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My cardiologist never called me back even though he put me through the paces of all these tests. Come to find out he was waiting for the end of my monitoring my heart for 30 days, and I had to confess I sent the damn thing back after only 10 days. I said it gave me more anxiety to think about my heart beats and monitor it than it did not to. I’m not sure his office understood. But the nurse did give me a quick overview of my tests – arteries unclogged, blood work – good cholesterol very good, bad cholesterol borderline – she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but something is working for you but now you have to start watching the bad cholesterol – 203 when they like to see under 200.

I came home and realized that the days of eggs and butter are over. Damn!

A while back I was up at some friends’ cabin in the Sierra and I professed to have led an unconventional life having grown up in hotels in many countries to a father with gypsy in his blood and a mother who was willing to suspend her disbelief. But my friend relieved me of own fantasy and reminded me that I was married and middle class and there was little about me the resembled the unconventional. What could I say?

In the same stroke of friendly patter, most people who knew my mother called her a free spirit and me by association, a wild child. Tsk tsk, I said to all that, I am and was never as wild as I thought I might be given the responsibility that always befell me.

So this Thanksgiving when we decided to do nothing at first, me still in mourning over my mother and this being the first anniversary of her death, and then realizing this was Tin’s first Thanksgiving here with us, a change of heart, and suddenly zowie – 17 adults and 3 kids later – we are having turkey day here at the LaLa, only it’s not turkey and the fixings, it’s Greek and I mean Greek cuisine.

So at lunch when my friend said she was going to make some turkey, sweet potatoes, and some stuffing and invited me to steal away later in the day and have it afterward, I looked at her like she was crazy – I chose Greek! But I could tell my friend was willing to play along with this charade, but in reality she would have chosen turkey.

Does that make me unconventional. Most likely not, last I looked and chalked up my experiences – I seemed more like a cliché than a bohemian.

Before when parents would tell me they never saw movies anymore, I didn’t have a clue, now I know. I went from being a movie whore to being movie deprived except for Netflix. But today we ran to see The Social Network and found out it has left New Orleans and so we ended up watching Burlesque – which we gave a 7 on a scale of one to ten.

Is it me or is there more moss on the trees in New Orleans than normal? Uptown, midtown, downtown moss is thick on the oaks.

My mother always saw the world through rose colored glasses and that is what kept her sane because she could not suffer reality. I always thought I took a sharp, clear view of the world but then at 45 when my eyesight deteriorated and I couldn’t read anything and I couldn’t remember anything I realized my focus was not as crisp as all that. I went to the eye doctor and he prescribed new glasses and I asked how often I had to wear them and he said, “Anytime you want to see.” Grrrr.

So I wear them to work and to read but the rest of the time I meander through the world seeing it through soft focus as he indicated the state of my sight. So this morning while I was walking though the park, amidst that welcoming quiet that only holidays bring (no traffic, no cars, no people, hardly a dog), I noticed the lagoons were low and so still that you could see every colored leaf and puffy cloud reflected on the surface. We turned a corner and behind a tree a white egret stood poised for flight and when Heidi made a move towards it, it flew, wings stretched out almost as wide as Heidi is tall.

Then we saw a white errant duck from the cluster that was released irrationally into the bayou careening with the brown ducks and I thought to myself, you don’t even know you are different as the duck chuked back and forth along with the others. As we rounded another corner with a dense grove of trees, tucked in next to the walkway were four swans, three white and one black, all grooming modestly in their cove. Their color stood out stark against the still dark water. Vibrant and breathtaking.

We saw a couple of our fellow park friends – the guy who comes and does sit ups and reads his paper on the bench while he talks on the phone, the guy who walks with his weights, the girl who runs now without the black lab who passed a year or two ago, and we saw Loca’s arch enemy #1, the dog she loves to hate, the one with the oversized pink ears. And we saw the woman who dated a guy who was interested in me a while back; she always wears glasses when she walks and it got me thinking.

What would I see if I actually was wearing my glasses?

A friend of mine is turning 47 next week, and I told her when she turned 45 that it was all downhill because losing your ability to read without glasses is a real pain. She’s been going through the usual issues at 47, loss of sight, loss of memory, loss of patience and the other day in an email string about her birthday celebration I reminded her I told her it was all downhill at 45, except what I didn’t tell her is the ride down is what we spend all that time climbing to the top for – weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

The turkeys are safe at this house this year as we prepare to have our Greek fest on the bayou on Thanksgiving day. The weather is so wonderful it’s hard to believe that it is around the end of November and we are even talking about Thanksgiving but there you have it – the every day mystery of living in the Gulf South where weather is usually good.

