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Yesterday, I was running through my to do list as if the house was on fire and it sure felt like it was at the time. I heard a knock on the window and looked outside to see a Northern Mockingbird cawing from the edge of the terrace and one on the ground upside down on the floor. I walked out to the terrace to help him and he was flopping as if he had broken his neck and couldn’t get his bearings. His claws were curled and his wing seemed broken. I turned him over so he wouldn’t struggle and began stroking his stomach and head and told him to calm down. His friend flew away.

He looked like the same bird who had chased me out of City Park the other day when I had obviously gone too close to a nest. That bird had looped around to peck at my head four times as Loca and I swiftly left out of the park’s front entrance. I told the one struggling now, “You never know who your friends are,” as I stroked him a little more. I brought out Loca’s saucer of water and tried to sprinkle a little on him to liven him up.

I went back to work and kept going back out to check on him and each time he had improved a little bit more. His wings weren’t all out of whack, his claws were no longer furled, his head wasn’t bobbing off its stem. He seemed to be recovering from the shock of the direct hit to the glass door, but he still couldn’t fly much above a little jump and I didn’t want to put him in the garden where he would fall prey to the cats.

A few hours later, he was able to take flight from the terrace and join his friends in the sky. I felt better that it was not another dead bird on account of my oversized windows up here. More importantly, I was glad to have seen this little creature fighting for his life and to have made it. It gave a certain hope that the larger things looming inside my office were surmountable.

I ran into a few of my morning walkers this morning in City Park, one who had been fired erroneously from her position and who later learned her boss had been embezzling the funds that was paying all of their salaries, another who had seen the handwriting on the wall in the ’80s when he was working with the oil rigs and the count was going down precipitously and so he segued out of that long-term career into owning a building with a laundromat only to have the Federal Flood hit him with a one-two punch losing both that source of income and his home. Just as he was putting his life back together, the economy tanked and so too the value of his investments. And then I encountered the walker who has a prissy dog who always gives me the evil eye because Loca licks her chops when she sees Ms. Priss go by.

Now I tell you under that dark cloud I came to realize a few things I already knew but which bear repeating – life is what you make of it. I’ve been seriously reprimanded for this attitude by friends who want me to just echo back to them what they are telling me – they want to hear “yeah that sucks” “yeah you are fucked” but I cannot reprogram to tell them what I refuse to tell myself. My comments are more like, “The universe provides,” “This door closing opens a new door.” “Checking in with the now, helps you forget all the what if’s” – I’m not saying these things because they are easy pseudo new agey feel good things to just say, I’m saying them because it matters what you tell yourself.

If you say to yourself, wow I’m screwed, that sucks, life is a real pain – then that will come to be. But if you say, I walked outside this morning and the birds were singing, my family is healthy, and I’m healthy, and all of the rest of it is problem solving as that is what life is, sometimes it has you juggling so hard you are panting for breath and sometimes it throws soft balls and sometimes hard balls and sometimes those old curve balls, but that’s life. The meaning of which is to live it.

For a period of time if you asked Tin his name he would reply with conviction, “Louis Armstrong.” But now I’m starting to wonder just who or how many now gone musicians this little boy is channeling. QED (quod erat demonstrandum) this is Jewel Brown singing with Louis Armstrong, When the Saints Go Marchin In. She is fabulous by the way and we watch this video over and over again as Tin wakes up asking for it.

So when the other day I was putting him to bed and he wiggled out of my lap and got down on the ground and started wah wah wa ah’ing like Brown in that video, hips and all, I couldn’t help but fall over laughing. So last night, we filmed him in his crib again, naturally I was late to get the camera, but you get a good idea of what is going on. He starts off singing When the Saints, a la Armstrong, moves into wiggling his hips and that wah wah wa ah of Brown, and then segues into Armstrong on the trumpet, and then moves over to Trummy Young on the trombone.

