Dangermond.org

Change.org just sent me a petition to sign about a transgender woman who was beat in a McDonald’s as the staff cheered in the background. Sick people if you ask me. Meanwhile, I saw a car today with a bumper sticker that said GOD LOVES EVERYONE * NO EXCEPTIONS. So I guess god loves the sick bigots too. Damnation.

The nun told me this morning that everyone in the world is too caught up in trying to make everything perfect and “what the hell does it matter anyway” – inspiring words.

With his new haircut and sharpened skills on his flute, Tin again looked as if he was all grown up this morning. I have to say the experience of watching a little baby grow up has got to be right up there with the most fascinating thing I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.

I never owned a pair of Birkenstocks and never bought a pair of Crocs, I hated those shoes and still do. I never owned a Keen sandal, they always looked so dikey, excuse the expression. But yesterday, I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers running shoes.

This came after a friend was wearing a minimal pair of running shoes and said I should read Born to Run, and then other friends who run short races said that these shoes are all the rage. I have been wearing them to get my feet used to them and already I love them. Mind you, I never wore Crocs or Keens because of the way they look, and these look amphibian but they are so comfortable, it’s crazy. And since yoga has been teaching me to use all of my toes to grip and balance, having my pinky toe engaged in walking and running feels more natural than anything else I’ve ever done before. Highly recommend.

It’s interesting that Born to Run came out around the same time as Vibram began making these shoes – it was purely coincidental. An Italian designer designed the five finger shoes and Vibram, a sole manufacturer, tried to sell it to many different shoe companies and none bit on it, and so they decided to do it themselves and now these are the number one selling shoes. There was an article recently in Nature about bare foot running:

Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners.

The city was filled with Easter egg hunts and yard to yard our friends and neighbors chased colored eggs and large Chocolate bunnies. Three baskets were delivered for Tin from the Easter bunny of fun things we did not not tell him were edible. We spent our morning eating pancakes with friends and then flying a kite and staring at the clouds. Yay for Sundays that are lazy and familiar and seem to last beyond their physical sense of time.

Yesterday, I joined my neighbor for a glass of wine right by the water. I brought my newly ordered Jazz Fest folding chair to test it and it worked so well, I wanted to just park my butt there and remain for the rest of the weekend. As usual on the bayou, no one sits out there without drawing a crowd and before you knew it we had a lot of other neighbors and friends stopping by to enjoy the gorgeous day and the lovely bayou. Tin came out with his drumstick that was a trombone for the evening and his superman cape and we marched up and down the path as a marching band. He had told us earlier that his name is Constantin Pavlovic Dangermond and he was born on March 5, 2009 and that he has a marching band. In his mind, it’s all that simple.

And maybe it is.

I was at a party recently and the father said of his son who was playing in the sprinkler, “I haven’t told him he is black yet.” It was sort of a jokey way of saying that he hadn’t spoken about race with his son and before he could, his son’s classmate had written a poem about him, about he liked his son’s skin color, which made his son notice he had skin color.

Friday, I was reading a AAA magazine and there was a letter about a wonderful vacation experience a couple had in the Bahamas with a couple who owned a hotel: the man was white and the woman black. It bugged me these people were described in color and I wondered if simply saying one was from the U.S. and one from the Bahamas might be enough for the story. Meanwhile on Saturday, I was sitting in the salon on Iberville in the Quarter mesmerized by the hairstyles being coiffed when a Chris Rock episode was playing on BET and the wife had just found out about a prior marriage and kept drilling her husband if the other wife was white. Was she white? Was she white? But was she white?

Tatjana just read Dan Baum’s Nine Lives and I for one am sidestepping any more Katrina and Federal Flood stories for a while because they depress me. My neighbor and I were talking yesterday about the Federal Flood stories and she said she read only One Dead in the Attic and decided she needed ten years before she could read the next one. I said I’m like that with Holocaust stories. She said the best matzo ball soup she ever had was at the Holocaust museum in DC. I haven’t been, I told her, much like Katrina stories, Holocaust stories depress me. She said it is a funny thing that the most well kept secret in this land is Slavery and that most people don’t want to talk about it. I told her it was a subject that I was reading up on because I wanted to be able to talk to Tin about it. She told me her mother would be a good person to talk to Tin about it because she was able to explain to her all of the details in a comprehensive way.

But when? – how to introduce that into an otherwise happy childhood with topics such as marching bands and pasta pesto. My neighbor said I had a few years because it wasn’t until she was four years old that she learned she was black and it came from a school mate. She said the world will tell him he is black.

When we first adopted Tin a few people said he might play for the Saints one day. It’s the sort of thing people say when you have a son and the Saints are winning. But I was like NO WAY. I hoped he might be a musician or pursue any career other than being an athlete. So when his musical interests continued to wax I was smiling inside. Then I noticed everywhere we’d go that had live music would get his toe tapping, his fingers halfway snapping, and the camera’s clicking away. He’s cute and he has some moves on him.