Our big dish will be fish, prepared simply in the Greek method. So no turkeys have died for this dinner (that we know of). But it’s amazing that in starting to look at Greek cuisine at how suddenly you find yourself staring down a menu that is actually mouth watering – meat pies, spanakopita, pilaf, fish with potatoes and tomatoes, oysters with pine nuts, chicken skewers, baklava, pita bread, Greek salad, cheese burek and shrimp with oregano in cilantro oil.

I say Opa! – let the festivities begin! – (btw I looked up the word “opa” and the definition said it is a word Greeks use all the time for no apparent reason.)

By all accounts I’m a bull according to the horoscope that is – but a lot of times you could call me a bull the way I move through life (sort of like in a china closet) because I just have a tendency to go full on till I drop. I’m also a boar according to the Chinese horoscope and that is pretty much who I am as well, sort of happy as a pig to roll around and feel good whenever I can. But in reality, if I had to pick an animal I most associate with it would be the elephant and certainly its manifestation in Ganesha – the sort of trickster who likes to push through to solutions while at the same time I’m the one who set up the obstacle to begin with – sort of like being in your own trick bag.

But lately I’m a bear. I have been crawling into bed at 9 and am legitimately asleep by 9:30 and I can’t get up until after 7 in the morning. I wake feeling like I need a few more hours sleep. T says it’s the weather changing, but I feel like it is almost PTS of sorts. The need to hibernate is overwhelming me because it is keeping me from wanting to be out right now enjoying this beautiful weather – see it’s not winter here, it’s spring (at least it feels that way – it was 80 degrees by 8 am) and I should be tiptoeing in the tulips instead of slumbering in the pine forest.

I can’t bear being a bear but it seems my body has its own will and now the will to sleep and rest is tantamount to all else. So I have to yield to the bear in me.

I lost something on Saturday and it was important to me because it was a piece of my mom’s jewelry. I moaned about and everyone had a pithy response such as – let it go, it was meant to be lost, it’s not important. But it was important to me because while I was wearing it my family (her side of the family) all recognized it as hers and remembered very clearly her wearing it. And I told them that it didn’t look nearly as good on me as it did on her, even though my friend is convinced I’m channeling my mother.

Saturday was very important to me because at my mom’s funeral the usual ugliness arose and I really wanted to have a memorial that was beautiful and sweet. And we did have that but then at the end of the day I lost this thing, which had me disturbed because in a way I had felt like mom had left me her jewelry in trust, to care for it as she had, and in losing it, I had not been paying attention.

This afternoon, on a whim, I got down on my hands and knees and searched the truck and I found it right under my seat where I had already looked a few times. Today, I am grateful for finding the piece of jewelry, for my mother giving it to me, and for the memory attached to it of my mother wearing it and being beautiful. And I’m also grateful for Saturday and having had the chance to honor her memory in peace and harmony surrounded by people I love and who love me.

Thanks!

It’s November 22nd and the cheese I unwrapped yesterday said it expires on this day. Which got me to thinking about from this moment on the end of the year will be here before we can blink our collective eyes. This week is Thanksgiving, then we are having our neighborhood Bayou Blunderbus put on by my neighbor where everyone costumes and rows down the bayou to a cook out down the way, then we have a house guest for a week, then a party here for T’s students as an end of year goodbye, then there is a birthday party where Evan Christopher is playing, then there is a family reunion at my house, and then are eight days of Hanukkah, followed by Tin’s first trip to Zagreb with T, and then it’s Christmas and then New Year and hey guess, what 2011!

So I suggest everyone try this exercise right this very minute. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and hold it in for the count of three. Exhale fully. And remember as you hurry on to your next thing:

We miss the point, the whole way along: It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.     Alan Watts

No really – it’s warm and sunny and beautiful outside and it doesn’t feel like fall at all. We had a glorious walk through the park this morning and even the weather for Thanksgiving looks like it is going to be wonderful – a mere 80 degrees – we’re thinking we’ll move our party out to the bayou as it was starting small and has now burgeoned to over 17 adults and a few kids. These events have a way of snowballing.

The main thing is this year there will be no turkey, no stuffing, no pies except for meat pies as we are building our feast around Greece and all the food will be Greek cuisine. As the menu has taken shape it is beginning to sound yummier and yummier.

Hale to spring time in fall in New Orleans!