I was at the doctor’s office trying to understand why all of these things keep going on in my body – from hot flashes to ghost cycles – she said, “Welcome to mid life.”
I said, “I passed midlife a while back unless you think I am going to live to be 100!”
I was sitting in my dining room today having lunch with my aunt and uncle and going over the details of my mom’s care when I looked up and saw the woman across the bayou putting up a 4 foot by 6 foot hand painted sign that says I LOVE DUCKS.
My neighbor comes out and sees it and says, “Money can’t buy you class.”
Nor intelligence, I responded.
There are those who believe I am strong and can withstand everything, but the cracks are evident everywhere. In Portugal, at the last turn off that I missed because we couldn’t understand any directions, I lost it. Even T says, you are strong, and yet, when I hit my arm against the door the other day I thought I would have a nervous breakdown. And then I get up and decide not to go to the staff meeting at the hospital because I cannot suffer any ugliness in my life right now.
Big strong girl – often needs someone to lean on.
Obama, he’s a big strong man, but Maureen Dowd wrote that he is missing the boat by being a pussyfooter. He’s damned for wanting to talk to our children and cursed for wanting to change a health care system that is defunct. He’s cursed by the left – not enough. Cursed by the right – too much.
Big strong boy – needs America’s support. How can we help Mr. President?
If someone was passing the LaLa last night and saw the shutters drawn, the porch lights softly lit, and no dog barking at the front door, they might have thought, how nice, the inhabitants are sleeping peacefully all tucked in for the night. But they’d be wrong, in the hallways of the LaLa, Bam Bam prowled with a limp stuffed fox in his mouth issuing blood curdling meows, Wolfie was chewing the hindside of her leg off because of an itch that can’t get satisfied, R was having nightmares of blisters growing all over her mother’s skin and she was turning her and turning her to find out if there were more, meanwhile, T was fighting off R’s family with a wooden chair in her own private nightmare, and Loca, the only one in the house to find peace, slept quietly in her bed dreaming she was in ours.
I was talking to my neighbor about the state of my brain these days – constant anxiety about my mom that never seems to find a safe place to land. She suggested antidepressants. I came home and we lit the candelabra and I ate a wrap and drank some ginger steeped hot water. Then we listened to Obama talk about health care. T gave me a foot rub. Later, I was on the screen porch looking for Bam Bam and as I leaned over to pick him up, I caught a big whiff of the night blooming jasmine that I planted three years ago near the screen porch so that I could one day be standing there and need aromatherapy in lieu of antidepressants. Wala.
Now that is good planning.
The house on the corner went up for sale recently and it’s a beauty, or it was a beauty. The owners bought it a few years ago and cut down all the overgrown native plants like ginger and canna and put in a suburban garden with low shrubs and a water fountain that always seems to be in repair mode. They held an open house today and I stopped in on my way back from the hospital. It has this utter magnificence when you walk in but as you make your way to the back you see how the remodeled kitchen has also been suburbanized. It was bought prestorm during the late nineties by a dot.commer who made tons of money out west. Then he sold it to a man who bought the old Whole Foods and turned it into a grocery full of all the stuff no one around here eats, and that since has become Canseco’s.
The grocer bought the house for $750,000 and it is now selling for $1.5 million after having put $700K into it. I asked the realtor if he thought they could get that and he said, sure. Well, I hope so, is all I could say. I put almost that into the LaLa and no one thinks I’ll ever get my money out – surely my bank doesn’t.
But all that is neither here nor there, the point is this is a fabulous house with a ton of interesting history attached to it and someone is going to buy it and love it – here is the history that I’ve gathered on it for my bayou walking tour:
1347 Moss Street
Mid-19th century, possibly constructed as a residence for the attorney Christoval Morel in the late 1840’s after he purchased a large tract of land on the Bayou St. John in 1847. The house served as New Orleans’ first Fencing Club in the 1880’s and one time as a rowing club. From 1935 until her death the house served as the home of Dr. Elizabeth Wisner, an original member of the faculty and later the dean of the School of Social Work at Tulane University.
Christoval Morel’s father, Pierre L. Morel dueled under the oaks in City Park while his wife (Victorine de Armas) was pregnant with Christoval. The Duelling Oaks in City Park have seen some of the most colorful scenes in New Orleans’ history. For years sword clanged against sword and bullets streaked between the ancient trees.
