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Tin and I were walking into Elmwood Fitness yesterday for his fourth and last installment of swim lessons before we leave for the sunny beaches of Europe and a handsome black man headed to his car stopped and looked at us as we passed. Just passed him, he said, “You never see a white woman carrying a black baby.” I just smiled at him and said, “You do now.” He then said, “He yours?” and I said, “100%.”

This is better than the last woman who asked me if I am Tin’s grandmother. I’ll take the black white confusion over the age one any day.

Tin has always had a very serious pensive look and luckily as the months have come and gone with us together that furrowed brow is seldom visible anymore. But he can still give you a game face, usually in a situation that he is unfamiliar with. But the other day I took him to the hospital with me to see my aunt who had just had back surgery and he only had that look for a moment and then he started hamming it up and of course, getting the attention he has become used to.

I was writing to a friend about the power of just learning to be, which is something that only children really know how to do and for us adults, all cluttered with worries of mortgages and careers and world events outside of our control, our furrowed brow seems to just knit tighter and tighter and we forget how to just be. Well I’m not sure I ever knew to be honest. Although I have to believe that in my childhood I just ran around without the world on my shoulders much like Tin does now and I had nothing to worry about because my dad and mom and older brothers were pretty much always there looking out for me and also my aunts and my grandmothers who looked after me in the summers when my parents traveled alone.

We’re getting ready to go to Spain for our vacation, to enjoy the Cadiz coast and to try to unfurl from the tight knit brow and the hunched shoulders and the carpal tunnel from texting and mousing and the way all this stress seems to work its way right into our gut making our daily interactions only a shadow of what they could be.

Last night, Tin had his last bottle on the porch and I told him it was his last bottle and he seemed to savor every drop of it. He actually let me hold him like a baby and look into his eyes – something he hasn’t done in a while as he has become a wiggle worm. Then after he was in bed, T and I sat on the porch and looked at the light reflecting in the water from the houses across the bayou.

We were chatting about performing what Jews call mitzvahs – doing something nice for someone or an animal other than your own – and I said I felt that I have been wound so tight lately that I have gotten off the path of trying to do something for someone every day. The subject had come up from a book Tatjana was reading about teaching your children to save – children need three jars to put money in: one for immediate pleasure, one for long-term, and one for giving. T said earlier in the day she had stopped and let someone else in line ahead of her and the person was very grateful. But I couldn’t recall having done one nice thing for anyone lately and I felt bad about it.

I’ve been clouded with worry lately, almost unaware of my surroundings. Worries are clouds that should pass through our mind. If we are living right then we are taking time to meditate and to let these clouds appear and disappear. It’s when we are out of balance that the clouds get stuck, hover and obscure our vision, our way. And it’s not so healthy to wait till you have vacation to work on clearing the clouds out, it’s a practice that requires daily toil just like everything else that is rewarding in life. But it’s a practice that I forget to do.

What worries me to the point where I don’t have anything to give back to those around me who have less, who only require a smile sometimes from a stranger to set their day off on a better note? When I look at these worries in a different light they seem so puny and so fleeting. Looking at Tin go about his day, simply being, is lesson enough that I lately have strayed a long way from the simple path of living, of being.

The meaning of life is to live it. Not to just do it like Nike says. Nike is the Dow. Living is the Tao. There’s a big difference.

Today is the Bastille Day celebration over on Ponce de Leon and all the merchants are putting on the dog. But for me this is a somber occasion, because last year, on July 11th on Saturday’s Bastille Day celebration Tatjana and I were enjoying ourselves to the max, having margaritas and dancing to the sound of the Creole String Beans while T’s mother sat in Fortier Park speaking to a neighbor. On our way home around midnight, I got a call from my mother that she needed to go to the emergency room because she was having heart palpitations.

I jumped in my truck and got there as she was literally crawling out of her skin and I got her stuff together and had to literally carry her down to the truck past the Hondurans who hung out on the steps drinking their cheap whiskey. One of them, trying to help me, was actually blocking my way and I screamed for him to leave me alone, but he followed us to the truck and in his drunken slurred Spanish said, “No te mueres Patsy, no te mueres!”

But mom did die, several months later.

And if I had known then what I know now, I’d have tried to hold onto those moments in the emergency room where we were till 8 the next morning trying to get her heart stabilized, where I could have said more than, “It’s going to be all right, mom.”

I’ll never forget being half curled up in a ball in that metal chair with a curtain around the bed as a makeshift room, listening to the woman in the next room speaking to her mother who was dying of cancer and couldn’t speak, while my own mother just looked at me with wide open eyes, smiling, and saying, “thank you” repeatedly. I think a lot about her at that moment because the last time we had been in a life or death situation like that, where she had tubes going in and out of her was about eight years earlier, and she had called me over to say something, but she couldn’t hardly speak, and I leaned in real close and she whispered, “I thank god every day for you.”

And now I say the same thing to Tin. And I miss my mom more than ever today as I think back to what seemed like just yesterday when she was a phone call away.

UNO announced yet another round of layoffs today – really? – how much more could they cut? Don’t ask the question if you don’t want to know the answer. $14 million cut out of the budget that was already reduced to nothing in the last round of layoffs. Question is – can this university survive Jindal’s bid for the presidency?

