Dangermond.org

I’m off to go fishing in a bigger pond.

Gone fishing

Hook, sinker, line.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth 1807

I went for a stroll this morning with Loca because both of us had gone to bed early and we were up before the chickens. The bells haven’t been ringing at 6 for some reason or at least we haven’t been hearing them. I was taking Loca alone so I would not have to contend with the drama the two dogs cause together and was running but I found Loca is much calmer when we walk rather than when we run. Sort of not intuitive – you’d think she needed to get that energy out but like me she responds to yoga flow rather than to cardio frenzy.

Last night, in the blink of an eye, one neighbor stopped on the porch to talk which then accreted to more and more neighbors – funny how the nicer the weather gets the more you start seeing your neighbors again and the more time you seem to have to visit. I was speaking with my friend who showed up first about Robin who hung herself night before last. She said she had seen this show about survivors in San Francisco who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. All of them said the second they had jumped they regretted it. I thought about Robin and wondered if she had regretted her decision seconds into it, but like her I couldn’t see her way out of her troubles because others had tried to reach through her pain and it seemed larger than her, than us.

I read in the Times Picayune about a woman who died and the obit said, “She had many struggles in her life.” She must have for her bereaved to include that in her last words. I thought about my mom who used to tell me how strong she was even though to me she seemed to be falling apart at the seams. A friend said yesterday she is angry because her father has decided to remarry and is going to do it in the next two weeks sending everyone in the family into a tizzy. I noticed a uber fit husband was diagnosed with cancer and dropped dead four months later running with a man. Good I thought.

Was Mom strong? Yes and no.

My world is enlarging again. Even here in this small little pond, I’m meeting new people and I’m every day seeing things and hearing things in a new way. I looked at the porch yesterday where the kids had all gathered and thought of when my whole family lived on Louisiana Avenue and there was a big crack in the driveway near the curb caused by a humongous oak tree. The water would pool there after one of our monsoon rainfalls and we’d all go outside in our wife beaters and tidy whities and play in the mudhole. I told this to someone the other day and they said you’d never see that now, people are too concerned with the details of their lives.

The details of their lives? Almost when we are not looking those details are being spun into the tapestry of our lives. Again to quote my dear Eudora Welty, we Southerners live our narratives. And here in New Orleans, that mostly happens on the porch.

A woman, an artist, I knew because she was the neighbor of a friend of mine killed herself last night. I wrote about her a year ago because I had just seen her on the bayou cut up and bruised – she said she had taken to bare fist fighting with some young Hispanic guys – and my heart sank. She was in a world of pain. I emailed my friend to see if there was someone close to her who could reach out to her.

Another friend broke the news to me today. It was after a dear friend had called to say her uncle in Germany had taken his life. It was on the same day that another friend posted a video to YouTube from August 29, 2010 of the Release Party we held to get rid of all our angst, grievances, sadness, and despair.

I’m yelling.

This afternoon, a friend pulls up on the bayou and speaks of her pain and says shaking her head, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” I said it’s all of us – we’re all leading lives of quiet desperation and we have to forge that into something. She said she wants to just be someone else. But who? I ask sincerely. Who?

Certainly not the woman who decided enough was enough. Or the man who gave up.

All things that are born out of fear seem to be what’s wrong with the world in general. And now a study shows what is a “duh” to most of us, conservatives are more fearful than liberals.

People around here are intrigued by the name Tin which is a derivative of Constantin. Similarly, I call Tatjana sometimes Tanja because that is a diminutive in Croatian of her name (pronounced Tonya). But my favorite are the nicknames you can glean from the Obits here in New Orleans – just this week Ernest Joseph “Poncho” died, so did Louise F. “Ace”, Tilman “Toe-Joe” was mourned by his brother Wilfred “Pinkie” and Reginald “Big Reg” was gone too – Louis Benedict known affectionately as “Doc” or “Louie” was not as unusual nor was Louie J “Bud” but all will be missed and hopefully their names passed down.

A friend on Facebook posted the Eagles’ There’s a New Kid in Town saying it reminded her of Tin after seeing him all over the internet with his trumpet. I told Tin last night that he has the moves, he has the looks, but now he has to have the music to be the real deal. As I made zucchini muffins in the kitchen, he was wondering around the house and being a little too quiet – Dizzy Gillespie was playing on the stereo – I peeked around the corner of the living room and there he was drumming away and getting down and I thought, hmmm, he’s got something going on – or like another Facebook from SomeTin going on.

I’ve been collecting Bridge Stories for a show that Marcela Singleton is curating at the Fair Grounds Coffeehouse called Bayou St. John: Portrait of a Neighborhood as part of the awareness campaign for the ReBridge project. I could just work in the world of Oral History – what a wonderful experience and how lucky we are to live here in this city, on the bayou, and have these romantic bridges to anchor our stories. Here is a photograph taken by a neighbor Henry Artigue to just give you a taste:

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
— Flannery O’Connor

I’m of the opinion that as you age you start to care less about somethings and more about other things and what I find strange is that instead of running away from certain ideals I held as a youth, I find myself returning to those visions now as I approach 52 years of age. Literature, good friends, gardening, service to the community.

I’m more convinced than ever that the best times lie ahead.

Listening to the beats in your own head. I watch Tin when he is in the crowd and the music is playing and he is inside his head, hearing the beats, feeling the beats. I like that because it took me a long time to grow up and listen to the beats inside myself. Last week and into this week has been a series of intersections with either the pugnacious or the rapacious leaving me bereft of my general joie de vivre. It’s a good thing I have a few tools in the toolbox to pull from to hear my beats.