter today to pick up something – a red wig. I can’t stand the fact that my hair is no longer red even though I’m enjoying the brunette do. But I forgot it is Southern Decadence weekend and was wondering why all the cute boys were in town. The crowd is not as strong as it has been for Labor Day weekends past, perhaps everyone was still sleeping off last night, hard to say. Lunchtime is early for the Quarter.

But I ran into an old friend who is trying to have a baby – the only problem she has is she needs a man. Hmmmm.

Then coming home, I stopped off at the Cultural Backstreet Museum to sign up for the Second Line parade email list and to be a member. They were getting ready for their back to school picnic where they show up and give all the school kids crayons and books and school stuff. The museum houses a good amount of Mardi Gras Indian costumes as well as Social Aid & Pleasure Club costumes. Rob, Sylvester’s brother, gave me the grand tour. It is definitely a must see if you are in the city.

I spoke to a man who has 10 kids. I said where were you when I was trying to have one? I almost called my friend.

I missed yoga yesterday because I was at the hospital meeting my aunt and uncle who had come in to see mom. She is not doing so well but the doctor keeps assuring me that she will get better. Sigh.

So I went to a night yoga class and was happy to see Libby, my other favorite instructor. She took us out of the ballroom up on the roof where we were overlooking the rooftops of the French Quarter. There was a full moon in the sky and a nice breeze blowing and just as we were getting into downward dog, a riverboat went by and blew its stack.

Libby told us about a woman in India who had hugged 18,000 people in one day. She said this as we stretched our hands out in opposite directions and she said the hands are extensions of the heart.

When I was upside down in a headstand, looking at the moon, I thought of a prayer my mother taught me when I was young – “I see the moon, the moon sees me, god bless the moon, and god bless me.”

NPR has been running a series on train and rail transit that made me think when I heard one of the first programs that this could only be possible under Obama’s leadership. When Bush was president was anyone talking about rail transit? Uh, no.

So they were polling people around the country to see if they would be willing to use the rail or train instead of their car and one woman driving an SUV said no way, I like having my own car.

People, come on, first of all this woman has never been offered serious train and rail options so she doesn’t know and shame on NPR for even using her opinion because its almost inflammatory like saying Americans wouldn’t use train or rail to get from one place to another.

The truth is more than likely that if rail and train services were in abundance, easy to use, and relatively cheap, most everyone would rather hop on a rail than have to park.

Lagniappe is a New Orleans word that means something extra like in a baker’s dozen. Today I saw a woman with large breasts walking towards Delgado wearing a tee shirt with LAGNIAPPE written across her chest.

Sitting around a dinner table a friend said she knew of nobody who had cancer five years ago but suddenly that is all she keeps hearing about. Another friend at the table said, “It’s your age.” Well it does seem like I keep hearing stories about more people with cancer, that’s terminal, and I think of how cancer still remains one of the most incredible tragic stories of our lifetime. People die from cancer – usually not quickly – but the dying process is drawn out over months and sometimes years.

There is a digital billboard in the Louis Armstrong International Airport that reads, “No one says you have cancer, get over it” – it is an ad about depression and how most feel people have the power to do something about their own afflictions such as depression, alcoholism, etc.

Someone close is dealing with a friend who is dying of cancer right now. It is heart wrenching to watch the inevitable slide towards death, the dissolution of the body, and the mind and spirit following it out the door. SO much for rage rage rage against the dying light – does anyone really have the power to stave off death?

October in Vermont

Endings are always more difficult than beginnings.
Don’t ask me why I remember
lying alone in the grass at dusk, gored
by the tiny horns of snails,
filaments of spider-silk like threads
of starlight across my eyes. I was listening
to the orange and blue
leaves explain my countless lives,
so many that I could not make out a single word.
Their colors wound each of us
in unnameable, and different ways.
By day they are the splayed hands of children
held up in self-wonderment.
At night they are the flutterings of dying birds.
Lighting my way with a dandelion
I hold in one hand like a sparkler,
in the other a jar of fireflies,
I make my way through the forking darkness
as the leafless trees climb the night like stairs.

JOHN LINDGREN

The Southern Review
Summer 2009

I was watching the movie last night and admiring the way Paul, Julia’s husband, adored her and supported her. Someone asked me this past weekend if I could see spending the rest of my life with T and I said no doubt, that is what I am going to do. The same friend who asked me had told me that her measure of destiny was who did you want to sit down at the end of the day and have a glass of wine with.

I don’t think that is the measure.

How about someone who supports you? Who when I say I am giving up the blog, she says, “NO WAY!” because she actually reads my writing and is a fan. How about someone who wants to be a parent with you and shares one of your biggest desires? How about someone who knows how to care for you when you are having your 19th nervous breakdown?

I’d say the measure of who you want to spend the rest of your life with involves more than a glass of wine at the end of the day, it involves a vision of your life together in the crystal ball, it involves supporting and appreciating each other, and it most surely involves chemistry – that attraction that has no definition or reason.

The deal is this, it’s tough to write about the daily habit of love, but it is truly the greatest blessing a person could have in their life. And to all my single friends who wish for this companionship, I have a special wish for you that you find your T.

I moved back to New Orleans with one goal in mind, to be near my mother. For decades I had dreamed of making my mother happy. I imagined that if I could relocate her to a cute yellow house, with a lovely garden, that she would sit outside on the porch and have her coffee and listen to birds and be happy.

Years ago a friend of mine whose father was an alcoholic told me that one day I would focus on making myself happy and quit trying to take care of my mother.

A funny thing happened, along the way, I did start taking care of myself and I found out I am incredibly happy but I never lost the desire to rescue my mother.

When I did return to New Orleans I decided to take all that happiness, and the cute house and garden and enjoy the hell out of it. And to invite my mother into my life. And that I did. Parties, dinner parties, girls get togethers, champagne on the porch, Saturday lunches colored our time together. My friends became her friends. My life was always here accessible for her.

Now that I think back on all the factors that drove me to leave my comfortable life in California and return home, I think that my time here with my mother was all worth it. I don’t believe my mother will ever live independently again and every day that weighs on my heart because I know that of all the desires she has ever had it was to be independent.

I went last night to see Julie and Julia, the new movie out about Julia Childs and a young woman name Julie who blogs about cooking out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Meryl Streep plays Julia Childs – and as usual she does a fabulous job, at times I almost forgot it was Streep and thought it was Childs. And let me just say I love(d) Julia Childs. Before I went a few people told me that the part of about Childs was great and the part about the blogger not so great.

I agree. Here is a woman who cooks her way through Mastering in 365 days and blogs about it. She then receives copious calls from huge publishing firms to write a book about it, then she gets the opportunity to make a movie about it. Well, I can say this about that – really? All riding on the coattails of Julia Childs’ phenomenal success as a personality and chef.

For many years as I wrote fiction, my friends would implore me to write autobiography because as one put it, “Your family is Southern Gothic at its best.” But I wouldn’t do it. Then in 2001 my mother went to the hospital for a minor injury that turned into the fiasco we are witnessing now and I started keeping a journal on my family specifically. In 2004, I started writing in earnest about New Orleans, my family, and my life.

When I started my blog nearly five years ago, I didn’t know that I would be writing more than Gothic, I’d have tragedy, romance, homosexuality, sense of place and not to mention a lot of fun at the core of my writing. Forget about family, they were a backdrop to my own drama. Someone once said that if you are not writing autobiography then you are plagiarizing. Well I have offered up cross country moves, major devastation in the form of Katrina and Rita, affair, divorce, dating in the late 40s, switching teams, not to mention my relationship with my mother. Has anyone called me for a movie deal – ah, no.