An article in the Times-Democrat, March 13, 1892, said, “Blood has been shed under the old cathedral aisles of nature. Between 1834 and 1844 scarcely a day passed without duels being fought at the Oaks. Why, it would not be strange if the very violets blossomed red of this soaked grass! The lover for his mistress, the gentleman for his honor, the courtier for his King; what loyalty has not cried out in pistol shot and scratch of steel! Sometimes two or three hundred people hurried from the city to witness these human baitings. On the occasion of one duel the spectators could stand no more, drew their swords, and there was a general melee.”
In early Creole days more duels were fought in New Orleans than any other American city. Creole honor was a thing of intricate delicacy, to be offended by a word or glance. The Duelling Oaks were a favorite setting for these affaires d’honneur, with pistol, saber, or colichemarde, a long sword with a broad forte and very slender foible, a favorite duelling weapon since the seventeenth century.
Creoles were expert swordsmen and often delighted in any and every opportunity to exhibit their art. Duels were fought over real and trivial insults, were sometimes deliberately provoked by young men anxious to display their skill. A quarrel between rival lovers, a fancied slight, a political argument, a difference of opinion regarding an opera, any one of these things was ample excuse for a duel under the oaks. In his History of Louisiana, Alcee Fortier states that on one Sunday in 1839 ten duels were fought here.
In 1855 the police began to enforce the laws against duelling, but it continued surreptitiously for many years, despite frequent arrests and prosecutions. Finally, however, the law began to have some effect and there seems to have arisen a simultaneous loss of interest in the affairs. At last the time came when a man challenged to defend his honor with the sword or pistol, suffered no stigma by refusing an invitation to the Oaks. By 1890 duelling was only history.
The house is a frame one and a half story Greek Revival style structure raised off the ground on six-foot-high piles. The large half story created by the gabled roof is broken by two fine dormers on the Bayou St. John façade. The roof which extends outward to form a gallery across the bayou façade is supported by six square wooden columns resting on the brick piers below.
The entrance façade is five bays wide with the front door placed at the center. The façade is covered with ship-lap siding while ordinary weatherboards cover the solid brick exterior walls. The rear, which once contained a gallery and two cabinets, has been converted to a kitchen/den/breakfast area.
The house is very similar to raised houses in the Bayou-Lafourche area. However, by the 1840’s the traditional Creole plan with no hall had been replaced with the increasingly popular center hall plan favored by Americans. As such, this house is an important example of two different building styles.
Morel house is a New Orleans landmark.
As I mentioned before, I opted off the neighborhood list serve because I found the banter useless for my daily life and more of a constant irritant. Similarly, a friend sent me a link that the ongoing duck rant had leaked into nola.com and so I read the article and then read the responses – all from people who do not live on Bayou St. John and all utterly clueless. So I felt compelled to respond and a friend wrote after seeing my note and the responses that ensued:
Saw your post on nola.com and enjoyed it. I would post there but it has become the bathroom wall of new orleans: pathetic and juvenile (oh, and an all white bathroom since the election). Unfortunately, your reasoned post is way over their heads and hard for them to comprehend. Most of the posters are still shitting their pants over the fact that a black guy wants to speak to their kids via satellite (by the way how can Barak be a fascist and a communist at the same time?… hmmm….).
Similarly, I have been trying to understand the care of my mother while she is in the hospital and I keep coming up with more questions than answers. At the same time, everyone else has written me about their horrific stories of their own parents dying in a hospital being run by a bunch of derelicts and they say persevere, don’t give up the fight, because our parents need us as advocates. Still I feel at sea with a bunch of morons who would give her Atavan right after we had had a lengthy discussion about the drugs she is on that are keeping her sedated. “But see she’s trying to get up,” the nurse tells me – well, she, who you did not know until this morning, has been trying to GET UP THE ENTIRE TIME SHE HAS BEEN IN HERE! AGHHHHHHHHHH.
