My Russian friend is want to say hope dies last and that is at least one note to end this year on.
A Turkish friend sent this message:
Umutlarn gerçege dönüstügü, saglk ve mutlulugun eksik olmadigi, basari dolu bir yeni yil dileriz
Roughly meaning may your dreams come true; where there is health and happiness, the success of a new year has hope.
For my Spanish friends, Prospero Año y Felicidad.
Happy New Year to all and may all your dreams come true.
I walked through the park this morning with the dogs and along the way marveled at the pelicans diving for food beak first in the bayou, the cormorants sitting on the naked tree and all of my fellow dog walkers who were out before the rains. The air was thick with humidity and it felt like it was New Year’s eve for some reason – friends and neighbors greeted me from near and far HAPPY NEW YEAR! Indeed, I thought, Happy New Year.
I ran into a fellow walker who said “I feel the bad easing” and I said I know what you mean, but it’s also I feel more interested in counting my blessings than adding up my woes. He agreed saying that he had gotten to an age where friends are dying left and right and he wonders about his own aging. I said tell me about it. I thought I’d end this year on a high note but having your first love dying as the year is ending is no way to end a year.
I ran into another friend who said they would launch a mini boat off the Magnolia Bridge with a rocket ship fireworks show at midnight – I said I hope to hell I can stay awake for that – and she said, “That’s why I’m praying for rain.”
All in all it’s been a year to remember, a year to move on from, a year to hold dear as you say goodbye to it.
I could never get used to excessive Christmas present mornings – it just isn’t in my cards, but I could very well get used to this week between Christmas and New Years, where you have not quite finished nor quite begun. I started with a quick dog walk around the bayou, not our usual long one through the park because I wanted to get to an earlier yoga class, which was divine.
T and I went to the Quarter after to see an exhibit by Michael Pajon. I found his card on the ground in City Park one morning and he has intrigued me ever since. Two things compelled me to his exhibit – it was part of Prospect 1.5 and it was in the Madame John’s Legacy museum on Dumaine Street in the Quarter. He does very interesting collage that I like. The rest of the exhibits were from recently transplanted artists who have come to New Orleans post-Katrina. The building itself was fabulous and part of an architecture now lost to the Quarter, so it is a fine specimen that remains.
We had stopped first at the Golden Lantern for a bloody mary and then after went to Italian Barrel for a delicious lunch. T had her Parma panini and I had pappardelle and porcini. Yum.
It’s in the upper sixties here today and might even have reached the 70’s with a humid air that is thick but pleasant.
What a lovely way to spend the afternoon.
There is nothing more romantic than a Mexican love song, no? Watch this video, beautiful.
Then again, how about an American love song by none other than Stevie Wonder? Watch this video.
If you just want to watch someone amazing, watch Aretha looking gloriously beautiful singing a song written by Wonder.
Here’s a video I could watch over and over, Evan (or EBAN as Tin yells his name every time he hears a clarinet playing).
If I got started with the Louis Armstrong videos we’d be here all day. What a wonderful world.
I read this obit this morning and smiled. What a great way to be remembered – making a killer stuffed mirliton. That is an obituary fit for a New Orleanian. We could all be so lucky. There is a guide in the New York Times this morning that says you should back all of your photos up to the cloud like Google’s Picasa – after my computer blow outs of 2010, I think it is safe to say the cloud might be where it’s at.
No one showed up for meditation last night so I drove home and on the way stopped at the book store looking for Possessed, a book about a woman who studied Russian Literature, but they were sold out. Yesterday was a collection of getting rid of the bulk around the house – the Lance table from Design within Reach that actually didn’t fit anywhere in the house because I bought it before I moved into the LaLa and then the space here loomed larger than life. I also got rid of two cases of champagne glasses I had purchased for parties in California – I actually bought antique champagne glasses when I moved back to New Orleans at an antique store on Magazine Street, which I use more often than those and so they were just taking up valuable space in the laundry room. I wrote a letter to my first love with photos of Tatjana and Tin and me and sent them on with a friend who is going to visit him bedside. My letter began with, “how do you bridge two decades in a single letter?”
We had one real cold day here and now we have been fluctuating in and out of warmish, humid Gulf South type December weather. Dressing Tin is a challenge – one day the poor thing has tights, long sleeved onesies, and so much clothes he is stiff as a board, and the next he is running around in a tee shirt. He gets cuter every day no matter what he is wearing and all he cares about is music – MUSHIK, PIANO, GUITARA, FLUTE, BASS, TRUMPET, TROMBONE, VIOLIN, HORN. These are his favorite words. Will he become a musician and we look back on this as prescient?