The King of Bhutan: from a speech that he gave in India: “I truly believe that the only way to observe the most important things in life and in this world is by putting them through the lens of “Simplicity”. You must break everything down to the fundamentals; break it down to the basic human instances.For, in the end no matter what country we may be from, we are human beings. No matter what our cultures and beliefs may be, we share the same needs and abide by the same fundamental values. In fact, it may be these very values that could guide us, through the great problems, even those of environmental degradation, terrorism and world poverty. Perhaps the first of these values is the sense of a shared planet. This is a world that is shared -not between governments and nations but among us- the people-The image of a shared planet must always be present in our minds-It is wrong to assume that a huge step to finding solutions to global problems and averting future crises, will be taken if we can think in the spirit of community and fraternity, not as individual entities? When we accept that this world of people all alike, of families all alike, of communities all alike, of countries facing the same challenges, of human beings ultimately seeking the same thing, then we will truly be in a position to foster well being security and happiness.”

The five foot long gar fish that were in the bayou the other day are still slinking around. There are about four or five of them and they look prehistoric. I ran into a neighbor today on the bayou who reminded me that he played football with my first husband at Rummel. I asked him if he had seen him lately and he said a few years ago. I said how does he look and he said, “Like any other 53 year old.” Yikes – we’re all look alikes in our 50s? Good grief.

Meanwhile, he told me that he could not let his dog off the leash in City Park anymore because the alligators were out of hibernation in the lagoons. He had seen some five footers in there.

Gadzooks.

Friends recently were raving about a 3D film they saw at the Louisiana Film Festival called Cave of Forgotten Dreams where filmmaker Werner Herzog went with a group of scientist who discovered the cave paintings in Chauvet, France, that are 32,000 years old. At one point, they discover a painting that is on top of the paintings done 1,000 years later.

I was thinking of my middle age spread as I watched three young women walking across the park this morning. They were in their mid twenties and had Venus shapes while I am fighting the loss of my Venus and the onset of the full moon look. I’m 52 years old, a mere spec in the time frame of nearly 6000 years on the Jewish calendar and to think that in one place some artist painted a rock and a thousand years later some other artist painted the same rock is a little mind blowing.

If I’m dealing with time in my own metaphysical sense, what is time in its enormity telling any of us?

Today, leaving the gym I saw the Louisiana Citizens Disaster and Evacuation Preparedness pamphlets – oh yeah, that time again – Hurricane Season begins on June 1st but right now the news has been on tsunamis, tornados, rising rivers, and earthquakes. Is this cycle of weather we are going through the Rapture, it is an “era” as in the Pleistocene, now that we are keeping records outside of caves, will people 1000 years from now know of our existence if all of our data is in the cloud?

Bayou Boogaloo, Re-Bridge work, Tin, Tatjana, and hardly any time to catch a breath. The most significant event that happened this weekend was Tin went with our neighbors to the festival for an hour. Hard to believe we let him go but we trust our neighbor, her daughter, and her daughter’s friend to obsessively watch him like we would. He had a blast and now that is all he can talk about is his cougar girlfriends.

Tatjana and I had been sitting on the porch after having showered in peace and we looked up and down the bayou came two little girls and a smaller boy who was animated and striking and we both watched our son coming home. Odd.

Bayou Boogaloo started late yesterday and it was more than a TGIF type Friday, it was a long week filled with emotional roller coasters, too much to do, and at the end progress albeit at a cost, so naturally a music festival a block away was the only answer and as usual, New Orleans provided. The Boogaloo has grown and now sports a kid’s tent like Jazz Fest along with other new attractions.

Since Tin didn’t like the blues delivered by our neighbor Jumpin Johnny Sansome, we went to the kid’s tent after he devoured his second large slice of pizza in two days (read: bad mothers) and there he painted his own face. Very interesting.

Right before Cyril Neville took the stage, the amplifier was pounding out klezmer, go figure, and Tin ran into his first and true love, Mignon, whose face had been painted by someone else, ahem, and he was beside himself with glee, throwing himself into her lap and dancing the duck walk like he was a 60 year old man. He is channeling someone or multiple someone’s with his rhythm and movement.

