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I was reading an article about birding in India (two great passions of mine combined – yay) and how there are tailorbirds that design intricate nests to attract females – the males compete and the female decides who is the best designer and which nest she wants to live in and with which bird. Ever notice how the NYT is what NPR was a decade ago? It seems like sprinkled into every conversation I had ten years ago was, “I was listening to NPR and …” Now I feel like it’s “I read in the New York Times … and. ” I’ve found the Sunday Times to be everything you could hope from a newspaper except one thing – local news. It’s a damn shame the NYT couldn’t have a local section since they are somewhat the archivist of New Orleans post-Katrina anyway. But I digress.

Back to talented birds that build nests. I was speaking with a friend the other day who wants to meet a man, fall in love, and have a child (most likely adopt). She said she is going to go against her instincts this time and not go out with the guy she is immediately attracted to – we had been discussing a man who asked her out, whom she was not attracted to, who is actually sort of a charming guy of his own sort.

I told her women of our age (40s to 60s) have not been hard-wired to find a mate like our parents had been. My mother was so proud and encouraging of the many choices I had as an independent woman she almost railed against marriage for me. She told me my whole life, you can do anything sweetheart, and she was somewhat envious of that fact.

So independence gets you where? Well, it is not without merit. I vowed after what I saw in my family to NEVER be dependent on man. But I threw out the baby with the bathwater, I was not dependent on men financially nor emotionally because truth to be told I knew so little about men having only observed the ones in my family who over-indexed to machismo. So I was unprepared for the vulnerable, kind men that I actually was attracted to – the more fragile species.

But I told my friend, here is what you need to size up with the next man – is he a good provider, will he be a good father, and is he kind and trustworthy? Who the hell was thinking of this when they were making their partner selection in their 20s and 30s – not I. I was drawn to the opposite of what I had known at home, I sought the sensitive man, the artist.

Only the world had not hard-wired these men for me – a thinking, independent, free-spirited assertive woman. Their boy code made it nigh impossible to feel masculine in my presence, and my directive to be fiercely independent and different from my mom made me a tough nut to crack. So while we were both attracted to one another like a house on fire – he could not imagine taking care of me and nor could I. Mutual dependence is the basis for interdependence to start a family.

Albeit, recently on observing a friend of mine who has been dependent on her man for their small family and finding out that he has been dipping into another sugar bowl for a few years, the first flinch I had was – damn, whatyagonnado now? You need to get yourself financially independent, woman.

So much like other areas that I’m learning about – like how women of my age never learned to style their hair (few updos other than ponytails), we also never learned how to pick a mate.

I heard on WWOZ that St. Augustine was going to be having an event in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday and so we went all went to check it out. We arrived right about the time the Mass was ending and walking into this church you know right away there are not a lot of Catholic churches in this country/world that are rocking out – something’s different. Something is different, this is the oldest African-American Catholic parish in the nation and recently, was almost sold by the Archdiocese as the Catholic belt tightening that took place across the United States over the past decade. Thankfully there was such a public outcry the church was spared. When free people of color organized in 1830s and received permission to build a church the Ursuline Sisters (those sisters again) donated the property with the condition that it be named St. Augustine after their patron saint, Augustine of Hippo. At the time there were pew fees so free people of color paid for extra pews so enslaved  blacks could also attend. A few months before the dedication the people of color began to purchase pews for their families to sit and some white people, upon hearing this, started a campaign to buy more pews than colored folks. The War of the Pews began and ultimately was won by the free people of color who bought pews three to one and on both sides of the aisles. These aisle seats were given to the slaves. (Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, as I said, we arrived at the end of the rocking mass and then went into the Hall for the event, for $10 you could get a hot plate of red beans and rice and watch the performance. Unfortunately, the presentations didn’t approach the reverence of what you might expect from a black church on MLK weekend, but we passed a good time nonetheless and Tin seemed to enjoy it. We then went for a walk into the Quarter and had an Irish coffee and on the way out found ourselves a nice sofa at a nice price that we purchased for the den.

