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There is a beautiful door to the old Spanish Customs house across the bayou, it is a big, arched, metal door almost Arabic in its design. Just mysterious enough to always make me glance at it when I turn down Grand Route St. John. T gave me a card with a photograph of a similar door with a red bud blooming on the side of it, and on the back, a poem by Rilke:

Pathways

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
When I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilight meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

Tatjana said she is going to write a narrative about Wolfie for Toby’s website – Toby runs a German Shepherd Rescue operation and is a one woman show having saved hundreds of dogs. We first learned of her when we met Wolfie. On January 19th, I was riding my bike home from the dentist and saw this dog scooting across the road near Robert E Lee and the levee. I called Tatjana and she came and we took the dog to our vet. The xrays said she didn’t have a broken bone but she was certainly in pain, so we got medicine and we brought her home.

At that time in our lives, Arlene was nearing her 14th birthday and she was peeing on herself and getting stuck in corners. Loca needed at least an hour walk if not more just to expend some of her energy. This German Shepherd was more than we could handle. So we called Toby to see if she could find this dog a home, but then the next day we learned the dog had heart worms. So with Toby’s funds and our care, we decided to foster the dog through the heart worm process and then we’d find her a home.

Well you know how these stories go, or do you? I had to go to New York on a business trip and meanwhile Wolfie had shown a propensity for baring her teeth to anyone who came near the house that she didn’t like or know. There was a rapist running amuck in the hood, having attempted to rape eight women, and my neighbor was telling me to get a gun. Not the gun type, I worried about T home alone while I was in New York. But something about Wolfie made me feel that she was safe.

We learned later that a German Shepherd will protect her owner to her death. This uncanny dog with large soulful eyes, so large and majestic and yet so crippled with arthritis and heart worms, looked like she just might eat two rapists if they even appeared to threaten us. After her heart worm treatment, we took her in to get her spayed and learned she had huge ovarian cysts.

She came out of the heart worm and the cysts treatments with flying colors and for months we had a puppy like dog and guess what, her name was Wolfie, Wolfie Levee to be exact. She was an incredible dog. And because of her legs and her convalescence she stayed mostly in Tatjana’s office with her and eventually became her mascot.

Today, while I was sitting on the porch with Tin asleep on my chest the mailman came up and asked where the German Shepherd was. I said sadly she passed. He said, “I’m so sorry to hear that. I would come to the door and it would take her a bit to get up on her legs and get to the door to bark at me, so I started waiting for her to get to the door before I walked away, so she wouldn’t feel bad.”

Damn, that dog, so little time with us and such a BIG impression.

When we got back from our walk today Tin was still sleeping in the Ergobaby so I stopped to rock on the porch and watch the mayhem going on with this movie that “Nick” is making here. There are 18 wheelers lined up on the side of the road, there is equipment coming out the wazoo, there are people and cars and dollies and generators and stuff everywhere. I watched the whole enterprise with a wary eye.

Haiti – our brethren are in desperate dire need – and here we are making one more crappy movie and spending a fortune on it.

I just don’t know how to say this – at the risk of sounding trite here in my tower, in this restored city – I love art and believe that art informs us more than the facts really do – and yet I remember when New Orleans was submerged and those of us in the diaspora could not imagine how people were going about their daily lives as our friends and loves ones were in danger, our homes were under water, our way of life was believed to have been extinguished – how could people not drop what they were doing and do something? Do something to make it better.

Now Haiti is in a bad way and yes, you can flash your plastic and send some cash, but how could we really go about this day like any other day, when there they have just had an aftershock almost as big as the first quake and people are dead and bodies are trapped and no one has water or food.

Tin was snug as a bug in the carrier and I was rocking and looking around at all the fuss wondering what it was all about.

Tin has been taking at first two steps by himself, then four steps, then ten steps and today it is like whoa – Katie bar the door – this little boy is a walking fool! He is walking all over the place. It’s sort of wild to watch because he just gets up and starts going and there is no stopping him except just pooping out himself.

We’re so pleased that Tin will grow up not just with racial diversity but with real cultural diversity as he will travel with us, become part of our friends who come from many countries, and he already has very culturally diverse mommies. So it is with great pleasure that we dress him in the outfits that are coming to him from around the world.

