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Yesterday, friends were over and we took a walk about around the lovely bayou. I spoke about our plans for the future, living at the LaLa and then retiring to the Quarter with trips abroad. I confessed to having been a ball of nerves last year because of my anxiety and fear of the future and now I had come to the conclusion that I must be open to any future that arrives.

Later on my neighbor’s porch, a biologist, he told me about how ten years ago he was walking around the bayou and suddenly the water dropped 8 inches and in minutes surged back up. During the plunge the water shook violently. He had to shake his head a couple of times to make sure he saw what he just saw. This wasn’t a tidal pull, but a seismic shift.

After Katrina and the Federal Flood, I returned home and about one year later, the New Orleans Museum of Art had an exhibit done by artists and photographers from all over – the wall of images made my knees buckle – the cover for the museum book was an image of friends in the raft they took out of my American Can apartment with a long shot of the bayou and the LaLa with a blue tarp covering the front (I had the original blue tarp having started a remodel three months prior to Katrina).

I went to sleep last night watching the lights dance off the small ripples in the bayou thinking about the human desire to live near water. I woke this morning to watch this video, labelled the scariest first person video of the tsunami in Japan, and I wonder about my fascination with water, about why we want to live so close to it, why Tin will just jump into the pool even though he is going to go underwater and that is scary, and about how I sit by the bayou and drive out to the lakefront and walk along the Mississippi wanting to be as close as I can get to the water.

Tin had a playdate today and mommy made brunch and did an impromptu cooking class for friends (in from Germany). All said and done, we passed a good time then I come back to my desk and look at what is going on with Japan and I’m just stunned by how devastating this has been – some towns completely wiped out, over 10,000 feared dead. And also I’m just sickened by the fact that CNBC is happy this hasn’t had more effect on the financial community. Good grief. Meanwhile, all thoughts on Japan, New Orleans.

Best place to help is Doctor’s Without Borders – they have sent two teams in there so far and I’m sure they could use your help. If you blog, give a shout out to Doctor’s Without Borders – this is real people doing real work where and when it is needed most.

Also, if you have a blog, reblog Danny James blog – he is donating for every reblog.

Japan’s death toll likely over 10,000.

Tin and I took a stroll on the bayou at dusk watching the setting sun and the half moon rising. He’s a good walker, I like that. Later, we came home and he had a waffle and scrambled eggs and a pear for dinner. Eating his waffle he said, “This is good.” For a nightcap we watched the Louis Armstrong DVD I purchased a year ago – best darn purchase I ever made. He tickled my feet while I lounged on the sofa. Then he went to bed.

A friend said she would stop by but I took the luxury of closing the shades early because I am grooving on being alone. I am lucky to have someone to love and miss, and yet I find that life has become so filled with work, relationship, child, and so forth that I rarely have a moment to myself.

Writers need time to be by themselves. We live in a world in our heads or may I say we live in words in our heads and we have to have space to descramble and recompose thoughts, past and present, that vie for publication. I think this weekend I went mad with Twitter and Facebook and the blog trying to rush to spring clean my brain.

I am a lover of people and a craver of solitude – and fine with the contradiction.

I began David Mitchell’s first novel set in Japan called Ghostwritten. I wonder about all of these natural disasters and how my mind can’t seem to settle on this beautiful day knowing that Japan has open gashes yet to heal.

I was thinking that next year I’d like to have Carnival masks to hang outside for Mardi Gras. You know the kind that look like jesters and one is frowning and one is smiling. A friend told me that she went to the Quarter alone with her toddler and saw a woman standing on the corner of Royal and Esplanade, with two children in a wagon, and one in her arms and she and the child in her arms were balling their eyes out. She said she felt horrible not stopping to help and she noticed no one else did either. She offered, “Maybe she was overwhelmed. Or maybe she was loaded.”

I told her that as I approached Royal with Tin on my back and Tatjana on my side, St. Anne was pulling up the rear and we found ourselves right in the thick of the marching band. We were all marching when the only black man in the band poked me on the shoulder and said, “Hey you, you can’t march with the band!” We moved to the sidewalk dutifully.” Before that we had been by the Brasserie Marigny with friends; as Tin was having a sugar low, we stopped to give him some food and I sat him on the trunk of a car parked right at the corner of Frenchman.

People were parading up and down the street in costumes of all kinds, a mini float went by, someone dropped a whole cup of beer and a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, that’s my car, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch it.” I just stared at him blinking my eyes because I could not fathom that he was serious.

I was lying in bed alone night before last and suddenly had this pause where I thought just a few days ago we were all out on the streets wearing costumes we spent a good deal of time and money and energy creating so that we could parade with our neighbors and friends and fellow NOLAns up and down the street. It’s absurd, I thought, as I lay there with this endless parade of thoughts marching through my mind one by one.

So next year I am going to get some Carnival masks to hang outside. The kind that look like jesters where one is smiling and one is frowning. I have no idea what my costume will be. Tatjana wants to be rastafarans.

Sign A Petition To Ban Cruel Kangaroo Experiment

March 11, 2011

A proposed experiment by the University of Wollongong in New South Wales has animal lovers seeing red, and a petition has been set up to voice disapproval over the experiment, which school officials have not yet decided on. According to the petition, the experiment aims to measure and study the farts of Kangaroos – which are notable because they don’t release any methane gas, unlike other grazing animals. The goal of the experiment is to see if data gathered can help in some way to reduce global warming occurring from methane output.

The cruel part of the study is that the experiments would have to be done by keeping the animals in tiny cages for nine months, where they could barely fit – causing severe stress that is said to affect the study’s results. Also, it is said that the study is unnecessary because it has already been done in the past.

It was back to music class this morning after a respite for Mardi Gras and it was good to see all the little people who just months ago were strangers and are not part of the repertoire of our lives. Afterwards, we stopped by friends uptown and wound up in the pool where Tin wanted to go underwater and then didn’t want to stop going underwater – good sign for our future of summers at the beach. We came home to eat lunch where Tin had gumbo and I had tunafish, but we ended up switching – he ate all my tuna and crackers and I ate his seafood gumbo. Who knew? Then I gardened while Tin brought his abacus out and counted on the porch.

It’s so beautiful outside I have to remind myself that I’m not hallucinating, so I am channeling John Denver.

I have written extensively before about my loathing of mothers who have said to me over the years, “you can’t know until you’re a mother.” Blech. I hate the superiority of that statement, the you versus them, the mommy club. It really strikes me like a club over the head. But last night, I ran into this exchange from the opposite side. I was chatting with friends, one with two biological children, one with an adopted black child just like me, and other folks. One of the other folks made the comment when we were discussing habits and child rearing that I might not have the same experience as the woman with her “own” child. Like a steel door shutting down I put her in the category of the “unknowing” – my own child is Tin, I knew it the day I laid eyes on him, I had my doubts about bonding with a child not my own UNTIL I laid eyes on Tin and there is no doubt, not a shred, that this is my son.

No one can tell you that. This is a visceral experience, this is not something that every mother feels (biological, adopted, ____), this is something that happens between two human beings. I am his mother, he is my son, enough said.