But then the tell tale signs of being overstimulated and too wound up were apparent, so attempts to get him to chill down were fruitless and so we came home, where he was beyond ready for bed a half hour earlier than usual. We put him down and then the aftershocks hit. I’ve read about musical children, how they rock the cradle, but Tin has from the start sang in bed, hitting high notes left and right. When Vanessa (aka Gal Holiday) was over the other night she said she used to cover her mother’s mouth despite the fact her mom is a singer, and cover the guitar strings as she plunked them, much like Tin does to us when we sing. I thought it was because we can’t sing. But when you hear “OH WHEN THE SAINTS, GO MARCHIN IN” coming from the video camera while his foot keeps time to the beat, you know that his destiny has really already called him.

In a writing class I took a thousand years ago, the instructor said to use a found object or a trigger to begin writing, write as if a memoir, using what is in front of you to lead you the way, a la Proust and his madeline. I walked outside my apartment on Vermont Street on Portrero Hill where we had moved, having arrived back in San Francisco much to my chagrin from a truncated and aborted move to New Orleans. It was 1996. I saw a safety pin while Sam and Arlene were peeing on the tiny patch of grass in the greenless world I had re-entered. I thought of the time I had wet the bed as a six year old and how my mother had lost it and made me wear a diaper to school. I had ill feelings about the whole memory.

Later, in retelling this story to the new agey woman who lived downstairs and did reike she responded in a way that made me see a different memory. I was my mother’s lynchpin and when I collapsed so did her tentatively structured world.

Today, after a good night’s sleep having had an awful one the night before, I was eating the rest of the mammoth bagels brought to me by my colleague from New York during Jazz Fest (trying to rid myself of these as I am about to go on a nonacoholic six week cleansing and weight loss diet) and was looking at the New York Times magazine before putting the rest of Sunday’s paper in the recycle bin. I saw an ad for Eileen Fisher, a lithe Asian model wearing loose and monochromatic capris and a top. It reminded me of when Steve took me to meet his parents for the first time and I wore an orange shift and humongous turquoise colored earrings. He asked me to wear jeans instead. But stubbornly I went in my orange dress albeit I had lost my desire for my outfit not too long after we were in the car headed down that boring drive to Sacramento. He always lusted over the Eileen Fisher ads and I always thought they were the most boring clothes I could imagine despite the gorgeous quasi Asian or silver haired middle aged beauties who donned them in magazines.

I bought a pair of Eileen Fisher capris just the other day, they are grey, the most neutral color you can wear and I did so because I’m fat and nothing fits me, and so these neutralizing, slimming capris were a temporary bandaid to this problem I seem to be having. A woman at the gym who is thinner than she should be said, “I’m ten years older, we all went through that patch right at menopause, early 50s, the thickening middle, you will come out of that trough. We all did.” She then said, “Now I’m too thin.” That’s when I stopped listening to her, any person who ever complains to me about being too thin is not to be listened to in my estimation.

I then read in the same NYT magazine that a character from Eat Pray Love wrote their own memoir, called now a metamoir, and thought this has gone too far, much in the same vein a friend who saw my new froggy shoes said to me the other day, “You have gone too far.” Yet, my niece had said to me over Skype half-jokingly the other day, “You should write a memoir.” I thought, aren’t I doing that? Isn’t that what this is? A blogmoir?

It’s easy to make a buck.  It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.  ~Tom Brokaw

I joined the Re-Bridge group in my neighborhood that is seeking to restore the two historic bridges that cross the bayou because it is a project that is dear to my heart. And even though I have no extracurricular time, I’m making time because I think it is worthwhile. I was thinking about how making a difference starts to carry more weight as you get older. I mean make more money – pishaw, make more time – impossible, but make a difference, perhaps.

The other day when I ran into the mayor of the neighborhood, he asked me to send good vibrations to the woman who had just lost her husband and I came home and lit a candle. He told me that after the funeral the last song they sang was “This Little Light of Mine” and then he saw my message to him with the photo of the candle lit. He said it made a difference.

I was thinking about this and him because I often feel like he is a kindred brother of mine misplaced at birth and replaced here in our wonderful world on the bayou. One thing he is always for me is a bright light in my day. And I thought to myself if I try to be a bright light to anyone’s day then I will have made a difference. So that is my goal.