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It’s Monday again, and I don’t mean that in any sort of dispirited fashion, it’s just that Mondays have become so typical in that they are the days that you race into work and plunge headlong into your projects and yet just minutes before you leapt out of the gate you were reticent to start the toil.

My neighbor was walking her dog which started out with her dog running at a clip around one half of the bayou, and then as they rounded the bend, my neighbor was carrying her dog. I saw her at the tail end and she said, “This happens every time, he runs the first half and lays down and needs to be carried for the second half.” She looked down at the dog whose tongue was touching the concrete, “Can’t you balance yourself out?”

Mondays seem to suck the energy out of the beginning of the week because the work is all just sitting there awaiting your return to it and it seems overwhelming on Monday and there is a need to tame the beast, and then as the days come and go, so too goes our energy (read: desire) to complete all the tasks at hand.

So for today, this first day of the rest of my life – is there time for additional reading? is there time for physical activity? is there time for reflection? No? Then make time.

After a big walk through the park this morning with the dogs and Tin, we went to Parkway Bakery & Tavern for lunch to meet friends who wanted to see the open house on the bayou. The house turns out to be accurately described as a Gentilly house (a neighbor described it) with a new reduced price tag of $299K. It was $475K. But that’s another story, apparently the home owners paid around $300K for it, similar to what I paid for the LaLa but that was five years ago, and since then everything has been on a slippery slope to nowhere.

But I digress, I was writing about Parkway and how Obama and his family picked our humble poboy restaurant and bar to treat himself to some typical New Orleans cooking. I split a Reuben (not typical) with T and wondered just what it was that Mr. President ate for lunch. There is also something nice about this place now that it was graced by Mr. Yes We Can.

I thought about him and what is on his plate for real, and I don’t know, but it really takes my appetite away. Tea Party noodle heads, Republican wantabes, and Democrats flailing in the soup. Geez Louise. What’s a smart man to do? Maureen Dowd continues to skewer him for his reticence to roar like a lion, but that’s not his style. Meanwhile, the country is reeling from an economy I don’t  truly believe is going to get back on track – instead I believe we are going to go through some major adjustments.

So nows Mayor Bloomberg is getting on the stump, because he is rich and he is kind to Wall Street that doesn’t want to digest what Obama has articulated – that Wall Street has bled the country dry of its talent pool by attracting the best and brightest and luring them to untold riches, which has turned the United States on its head – California is up in the air as New York is sinking from its weight in gold and the rest of the country is just teetering on the brink except down here in this poor and disenfranchised city of New Orleans – the city that care forgot – or the holy trinity land of Katrina, BP and the Saints.

What’s a smart man to do when he is in the midst of a complicated unraveling of everything we know to be good and solid – making more money than God and leaving the poor and disenfranchised to fend for themselves? Maybe Obama should have had lunch at the cafeteria at UNO, so he could watch the real collateral damage of our runaway freight train economy. And as our city leaders pontificate about what it takes to be a first class (read: ideal city), like my neighbor said to me today – “We don’t want to be the city they have in mind; we don’t want to be that [or in my words, we don’t want to be dat!].”

On my block of the bayou I have fabulous neighbors, who have become great friends as well, but even down the block and on the court, and across the bayou there are more of the same. Last night, we walked over to a neighbor who has a tradition of holding a break – fast after Yom Kippur, and there we found once again the company of friends. The table was filled with delicious food and the side table heavy with desserts of all kinds. Tin played the piano and ate copious amounts of applesauce and cake and we talked about how we had spent our day in thought and what we hoped to achieve in the New Year.

The theme this year was the art of being and moving out of the realm of the art of doing – Nike, you are so yesterday with Just Do It, the Jewish logo this year is Just Be It.

Everyone needs a wife – this has been my motto for a long time since for many many many years I have been a wife and I could see how you would benefit from having one in your life. Today, T was my wife, having shopped and prepared the meal to break my fast – Afghanistan lamb with noodles and Turkish green beans – can I get a big AMEN.

Ideal Cities

Ideal cities are cities where the neighbors
play soul music all night long & don’t care

who they bother because who doesn’t like Holy Ghost
or Loose Booty? Ideal cities have at least one drunk lady

outside the liquor store mornings, who asks you to hold
her cigarette so she can lean in to touch your baby.

In ideal cities, the pharmacist knows your prescriptions
by heart. In ideal cities your neighbor sells pot to the cops

for a living, though you’ve never seen him do it & most days
he wears a caftan to glue rhinestones on the cement frogs

in his yard. On trash night in ideal cities your other neighbors
swap stories in the alleys. Ideal cities

have margins that aren’t pretty or bleak
and are without proper representation

but have no grievances. My ideal city
has a wish list written on the back

of an envelope scrap, an ATM slip.
My ideal city is peripheral and claims

uneven sidewalks. In the ideal city
my neighbor is a taxi driver.

My neighbor is at sea.
My neighbor thinks

his house is haunted
while his wife’s away

on business. My neighbor
gives a robber a glass

of Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry
and a hug. In the ideal city my neighbors

are a multi-generational
family & one guy

who puts chairs
in the street

to save a spot
for our moving truck.

ERIKA MEITNER

Ideal Cities
Harper Perennial

Tin is cutting both of his canine teeth so he went to bed in a whimper and woke up with a cry and has been unable to be consoled. We see those two big old teeth coming down and didn’t need the drool and tears to tell us what was up. So I started my fast day worried about him and then came up to my office to begin in earnest.

