Dangermond.org

Some friends of friends stopped in tonight to say hello. They are young and in town to volunteer, one of the great phenomena of the Great Government Levee Failure Disaster (I still can’t find a name for it and have been refusing the shorthand of Katrina as much as possible). We are the great petri dish for the U.S. and possibly beyond because everything is a blank slate and could begin anew.

Well some things aren’t a blank slate – the crime returned after only a hiccup. But our schools did change and while we may find that charter schools work here, and perhaps they don’t work elsewhere, still we are forging ahead and learning as we go.

I love the fact that young people with progressive minds are coming to New Orleans in droves to learn and help us on our journey. After they left, Tin and I went into the den to watch the ABC video. We moved the TV into the den from the guest bedroom where it was never used by any of the visiting Croatians – an idea that seemed good in theory and had no practical application.

I was beginning to think the other day when the hordes of guys (electricians, audio/visual, carpenter) entered the house to move the TV (what does it take? I hired one guy and literally five guys came in and out), and two guys came to deliver the dresser for Tin’s room that I was having done from two sets of drawers Steve built a million years ago, my neighbor was bringing in my writing table that he had finished and it still needed something done and all this commotion was going on and it was driving me nuts and I thought it must be true Americans are always spending a lot of money to obtain things and then moving them around all the time trying to get to the point where they can enjoy while those Europeans are simply pleasurably enjoying. I wanted to stick pins in my eyes.

My good friend called me earlier and was simply telling me that she is not a depressed psychotic nutball because every time I’ve spoken with her recently she’s been sick or stressed. She confessed she just believes she doesn’t know how to do downtime. Duh! QED – unable to live without a glaring to do list in front of me. When I hung up the phone, another call came in and I was looking out from my new writing table and a bird with a yellowish purplish breast was sucking nectar from the Queen palm that was almost an arm’s length away.

Tonight, after our friends of friends left, leaving me again hopeful that New Orleans stands to gain from all this brain trust we have attracted from adversity, Tin and I were able to snuggle on the newly purchased great find $250 sofa for the first time and watch Louis Armstrong on the now well-placed spot for the TV, and I thought well alrighty then, I have achieved nirvana.

And then the DVD started skipping.

So the NYT posts this as quote of the day:

“People don’t have faith in government. They have faith in their neighbors.”
MARÍA DEL SOCORRO VELÁZQUEZ VARGAS, a sociologist, on families who have chosen to stay in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, despite widespread violence.

Dangermond.org takes the liberty of posting this as quote of the day:

“People don’t have faith in government. They have faith in their neighbors.”
Rachel Dangermond, a blogger, on families who have chosen to stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, despite widespread violence.

Last night in meditation we ended the compassion cycle we have been on and I have to say Thank God. There is only so much compassion one can have in their heart. Sorry, I’m limited. But when you have to go in there and place this difficult person in your life in the midst of your meditation, well it grows tiring after a while, because sometimes holding onto anger is a lot easier and a lot more fulfilling. Maybe not in the long run but hey, who knows if we will be here in the long run.

I finally finished the last entry in the New Orleans collection and maybe that is what has contributed to my melancholy – I have been having difficulty starting a new novel and have been slowly reading these entries. I simply cannot read or watch anything about the Great Levee Failure of the United States Government without feeling somewhat sick and hopeless. Despite the fact that we have worked our way back, we are still standing, and thank god we are not up north knee deep in snow.

Taking a page from one of my yogis, you have to use every opportunity to start over again. So today Flower sent me a quote from a used car dealership’s newsletter which I thought was appropriate as today’s inspiration or aspiration:

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one more hole in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to the circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past. Henry Ward Beecher.

Two pelicans tucked into their wings in the first tree, 16 cormorants on the next tree, stopped counting at 36 ducks, 12 geese, one Great Blue Heron, seven American Coots, four squirrels, and one egret. This is what I saw in City Park this morning and it was uplifting because the day again is a grey day and again my mind is shattered into a million shards of pieces of my life. It took me a moment to realize that I was wearing the same hat I bought in San Francisco when I lived on Mason Street and instead of streetcars going by there were trolleys, and it was July, and colder than it is this winter day in New Orleans.

I had been thinking about Deacon John and when he sang Many Rivers To Cross at my mom’s memorial in November. It’s that sort of time of year, where the days are gloomy and it makes me somewhat gloomy. But really should I be complaining when the people who live up north aren’t walking through their parks while the lawn mowers are going – they’re buying salt and shoveling snow and dried up like prunes from being inside with the heat blazing or a fireplace sucking all the moisture out of the air. Like I have something to complain about?

