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On both sides of my family are faulty hearts. Maternal side is faulty valves and Paternal side is clogged arteries necessitating stents. One of my younger brothers went in for his third stent just yesterday. It’s some scary stuff. My dad died of heart failure – perhaps a stent could have saved him. My mother died of pulmonary disease or at least that is what the death certificate says – she actually died of heart failure due to pulmonary disease.

I guess it is fitting that my family would be plagued by matters of the heart. Fitting.

I was watching parts of The Queen last night with Helen Mirren – if you haven’t seen this movie, watch it, it’s incredible as a study in the subtlety of character development. The part about Diana’s death was mesmerizing. Do you remember where you were when she died. I lived at 449 Vermont Street, and woke to go down and get the newspaper (I was at war with the delivery man), and saw the headlines and shrieked and yelled to Steve who was still sound asleep – DIANA IS DEAD! OH MY GOD!

Do you remember where you were when the first man walked on the moon – Brooklyn, with my aunt and we all ran outside into the streets where people were sitting on stoops and shouted, “WOW!”

Charles Manson murders – Riderwood Road in Atlanta.

JFK shot – Louisiana Avenue in New Orleans.

Tin was born at 1:45 pm on March 5, 2009 and I was wondering what I was thinking right at that moment. I looked at my blog. Now if you think that is a coincidence you’re not paying attention – I just wrote an article about Faubourg St. John and ended with having adopted Tin and a line from this very same Louis Armstrong’s song.

Today Sarkozy is in town and telling the U.S. they need to police the world after what happened in Moscow. Really? I thought us policing the world is what generated the ire of a thousand would be nations. I read this in Harper’s this morning, pulled from the Virginia Gazette in 1774:

Some fitter day shall crown us the
Masters of the Main,
In giving laws and freedom to subject
France and Spain,
And all the isles o’er Ocean shall
tremble and obey
The Lords, the Lords, the Lords of
North America.

Really Sarkozy is this what you’d like to see?

It’s Passover and like a lot of the last few Passovers in my life, there was a lot of talk about a seder but no actual one materialized. It’s hard to get a seder going these days. I remember in California when Jan Birnbaum had the seders at Catahoula in Calistoga – boy now that was a seder. Delicious!! In the meantime, I won’t be having the bitter herbs or the haroseh but I will be eating my matzo this year like every year.

Happy Pesach everyone, Jewish lent is almost over and the suffering will end at midnight on April 3rd!

In Turkey, when the moon is full, you open your purse and repeat three times – Fill It Up, Fill It Up, Fill It Up. Tonight, for the full moon, I sat with Tin in my lap, feeding him a bottle as we watched the full moon and the golden halo around it and said what my mother used to say to me when I was his age, “I see the moon, the moon sees me, God bless the moon, and God bless me.”

Tin, Loca and I went to the park and there was this young couple making out, nay, getting it on, right in the midst of the kids and ducks. Gadzooks! Just yesterday, two dogs were almost going at it while we were watching the Mardi Gras Indians and I overheard a woman with a French accent say, “My, even the dogs are flirting.”

Spring has sprung and I for one can attest to the fact that there is a certain slant of light, and a certain warmth in the air, and a general feeling of hoorah going on in New Orleans.

Tin ran up and down the path in City Park with his arms straight up in the air – he almost seemed to be about to break out into song “I have a song in my heart!” – we ran straight over to the lagoon where seagulls were dotting the sky, ducks were flying across to meet each other, and geese were gliding by. We sat down on the banks on the cool clover grass to watch the aviary show.

The nursery said they are having record days of sales – it’s not only spring fever – it’s a bash, a spring bash, going on around here after having the fifth coldest winter on record in New Orleans.

People ask weird stuff like where’d he come from? when they see Tin. Where does he look like he came from? I want to say. I always just say Gary, Indiana but then that always prompts people to start singing Gary, Indiana from The Music Man. I’ve got to come back with a better line like Mars, Girls are from Venus and Boys are from Mars – Right?

I was walking in the park late yesterday when we ran into one of my fellow walkers. Tin was busy being busy, going where he wanted to go and not even being cajoled to go on the path I was trying to direct him to. The guy said, “He looks like he is into everything.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“They’re self-educators,” he said. “Working their way through the world and figuring it out as they go along.”

“Not much different than me,” I said.

I had Tin on my hip early this morning when we went outside to put the recycles in the bin under the porch. He wouldn’t let go of the empty yogurt container and I was cajoling him into either dropping it himself or giving it to Mommy. Neither working. So then I stood him on the porch and was joking around with him when a woman’s voice said, “Isn’t he adorable when he smiles.”

It was the nun, in the window, but for Tin it was a voice, an Irish female voice, coming from above. I said, “Sounds like the voice of god, proof she’s a woman.”