All in all – we had a good morning with friends and Tin and although it didn’t much feel as if a Martin Luther King celebration took place for us – it was our little adventure.

St. Augustine Church seen from St.Claude Street

My baby went in for a haircut today and it was quite exciting. I took him to the Quarter to this salon that I have passed when I’ve been headed down Iberville, where, at  night, the chandeliers are all lit up and gorgeous black women and men are sitting there in all sorts of stages of hair dressing. Cyril cut his hair and framed him up a little, although I was less inclined to this part as it meant cutting off his baby hair (not ready for that yet). But he was a champ and at the end of the day he emerged even more handsome than he went in. Since I went in earlier to get my hair blow dried by Agnes, we both are having a good hair day.

I was speaking to a colleague about Tin having become a music dictator – he has his music and as far as he is concerned, we should listen to ours somewhere else. Trombone Shorty, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, some Brian Eno, Gal Holiday, and Professor Longhair for starters.

My part of the conversation was fear we had created a music monster and what my friend said is he envisioned Tin growing up to be the Music Critic for the New York Times.

In the Times there recently was an article about earphones and how they harm kids’ hearing. But layered in the article was how earphones cause tuning out when listening to music is a social phenomenon. Or at least it should be.

Living here in New Orleans it is commonplace to listen to music together – with family, friends, lovers, neighbors, hell the entire city turns out for seven days of musical orgy and that’s just Jazz Fest, we also have French Quarter Fest, Mo Fest, International Fest, Bayou Boogaloo Fest etc..

The article encourages adults towards sharing music – you listen to your child’s and in turn the child listens to yours.

I remember so clearly my father’s love of Connie Francis, my mother’s of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, my brother’s fondness for the Beatles and of not telling me what the words to Get Back meant, keeping them locked up in mystery till I was quite older, my other brother’s not only love but imitation of Elvis Presley, one of my older brother’s love and imitation of Johnny Mathis, my father’s piano playing (almost a virtuoso on the piano having started from the age of six), dancing on my father’s toes, my sister and I choreographing Eli’s Coming, Mony Mony, and Crimson and Clover on the back terrace when we lived in Puerto Rico.

My music memories are shared ones, not tuning out, not by myself, but music flooding the house, my ears, my soul. Tin needs to get with the program – it’s not his way or the Freeway of Love, it’s our music – all of it.

It’s not even the end of January 2011 and so far it feels as if this year has expanded beyond its days, its minutes, its moments to contain unsettling, unexpected, and unexamined events. The year began with a harbinger of what was to be the theme of this year – trust. And that five letter word now pervades every meaning – can we trust government? Should we trust China? How long shall we trust our partners? Is it possible to trust our jobs? Is trust passé?

Trust, my fine readers, is the word of the year. And it’s a very sticky, stretchy, flexible, rigid word for a year such as this that did not begin auspiciously but instead arrived with portents hovering all over it. Trust is defined as reliance on integrity, strength, ability, surety of a person or thing. It is confidence in a person or thing. But trust also means hope, hope that a future is there that we might trust in.

Is it possible we, who survived the greatest federal disaster of all times – the failure of the levees to support our grand city, can no longer pretend to trust in a government? That we BP victims know for real that no corporation should or will be trusted? That having survived all the marriages and babies born out of 2005, we now find we can no longer trust the sanctity of those mergers?

Shouldn’t we have distrust fatigue? Is it we were lied to so many times we can’t trust anything or anyone anymore? Nietzsche said, “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”

More will be revealed my dear readers, more will be revealed.

Before I start winding down by cleaning up my desk and figuring out my calendar for next week, let me just say that the season has begun in earnest here in New Orleans – Mardi Gras kicked off on Epiphany, Jan 6th and was underscored by the first parade of the year – Joan of Arc parade. Next up Martin Luther King weekend with marches and memorials a plenty. Do you know some cities don’t recognize MLK as a holiday? Weird. Then it’s an interlude for Valentine’s Day but the way this year is going it might be just called Musical Chairs Day.