And lately it seems that he is always drawing his own crowd as he moves and plays his toy or imaginary instruments and I’ve started having a different feeling where I want to reel him in a little, keep him a little closer. It’s sort of some reaction to him being a spectacle to be observed that has me a little flinching. Last night, I was at the Fair Grinds with the Bridge Stories for the opening of Bayou St. John: Portrait of a Neighborhood and Tatjana had come late with Tin because he decided to eat not one but three bowls of pasta pesto before leaving the house. I told her to check out Paul Sanchez next door at Swirl before he quit playing, so she walked over there with Tin and his toy trumpet.

Paul remembered Tin from the Sound Cafe the other night and was very sweet and talked about him and autographed our copy of Nine Lives, A Musical Adaptation and mentioned him several times during his performance. I walked in towards the end of it, wondering where T squared was and saw Tin standing in the middle of the room dancing, his trumpet standing up near him. I had that pang, that I don’t like him out there so small and alone like a performing monkey for the crowd. It bothers me. I thought about what we had been talking about the other night, that Miles never smiled for the audience because he didn’t want to be one of those black performers entertaining the white folks, and we were talking about this because I had told Tin that Louis Armstrong always had a smile on his face.

Later I told T how I felt, that I don’t want him thinking that the way he gets attention is being an entertainer for the crowd. She said that Paul had told her that Tin is a natural born performer. But she admitted, she felt the same about him being on all the time too. It’s just that you can’t hold him back. When he hears the music, he becomes possessed by it. He loves the crowds and believes he is performing for them. It does all seem so natural. I just want him to know he is loved and adored for simply being himself too. He doesn’t need to be a celebrity, he needs to just be Tin.

The nanny called in sick today and today is a holiday so it was serendipity. T had meetings so I took Tin to the Quarter to get his haircut by Cyril – what a trip – for one Tin calls him Cereal. This salon has got to have it’s own MTV show. Wild. Then we grooved with a lone saxophone player on Bourbon and found ourselves in front of a street band with swing dancers, Tin was in heaven. But all of a sudden we needed a pancake and luckily Ed was working at Stanley’s and let us slide on in.

The automatic bubble machine, the outdoor folding chairs, and the hot potato toy arrived to outfit our Jazz Fest deluxe stroller. Look out!

I read this morning about children growing up with digital games and then spoke with Tete over Skype who had just gotten a new cellphone but was unsure how to work it although she was delighted to have it. The other day a colleague of mine wrote about introducing me to someone who is moving to New Orleans and for some reason what sprang to mind is a decade ago when I was covering a lot of reports solo, I had gone into the office and printed out copious analyst reports to read much to her horror. She is a paperless person. And I sadly, am still a Luddite.

On the cruise I saw many people using Kindles and I thought interesting because you don’t have to lug books (I had three in my suitcase), you don’t have to lug magazines (I had three in my suitcase) and you could read it under the glaring sun. Still, I don’t want a digital book – I love the feel of paper, the smell of books, and my eyes have gone bad after decades of staring at a computer screen. I should write a book – not Born to Run about our natural ability to run, but born to look at words on paper.

I thought about all this because I had asked someone to make a physical book from my blog a while back and I was thinking about it again. I want to give it to Tin so he will know who I am because I was thinking as I walked both dogs this morning I would like him to have his feet on the ground like me, his Mommy, and his head in the clouds, like Tatjana, his Mama. And I wish him a free spirit like Mimi, my mother, and that he develop his musical talent like Papa, my father. I would love for him to go out into the world with curiosity like Tete, Tatjana’s mother, and to love life like Tatjana’s father.

Most importantly, I thought about what a recent guest told us much to my dismay – that her sister had been adopted when she was nine months old and she was never right. Good grief. I would like Tin to know should I pass before I had the chance to tell him some things. The first thing I would tell him is what my mother told me, “I thank God every day for you.” Then I’d say to forgive your biological mother for putting you up for adoption because she did not have a lot of choices in her life. She was raised in foster homes and had three children before she was 20 and she was poor, uneducated and had no one to support and help her make good choices. I would say to be grateful for the biological great-aunt who woke up at midnight when you were eight months old and knew your situation required action and heard Jesus tell her in her sleep to go get you. And for her partner who looked all over the country to find us to be your parents even though we were 1,000 miles away.

I would say I found a lucky penny on the way around the bayou coming out of City Park this morning while walking Loca and Heidi and threw it in the bayou and wished you grow up healthy and happy, know you are loved and know how to love, have conviction in your life and confidence to express it, have compassion for those who are suffering and have less than you, and enjoy every day of your life. I would remind you that when you were a child you loved books, and the feel of paper, the joy of words on the page, and the stories that lived there, long before the digital world took over.

April 22, 2011
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Your increased exposure in the public eye will enable you to take a break from the internal dialogue that’s been bouncing around in your head for the past few days. Now you can turn off the heavy thinking part of your brain and spend some time skipping through the trivial, the shallow and the downright silly. Turn toward the external world with your arms wide open. If you can, go someplace where you can be smack dab in the middle of the action. Immerse yourself in the crowd.