UNO Chancellor Tim Ryan

One of the real emotional issues I’ve had to battle with the last few days is the sense of not having control of my destiny and that has been manifest in disparate observations that I’ve cobbled together. One example of which is I bought this house with two incomes and set out a remodel that was within budget reach, but in the blink of an eye, I became one income and the remodel cost tripled due to a post-Katrina premium. Then once in the house I ran into a familiar friend, the addition was not attached to the house the way an appraisal could take it into account so the appraisals I was getting were way too low for what was already equity in the house. So I had to take out a first mortgage and a line of credit to refinance. At the same time as all of that was happening I hit a headwind called the economy and year upon year brought considerably less input for the same highly escalated output. Basically I was screwed.

I chose to look at it this way, every day I spent in the LaLa was a day I enjoyed and enjoy it I would and will and do. But still the worries of more headwind ahead and uncertainty have hovered like a bad penny in my mindspace, crowding out my joie de vivre at times, like recently. So when I began to see tellltale signs that the economy was slowing down, I started getting nervous again. And when my friends were all taking advantage of the ridiculously low mortgage rates and refinancing at 3.75% and changing from a 30 year fixed to a 15 year on their mortgages and I couldn’t participate because it would jack up my mortgage by $600 a month and it would be neigh impossible to get a favorable appraisal in this new regulatory climate, I was overwrought with where I found myself at this juncture.

Then my brother showed up with some brotherly advice from his mortgage broker days – and so yesterday I added a small sum to my monthly payment and now my 30 year fixed has been reduced to a 25 year fixed. And in the next few years when the line of credit is gone, I’ll add a little more and bring it down to a 15 year fixed. So by the time I am 65 years old, my house will be paid off. That was all I wanted, a little comfort in knowing I could retire.

Alas, this undertaking gave me a feeling of empowerment and a doable plan. And I am a woman who likes a plan.

Starting the day with a walk through the park with the dogs is the best way to hold the demons at bay – yes this is another day in paradise complete with all the stress that accompanies the other days but today as Lena Horne said, “It’s not the burden that wears you down, it’s how you carry it.” So Zen dropping #72 from the Tao te Ching to begin this Thursday:

When they lose their sense of awe,
people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
they begin to depend upon authority.

Therefore the Master steps back
so that people won’t be confused.
He teaches without a teaching,
so that people will have nothing to learn.

With the envelope figuratively at my temple I must return again to this one wonderous fact – who matters, not what – we are living through some interesting times – right in the thick of rapid developments, considerable game changers, epic strains that require heroic solutions, and uncertainty – don’t forget uncertainty – but buckled into this roller coaster ride comes facts that haven’t changed since first recorded history and those are: a) if you have someone who loves you, they have your back (read: they bring you a dozen roses when you are on the ledge); b) your child’s smile is a beacon that cast light on your troubled mind and makes the hoary shadows puny and ridiculous; c) anything in your life not made of flesh and blood is 99.9% expendable and not worth the stress.

It’s amazing with all the progress we have made, these are central tenets that have remained constant and bullet proof.

Friends of mine in California said that they used to know a child who they called Rotten Rachel. Rotten Rachel was a holy terror of misery and then suddenly she turned 14 and became a delightful young adult and has grown up to be a person you would want to know. No one knows why she was a terror or why when most kids are becoming a terror she became nice. It’s a puzzle.

Ruby was walking by yesterday and stopped to see Tin. I was flying out the door to go talk to a friend about my 1900000th nervous breakdown. Tin picked up his flute (that he actually was able to blow for the first time yesterday – a product of learning to blow in swimming lessons) and he looked as if he wanted to serenade this little girl who used to like nothing more than to hit him upside the head. So while Mommy was entering the whirling blades of anxiety, these two munchkins seemed to be finding their groove.

Today was a day for having a Come to Jesus with myself. What, why, and when? were the pertinent questions circling my mind. The answers are out there but I was clawing at the walls trying to find them and suddenly my brother called out of the blue and asked if I could have lunch. So I went to lunch and it was just what the doctor ordered, I bounced all my what, why and when’s off of him and his responses put me back to that zen state of mind that I needed to find – because the answer to what is so what, the answer to why is why not, the answer to when is whenever?

He also had a belated birthday gift for me that went a long way in capping all of these sentiments – it says simply:

Live Well
Laugh Often
Love Much

The days leading up to us leaving for our vacation are like walking on fire – I’m not sure I have what it takes to make it without exploding into a million pieces. The truth is I’m toast – just done with all the getting and spending where we lay waste our powers. I’m ready to find myself again because I’ve gotten lost in everyone else’s agenda and certainly not my own.

In yoga the other day Michele dedicated our practice to embracing who you are and being who you are. In a funny conversation with a source yesterday, he was saying, “We all follow the Dow,” but for some reason I thought he was saying, “We all follow the Tao.” And so I kept asking the Tao te Ching or the Dow of Wall Street? And we had a good hearty laugh. But I wonder why we are not following the Tao in lieu of Wall Street. Don’t more answers reside there?

#73
The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing.
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.

Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn’t let a thing slip through.