But actually my morning was even more rocky,  as I had woke at 4AM with a bad attack of anxiety that encompassed everything from mounting bills in a diminishing earnings environment to my friend’s losing her 45 year old nephew to a heart attack on Thursday. I tossed and turned and tossed and turned and ended up finally going back to sleep and waking in a stupor late enough for Tin to have gotten up with his crying.

Up in my office, in my inner sanctum where I was to set the day off with meditations, I began the process that has now become a ritual for me – the reading of past Yom Kippur writings. I actually read through a lot of stuff – I read my Writer’s book that I started a long time ago where I make entries about writing and being a writer. My golden nugget find today was where at the very beginning of this book which began in 1990, now 20 years ago, I ask myself when I will feel comfortable calling myself a writer, and then use a quote that implies the answer: Writers have to write. So I thought about my blog that began now only five years ago and think about the times when I have thought about giving it up but almost like an addict had to come back to it time and again.

I read through a journal about the break up of my first marriage where I was in the throes of separating property that I now know was the currency of our emotions, and then the beginning and breakup of my second marriage which only lasted five months, and then the beginnings of my third marriage. I also read through my journal about the affair I had and my sessions with E, which helped scrape the scales from my eyes.

Now here I am back again seeing E and this time it is to take it all to the next level not to repair collateral damage. This time I want to see in T more than I expect from her and I want her to see in me a person larger than she imagines.

And then I read through my Yom Kippur journals – do you know what one of my dreams was last year on September 28, 2009?

“To raise a happy and healthy child.”

My entry last Yom Kippur begins: “My worst fear that my mom would get sick and start dying over a protracted period is in play.”

I come to this year ready to begin again with all my wisdom and scars – open heart, open mind, open arms.

There is an article in the New York Times about a new modern version of the High Holy Day prayer book for Conservative Jews. In this new version, they are attempting to be all inclusive, not a traditional Jewish way of going about things. In this new version, in the Yizkor service (for the deceased) they have a prayer for a deceased partner, and they also have a prayer for parents who were hurtful – go figure. Interestingly enough my schism with the faith revolved around my deceased father and going to the synagogue to say Kaddish for him (the prayer for a parent or child) and because I am a woman, I couldn’t be counted as a quorum of ten men.

I don’t know – I went to a conservative synagogue where there was a woman with a harp, and the books went normally instead of backwards, and no one wore a yamulka, and at the end of the day, stripped of all the iconic elements that I knew, it was not all that meaningful in my life. Hence the reinventing of my faith – keep what’s best and discard the rest – hence, the half-day fast day, etc.

Even though it is probably odd to say Yom Tov (good day) to someone on Yom Kippur, a somber occasion, in the United States, a lot of people say Good Yom Tov, even more weird. But even weirder still, a friend was listening to the shofar link that I posted and said while she was listening, Pete Seeger began singing Good Night Irene in the background on her iTunes and she said, “it actually worked,” – that’s the musician in her speaking. I told her there are no coincidences just weirdness.

I got this off of Wikipedia:

Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement, is one of the holiest days of the year for Jews. Its central themes are atonement and repentance. Jews traditionally observe this holy day with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogue services. Yom Kippur completes the annual period known in Judaism as the High Holy Days (or sometimes “the Days of Awe”)… According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person’s fate for the coming year into a book, the Book of Life, on Rosh Hashanah, and waits until Yom Kippur to “seal” the verdict. During the Days of Awe, a Jew tries to amend his or her behavior and seek forgiveness for wrongs done against God and against other human beings. The evening and day of Yom Kippur are set aside for public and private petitions and confessions of guilt. At the end of Yom Kippur, one considers one’s self absolved by God. … As one of the most culturally significant Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur is observed by many secular Jews who may not observe other holidays —for many secular Jews the High Holidays are the only recurring times of the year in which they attend synagogue,^[1]—causing synagogue attendance to soar, and almost two-thirds fast.

I have a friend who was raised watching DVDs on Yom Kippur. Nutty. I was raised going to the synagogue the eve and day of Yom Kippur and fasting along with all the other people who get really bad breath from not even drinking water for 24 hours. But of all the Jewish Holidays, it’s amazing this is the one I still hold the most dear. Not Hanukkah, or Rosh Hashana, or Sukot, but Yom Kippur – the day god opens the book of life and decides who shall live or die, who shall bear children or not, etc.

Like other Jewish customs, I’ve made this one my own. I fast, but only till the afternoon; a friend said it sounds like a Pete Fountain chant, your half-fast fast day, but it’s a day I keep to myself, meditate, and think about the year past and the year ahead and try to set myself on course.

Although I’ve gone from a 24 hour fast to more like a 10PM to 2PM fast, I’m now going to have to use my office to for my observance as I don’t go to a synagogue nor belong to one. I listened to the shofar on YouTube for Rosh Hashanna to start the High Holy Days and will listen to it Saturday evening to end them. I have started a tradition of joining my friends across the bayou for a break-fast in the evening.

This is my new fangled Yom Kippur and my message to all y’all:

May you be inscribed into the book of life for a very good year.

A friend called and said her widowed father is getting married – what the hell, he has such a short time left on this earth – go for it. It’s been months since his wife died. Similarly, another friend is lamenting that after two years her father wants to remarry, she said her mother is not even cold yet (two years?). Another friend tells me her husband will have a date for her funeral.

I say when you’re dead, you’re dead, life is for the living.