Ommmmmmm. I try to remain neutral and not get riled by the mentally challenged but sometimes it’s hard. My friend closed with the winning argument about the ducks:
My main problem with the ducks is that they’re non-native. …. I might have to do an ornithology seminar for some of our neighbors…
There was an article in the NYT by a woman writing about how she and her partner call each other wife. It’s an interesting predicament with same-sex couples, there is a way you refer to each other among friends, family, strangers, clerks, phone clerks, etc. It never comes out exactly right with any of them. Some friends of mine opted to not get married after ten years and instead had a jump the broom ceremony, which harkens back to the days when slaves couldn’t marry and so to mark the ceremony they jumped a broom to show their community commitment. And he always calls her “mi novia” which I think sounds great.
After all what it is about is announcing you are entering the threshold of serious coupledom to your friends and family and beyond. Or is it? It’s also about health insurance, inheritance, power of attorney, and all sorts of issues that just don’t come from deciding to be a couple and live together.
I have been married three times, each time I was about to walk down the aisle I felt as if someone was slipping a yoke around my neck, even though actually I always liked being married. We live in a state that doesn’t allow us to get married – I know that this will change in the near future, but in the meantime, do we want to get married?
There is a part of me that says no, we don’t because marriage is bourgeois, and because it is a creation of convention, because it is meaningless unless it has meaning, which translates into why do it if you don’t need it? A long time ago, I was on a business trip in New York and a colleague asked me why I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring (I was married), I didn’t want to get into the long story behind it, the rings we picked from my brother’s fax because we had decided to marry right away rather than wait, the rings that we never really liked so quit wearing, but instead I said I don’t need a wedding ring to know I am married. The colleague said, but everyone else needs it to know you are.
We live in society regardless how often I like to flaunt society’s norms. In this article in the NYT, the woman was making the case that she had started calling her partner, wife, and she knew it was an affront to many. The sad part of the article was that she was standing in line for the superslide while her daughter was with her wife, and a stranger she was chatting with asked her where her daughter had gone to and she flinched. Should I say partner so she isn’t uncomfortable, because it is still nebulous to say partner, do I say wife and have her deal with it, and the author opted to say partner in the end, risking two steps backwards for her and everyone like her.
It was sad to read this but I totally understood what she was saying. Having just entered a same sex relationship at 49 years of age, my initial impulse was to say GIRLFRIEND to whoever was listening, then I watched how T maneuvered through the world, under the radar, and at first I was furious, but then I started noticing how many gay people were doing the same thing, flying under the radar. I also found myself in situations where I was speaking to someone about something completely banal and to say my GIRLFRIEND was to turn the conversation into something else.
It’s sickening really to think that all of these contrivances are necessary – marriage, ring, wife. Better to be like my good friend and neighbor who says, “I’m here, I’m queer, now deal with it.”
Will T and I get married and be each other’s wives? I guess anything is possible. Right now there is no legal same-sex marriage in New Orleans, that will change, (you read it here first), one day when it is legal, we might decide that we want to get married, not to confirm our love to each other, but to affirm to the society we live in that we are here, we are queer, we are in love, come celebrate with us our joy!
I was thinking about Bill Gates this morning as I walked through City Park only because Microsoft became the company to hate because so many people envied its success and feared its domination. Well Microsoft has done some things in spades but other things it has sputtered and utterly failed at, for one thing, dominating the internet. It just can’t seem to accomplish this no matter how hard it tries or what company it acquires.
So Bill Gates marries Melinda and they form a nonprofit and then become the largest philanthropic foundation of modern time.
I think that is a good segue for a man who built an empire. A woman came into his life and put him on a new and rich path.
Not bad, Bill.
Labor Day is a good thing – I’m happy to have had the day off but boy does Tuesday feel like Monday. The overarching theme of the day came from yours truly, Michele, during yoga whose talk today was on kindness and she asked that we try to be kind to at least two people every day.
Yom Kippur is fast approaching (Sep 28) and although I’ve given up my religious ways for more spiritual pursuits, I still hold this day sacred to fast, to meditate, and to reflect on what has gone before and what might come next. For the Jews, this is a day when you are supposed to forgive anyone who has wronged you and to ask for forgiveness from anyone you have wronged.
I thought about that this morning on my walk – about forgiveness – and then later about kindness. Sometimes you know what you should be doing to make things right and yet you still don’t follow your own knowingly good advice, but sometimes that’s okay too.
It’s really easier to be kind to strangers more often than not.