The weather in New Orleans has been so delightful it has a lot of us scratching our heads – is it July? Last night we sat on the porch with the cool wind blowing and T almost went in and got a sweater. Meanwhile, New York is having record breaking heat wave days. What goes on?
The elections this year are about those who believe that there should be no new taxes and no larger government footprint that what exists today and those who believe that we need more taxes and more government to figure our way out of this mess. Hard to say who is right. Our own Governor Jindal is trying to balance the budget so tight so when he runs for President everyone will say look, he balanced Louisiana’s State Budget – they won’t see the trail of dead he leaves at UNO and Louisiana’s education system in general, nor will they see the huge gaping hole in our city services because Jindal has taken the path to fiscal prudence to respond to the issues at hand. As if it were that simple.
I love driving a truck in the South and especially in the Gulf South where it makes sense for me to be driving a high water vehicle with a lot of get up and go (Ford F150) – yes even in these dire gas guzzling times driving this truck makes sense. You try to evacuate in a low rider and see how far you get.
Today when I was behind another truck driver, I noticed that he had an umbrella across his gun rack. Genius.
I was thinking about a few years ago when someone close to me said, well you sound so happy in your blog, you don’t sound like you are lamenting anything. And then yesterday, when someone mentioned me not writing about the oil spill that much. I’m here to say there is a lot that doesn’t get written just like there is tons that doesn’t get uttered that goes through the minds of most people. There are the thoughts that swim and swarm in our minds, which pass fleetingly or stay obsessively, and range for me from missing my mom to remembering a slight thirty years ago. Or there are the questions and doubts that populate the periphery of my thoughts that question if what I’m doing now makes sense in the long run or I just wonder if I am still feeling the consequences of what I did and didn’t realize long ago.
I dreamt last night about someone, who was a composite of many someones and our conversation was a composite of many conversations, and I woke as if something familiar had just happened and yet I wasn’t sure if it was good, bad or neutral but it left me feeling pensive and unresolved as if I was about to have a case of the Eli’s Coming or I was about to cross over from my melancholy into a more transcendental place – hard to say.
A long time friend who refers to me as a Polyanna only knows this, I put my best face forward, my game face, but read between the many lines on my face and you will see shades of doubt, paranoia, pessimism, fear that can’t obscure happiness, joy, love, confidence but certainly colors it. And all of it bears telling, but most times there is not enough time to dwell on what is between the lines. A lot gets left on the cutting room floor.
The pediatrician said that Tin’s language would come via word explosions and so they are, to date:
Moo
Quack
zzzzz (Bee)
Arf Arf
Buck Buck
Baaaa
Good girl
Duck
Heidi
Bayou
Mama (T)
TeTe (T’s mother)
Mimi (my mother)
Cup
Silent Fish Sound
I spoke to a friend in Croatia yesterday who said he was keeping abreast of the BP oil spill by reading my blog but that I don’t post updates often enough to keep him informed. I thought to myself afterwards, well that’s good because that means that nothing is happening because if it were, I’d know and write about it, right?
This morning I learned the tar balls have made their way our way. The worst news yet. Even Lake Ponchartrain is getting tar balls. That’s right. The oil is here folks and it is in our oyster beds, where our shrimp are, where our crabs are, where our fin fish are.
Yesterday, around 3PM, I grew melancholy, by evening I was feeling depressed – it was a matter of having been sick the whole holiday weekend and it now coming to an end.
This morning my depression sunk lower and it was a matter of having been optimistic we might be able to skate through the BP oil spill mess and now the optimism has come to an end.
The nanny was here today even though it’s a holiday and so we took advantage and stole away to see a movie – only there weren’t any movies really playing because it’s New Orleans and we are last to get new releases if we get them at all. Karate Kid, maybe. We opted for Sex and the City Part 2 – yes, even though it was panned by everyone and then some. We just wanted a mindless movie and it delivered.
On some level somewhere the movie made me think about this one overarching emotion – fear. How most of what we do in life is based on fear – based on fear that we might have changed, based on fear that we have not changed, based on fear that the person we love may change, or hasn’t changed enough, or based on fear that our life as we know it right now could change, or hasn’t changed.
Some friends of ours are back in town after being gone for a year, we had them over for an intimate 4th of July with a couple of other friends. One sent a note that it was great to see us. I wrote back, imagine the last time we saw you was at your house and we did not have a son. Pretty weird.
Time goes by so fast. How many 4th of Julys have you had in your life? And yet, we seem to hardly have time for the ones we love, the things we love, even for loafing and for ignoring all that we love.
But I digress, it’s fear that made me think about a lot of things this afternoon. I feared I would never have a child, and now I have Tin. I feared a lot of things in my life, and sometimes I took a risk, and sometimes I took a calculated risk to get to what I think I needed, wanted, could not live without. All of that fear brought me here.
You might ask yourself right now as you are reading this – she got all that from watching Sex and the City Part 2? And you’d be right in thinking I think too much. I’m afraid it’s true.
Was it Emerson who said that the whole world exists in your own backyard? I can’t remember. I’ve been picking up Ebony magazine because twice there have been cover articles that caught my eye. One was on adoption, and the other was on Prince. What’s interesting is that the women appear to me to be of all shapes and sizes, unlike your typical InStyle where everyone is a waif.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how a family is together. When we were young, we had no scheduled play, no lessons to go to, not much of anything except the summers were lazy. We’d get up and hang out around the breakfast table for long periods of time and then lay around or play outside. We didn’t do much of anything and that is how best I remember summers – lazy and long.
Yesterday, Tin woke late and we were out of eggs after making blue deviled eggs, so we all headed to Huevos to eat breakfast together. Tin ate a big plate of poached eggs with tamales and creme fraiche. He ate more than T or I did. Family brunch, nice way to spend the morning. We came back and laid around on the sofas and Tin played up a storm.
I came across this poem in the last Ebony I picked up:
Summer Brunch
and where
do your parents
summer?
she asked
him.the front porch
he replied.Reuben Jackson
Tin has a thing for good looking gals. I thought it was just him but then I read that children show a definite preference for beautiful faces. Yesterday, when my niece walked in the room with us to wake him up from his nap, he instantly put his game face on – the serious one, when he is put in an unfamiliar situation. But then he started becoming the little charmer, the flirt, as soon as he got a good look at his cousin’s face.
Children know surface beauty intuitively, but the broader picture takes skills that only age will develop.
As we grow old … the beauty steals inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My niece came over last night to pitch me on Cutco knives. I had to smile when she called to make the appointment since my two older brothers sold Cutco knives when I was a youngster. One of them even, if I remember correctly, managed a Cutco knife store. There were always Cutco knives in our drawers naturally. And the truth is they do last. I was still cutting tomatoes with mom’s Cutco knives when I’d go over to her house for our meals together.
Cutco knives are a like a madeline in my imagination – the very name brings me back to my childhood, my brothers young adults (very slender and dark), my parents getting rid of all their other knives to make way for Cutco cutlery in all shapes and sizes.
While I listened to my niece work through her sales pitch, I blew my nose three or four times (still working through this cold) and couldn’t help but think of my mom, her drawer full of Cutco knives (all looking almost brand new having been through the dishwasher a zillion times), our life and how it has been so wide and yet so quick, and I felt the circle, the one that comes from generations blurring into generations and suddenly being aware of where you are in the life cycle.
I came upstairs after and wrote a delayed condolence note to a friend who recently lost her mother. We were kids. Then adults. And now she and I are becoming the older generation. Scary.