So I counted the birds and my blessings and ambled on.

I’ve been working on working from different places – in the house of course, but still sitting at my desk staring at my computer monitor and being hard wired to my telephone have all become barriers to creative thought. I need to move around to get my blood going. So the new writing table of course, gives me a new perspective on the palm trees and my neighbors’ yards. I wonder what it is about me that does not stay a little longer and look at the backyards – from my vantage point, it is a view that so few people have and it is a nice one. Lush in the middle of winter. A luxury.

I’m going to attempt to move around the house and read in different places. Think in new rooms – new thoughts. I’m going to do all this because the grey area of my mind is besotted with memories that tend to make me melancholy and my premonitions of the future are sometimes laden with fears from my past.

I’m going to change my life one thought at a time.

Sunday was Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday and we watched some clips last night with fascination at how this conservative almost evangelical was such an icon for this country. On the surface he was the perfect president, believed in the American pie in the sky dream, but underneath was roiling what was to become the biggest redistribution of wealth this country has ever seen.

I remember the day when I was working at the Rault Center, the hotel where the pregnant woman jumped from the flames, where I had gone to work on marketing it back into a viable business, and four black women were at the front desk when the news flashed that Reagan had been shot. They cheered.

It was a chilling moment of reality.

Walking through City Park with Heidi straining on the leash, I marveled how this once shy dog is now a bulldozer going after squirrels, and sometimes trying to take flight and chase pelicans. Now it is two dogs who strain on the leash looking for mischief.

But not me. I’ve worn too many leashes out and have now found that my leash is slack on the ground. Which I don’t mind, it comes with the territory.

As I was walking around the lagoon my eyes keen on a cormorant drying its outstretched wings on a low dead branch, a fellow walker who likes to call me Red but now catches himself each time as my hair is blonde said, “I noticed how good the Shepherd has gotten.” I smiled not wanting to reveal I was having opposite thoughts. I said, ” She tries but you can’t teach a dog new tricks.”

And he said, “Well it’s that you can’t learn them anything without unlearning them. That’s the hocus pocus them and humans have to deal with.”

Hmm, I thought, you can unlearn a lot of things – you can unlearn straining on a leash because I have seen many of my dogs age and slow down, just like I’m seeing it in myself. I told him, “That may be so, but the best is yet to come.”

He said, “I’m going to keep that thought today. That’s a good one, Red.”

A friend of mine is going through the sorrow of a dog who is dying. He always referred to the dog not by name by simply “the dachshund” but that belied his deep love for the dog. Now that more than 16 years have passed and the dog is preparing to go, the humans clutch and rail against the inevitable. It’s always that way.

Here is another poem by John Updike about losing his dog – this one more dark than the sentimental one I have posted before:

Another Dog’s Death
in
Collected Poems, 1953-1993
by John Updike
Knopf

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.

She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field.
The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
I carved her a safe place while she protected me.

I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth.
Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.

They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.

I was walking home the other day from the park and saw an American flag hanging out front of a neighbor’s house and I began to say the Pledge of Allegiance in mind, only I couldn’t remember the words. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of American and BLANK. I tried several times to get the words but nothing would come.

So Christina Aguilera couldn’t remember the Star Spangled Banner on Super Bowl Sunday.

I am so happy no one stopped me and asked me to recite the pledge because even right now, I can’t remember the lines.

I was about to embark on a diatribe about the maintenance that comes with age … for the body, for the mind, for the heart, for the soul, but let me rephrase this phase, it’s about fine tuning. I think it all started with a writing table that I had my neighbor build for me that went from being practical to being beautiful. Now I have a walnut bookmatched table that is where I stand to take my notes. Cleared of all the junk that is usually collecting around my office, I only have my kneeling Buddha holding one stick of incense and my nomadic charm necklace T brought me back from Turkey years ago. And of course the ubiquitous notebook and pen.

Now that the writing table has arrived, it makes me think about things – about the way I tend to be more practical than aesthetic. I tend to be more about the expedient then the pleasurable. These are not good things. I have now added the bell from India my colleague brought me many years ago. Every time I begin to rush into the next thought or deed, I will try to stop myself and ring the bell. Am I here? Aware? Present? Most likely the answers will sometimes be no.

So this is the way it is, all this fine tuning, to get the instrument just right as decay sets in all around and inside the worms are eating the fibers of being. One day when I have found my perfect harmony, I will disappear like tears in rain (thank you Bladerunner for that one poignant moment of sci fi cinema).

Until that time though, my music is getting richer by the beat.