Here first is the Argentina outfit that he inherited from Ruby (who got it from her uncle):

This one is his pants from Ecuador that Clare brought him:

Then here is the coup de grace – a vest sent from a friend in Shanghai:

My neighbor mows the bayou because he wants to. Very good for us. He gets really vexed when he sees piles of dog shit on the bayou and he makes little signs  on little orange flags that he sticks in the ground by the piles. They have pithy sayings directed at inconsiderate dog walkers. He also made a huge sign – sort of a counter I love ducks sign that directs people to pick up their poop.

Today he was out signed. I walked through the park with Loca and Tin and saw wood blocks about 3 x 3 inches with sayings on them laying on top of dog shit piles. One said “Pet the dog, Spank the owner,” another said, “Owner doesn’t think laws apply to them,” and another said, “Stupid owner.”

Dog shit matters. When I first moved back to New Orleans in 2005, my fellow dog walkers and I were going to make tee shirts that basically said PICK UP YOUR DOG SHIT because we couldn’t believe that people would walk their dogs in plain sight and not pick up after them.

Shit happens. Shit continues to happen.

Tin picked up another cold and it is back to the aspirator 24/7 and Little Noses and lots of gurgling and kleenex going on. His ear infection is still there and so the doctor switched his antibiotics for another ten days. At least he’s eating and pooping – always the major indicators of health. But speaking of health – it amazes me how parents just cart these germ buses around – I was talking to a friend with three kids about going to the parenting center and I said I don’t want to bring Tin because he has a cold and she said, “They all have colds there.”

Then I went to go pick up the crib and two mothers were standing in the front yard and I said well you might not want to come near because Tin has a cold and they looked me dumbfounded – “Unless he is throwing up, that’s nothing.”

Wow – no wonder these kids are always sick – no quarantine – no nada – just germs to the wind.

Friends have weaned their children off the crib and have loaned it to us for Tin. So last night I brought home the new crib and when Tin got in it he jumped and jumped and jumped. He loves it! One of the crew members from the film going on in the neighborhood helped my neighbor carry it in the LaLa. I had to help my friend carrying it down a long flight of stairs at their big old uptown house – gadzooks!

The crib is most likely here for only a year, but there was something about the way it pulled the room together and made it more real last night that caused me to get up in the middle of the night with anxiety about how we are going to pay for the nanny, school, life, mortgage – GADZOOKS!

They are filming a movie at my neighbor’s house – of course they are, what better scenery than Bayou St John and the lovely old houses along the water? The name of the movie according to the crew is The Hungry Rabbit Jumps and it stars Nicholas Cage who is supposedly here filming today. Another neighbor was referring to him the other day and called him Nick. Nick? Puhlease. Give me Nicholas Cage, gifted actor, in Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas not sell out Nick who has starred in one stupid film after another and has lost all sense of being an actor in pursuit of cold hard cash.

I was talking about relationships with a friend the other day and we were talking about how people change so that we are continuously evolving and can never go back and recreate relationships from the past; all relationships have to evolve to be meaningful.

With another friend recently, one of the things that I was counseling her about is her career. She went through a life changing event in the last two years and she was lamenting that her performance at work wasn’t up to par during that period and she wanted her bosses to know that – duh is all I could tell her – but then I told her to think differently, perhaps she clung to that miserable job because she was going through a horrific time and couldn’t afford another change in her life. But now, on the other side of that enormous event, she has changed, irrevocably, and so she now understands she no longer needs to perform for them to believe she is good, she no longer needs this job that wrests out of her every available source of energy, her priorities have shifted so far to the other side that she can no longer accept what was and that maybe all of this has nothing to do with whether she did a good job as she went through a tragedy, but the real truth is that the tragic event has made her a different person. And that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the job is a bad thing.

Maybe relationships end because the couple were not evolving individually or together.

Maybe big upheavals change our mental parameters so that our priorities shift and we never return to where we were.

Maybe change is neither bad nor good, but we are different nonetheless afterwards.

Forget what was, this is what is.