Mardi Gras follows in earnest with Krewe du Vieux marching on February 19th and culminating in Fat Tuesday on March 8th (interlude for Prince Tin’s 2nd birthday!). The St. Joseph’s Day parade is on March 19th starting at 6PM. The Tennessee Williams Festival is the 23rd to the 27th, and then the Irish Parade is March 12th. Guess what? They just added Thursday to French Quarter Festival which starts on April 7 and goes to April 10th. Jazz Fest begins April 29th and ends May 8th, Bayou Boogaloo is May 20 – 22, and Greek Fest is May 27 – 29) – they’ve finally disconnected it from Boogaloo which was a conflict of interest (two sides of the bayou? come on that’s too much).

Just thinking about this makes my head spin but recently a lot of people have been compiling compelling reasons to move to New Orleans and I saw a list that mentions the business opportunities – who is thinking about work?

This weekend is a long one in remembrance of Martin Luther King. Why stop the madness and take some time to honor this man? Well that question is almost akin to asking why New Orleans should be rebuilt, but I’ll answer it and not just because I’m the proud mama of a little black boy, but because Martin Luther King did not fight just for black people, he fought for every people – for you and me to stand up because united we stand, divided we fall:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Around New Orleans there will be many celebrations to honor both Martin Luther King as well as many of the other Civil Rights leaders from his era. The Ashé Cultural Arts Center is having a sing-along, the Children’s Museum has created an I Have a Dream wall to add your dreams to, and the Times Picayune lists all of the marches, memorials, services and other events happening around town this weekend.

Last night, I went to meet a friend at Houston’s in Metairie and I walked in at night, to see so many young faces – servers and hosts and cooks – that it brought me back to a time in my life that seems like it was someone else’s life. I worked as a server there when I was in my early twenties. It was when I was with the first love of my life. When I saw how young the servers looked, I realized just how young I was then. My friend and I sat a table and two tables down were two men dressed in suits. One of them kept looking over at our table. It made me flinch because I was remembering just a few hours earlier I had heard from a friend that she had discovered her husband had been having an affair for five years. How could he?

I looked around at the other tables – couples eating, friends talking, and the young young servers bringing us drink and food and hustling through the restaurant. I was too young then to understand what life was really all about. Later I had a glass of wine with another friend who quoted from Moonstruck when the guy is out in the streets and says we’re born, we get married and then we make a mess out of our lives and we die.* Poignant given the year has started on that note – I am now keeping a mental list of a relative whose almost 50 year marriage has broken up, a new friend with a young child who has just separated, a friend who is in the midst of discovery of infidelity, and so on.

My dreams have been all about discovery, my mother walking into the room where her clothes were and picking a dress from the closet that was obviously bought after she was dead, once she held it up and asked what we thought, we knew she would realize she was a ghost. Or another with me moving through rooms and my hair getting shorter and shorter as I glided from office to office and although I was physically changing in each situation, I proceeded as if nothing was different.

We are born, we get married, then we make a mess out of our lives and die.

*Ronny Cammareri: Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!

Truly one of the iconic politicians of New Orleans was released from prison today.

When Tin was around 10 months he started singing this song and it went gunda, gunda, gunda da and now that song has progressed to him using his voice to mime an instrument – he puts the recorder or his drumstick up by his neck, looks in the mirrors in the den and begins his performance, ammmmmm, ummmmmm, ommmmmm – wailing on his horn.

Other than picking up our erudite language like fucking jerk and oh shit, he is really mastering both English and Croatian in a remarkable way. He now knows several Croatian nursery rhymes as well as songs like Take Me Out To The Ballgame.

But the best Tin-ism happened last night. He has the toddler’s habit of shouting commands at us, his favorite is No of course, but the other fav is Get Down. So everytime he shouts Get Down to me, I do it, I get down, I swing my booty and get funky. So last night as we were reading his bedtime book on the sofa, he commanded Tatjana, “Get Down!” as he squirmed off her lap and took his book to the coffee table so he could obsess over the musical instruments in his Jazz Fest book and I said, “Tin, how does Mommy get down?” And he started shaking his booty. Love it!