We went out last night to celebrate my mom’s birthday in what has become a new tradition – dress like my mom – glamorously. I wore the fox stole my mother in law gave me along with mom’s jewelry that she gave me and got all dolled up in her honor – she was a snazzy dresser. Happy Birthday Mom!
We then came home to learn that the first love of my life is on his deathbed and might not make it till the end of this week. I can remember him taking his nitroglycerin pills when I was only 19 years old. I met him because I was staying at my brother’s apartment and he had a date with my brother’s dear friend and neighbor (who sadly died in a car crash a few years ago). I fell in love with him at first sight – I was 13 and he was 29.
He was 6′ 8″ and his favorite come back to anyone who asked him if he played basketball was whether they were a jockey. He had Nordic good looks and was a freak of sorts – a genius, an alcoholic, a lover. After he cheated on me so many times I couldn’t count the times on my two hands, I gave up trying. And they were always dramatic times – he slept with my boss after meeting her one night with me, he left the bar with another woman while I was in the bathroom (the bartender took me home instead – Linda), he would sit at Cosmos and wait for me to come home when I lived in the shotgun on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter. He moved into the lavish apartments on Esplanade and conducted business by the pool. I threw another woman’s clothes over the balcony after finding her in bed with him. She was my co-worker and lit my cigarette with matches from the bar he had been at the night before – it tipped me off. He made millions. He owned hotels with my brother and my brother in law. He was bohemian, a high roller, a lush, and a cheat.
Then he had a nervous breakdown and committed himself to an institution.
For 20 years afterwards, I dreamed about him. I went to work for my brother and he came to work with my brother again. He was married for the third time, with a new baby, and he talked to me as if we were still lovers – it was disconcerting because my heart still skipped a beat when he walked in the room. He told me tales about how if we were together I would have to let him also have a darker woman in his life. I told him he was absurd and there was no “we” anymore and never would be. I was married to my first husband at that time.
I had married my friend who had been my confidant when he first went into the mental hospital. I had decided to never love like that again.
We always believe our first love is our last, and our last love is our first.
I’m borrowing that word from Oprah as she said it on her show once and let me tell you, it works. I just read this buried in a white paper on what to expect in the coming year(s):
We are still in the very early stages of nothing less than the World’s Second Industrial Revolution.
LOS ANGELES – Sir Elton John is holding close a new tiny dancer.
The piano man and husband David Furnish have become parents to a 7-pound, 15-ounce baby boy born on Christmas Day. The news was first reported Monday night by USMagazine.com and confirmed to The Associated Press by John’s Los Angeles-based publicist.
Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John was born in California via a surrogate, whose identity is being protected by the new parents.
Zachary is 62-year-old John’s first child with the 48-year-old Furnish. The couple married in 2005.
In a joint statement, the new parents told USMagazine.com that “Zachary is healthy and doing well” and they are “overwhelmed with happiness and joy at this very special moment.”
My mother would have been 75 years old today and I am thankful she was my mother and she got to know the people who are close to me – here is a few photos of our last five years together, the first is a jpeg of a note posted to Mom’s digital album that I kept updated for her, it is from December 2004 – the rest are five years of fun that I will cherish for the rest of my life:
Maybe it is ashes to ashes, dust to dust Mom – we come from nothing and return to nothing – but you and me passed us some good times while we were walking this earth together and surely you live on in my heart and the hearts of all these people you touched. You didn’t meet Tin – but I know your paths crossed.
Happy Birthday Mom – I/we love you.
A friend was telling me in a note she sent that you just never know what is going to happen next. How true? Do you know that predictions for the New Year include huge hacking into personal information databases? Or that all of Wall Street is one big asset bubble? Who knows what is next. Picture this, in Israel, they may have found remains that mean evolution actually began in Israel not Africa:
By DANIEL ESTRIN, Associated Press – Mon Dec 27, 6:13 pm ET
JERUSALEM –
Israeli archaeologists said Monday they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern man, and if so, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.
A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.
“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.
He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”
The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.
Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.
“Based on the evidence they’ve cited, it’s a very tenuous and frankly rather remote possibility,” Mellars said. He said the remains are more likely related to modern man’s ancient relatives, the Neanderthals.
According to today’s accepted scientific theories, modern humans and Neanderthals stemmed from a common ancestor who lived in Africa about 700,000 years ago. One group of descendants migrated to Europe and developed into Neanderthals, later becoming extinct. Another group stayed in Africa and evolved into Homo sapiens — modern humans.
Teeth are often unreliable indicators of origin, and analyses of skull remains would more definitively identify the species found in the Israeli cave, Mellars said.
Gopher, the Israeli archaeologist, said he is confident his team will find skulls and bones as they continue their dig.
The prehistoric Qesem cave was discovered in 2000, and excavations began in 2004. Researchers Gopher, Ran Barkai and Israel Hershkowitz published their study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.