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The other name for pay it forward is karma and yes, there is a bank of karma, and you best have enough chits in it. Lately, I’ve had such an outpouring of manna from heaven and I feel first, lucky, and second, that I deserve it. A friend was over at my house for a meeting on Sunday, she said I have a cabinet, I said I need a cabinet – next thing you know there are movers and a cabinet to install in our European kitchen we are adding to the LaLa.

Today on the way home from taking Tin to school on Louisiana Avenue, there was a dog in the middle of the road. A pit bull. He wouldn’t budge. I honked to get the car coming in the right lane to stop – she stopped. Then on the shoulder another truck stopped. Everyone was telling the dog to get out of the road. The men came out of the car repair shop and told the dog to get out of the road. Finally I got out of my car and the dog came up to me wagging its tail and wanting love. He followed me to the sidewalk and the car repair guys said that he had been hanging around the last few days, in the road. The other truck driver said, “Seeing this a lot, people can’t afford their dogs anymore and letting them loose.” I said, “Don’t look at me, I have two dogs, two cats, and a two year old – TOO MANY.” But the dog wouldn’t leave my side and was wagging his tail.

Another truck stopped, and he said do you know whose dog that is and I said yours. He said it looks like a good dog. And I laughed, he is a good dog and today is his and your lucky day. I kept petting the dog while he made a leash and then came and pet him himself. Then he put him in the car and everyone drove off with a smile on their face. Some good is going to come to that dog. He was a sweetie.

It made me think about my dogs that have been driving me batty – Loca dug up my side and back yard. Grrrr. She was six months old when someone let her out of a car in front of Swirl. And there she was and there I was and now that is four years later. She hasn’t changed much – she’s smart as hell and crazy as a loon. But she’s mine. Whatyagonnado?

I told a friend that I just said yes to the universe and that I was ready to receive and wham, bam thank you mam, the universe started spinning good things my way at such a velocity it has made my head spin. She said that she told her children while they were growing up that every time she thought it was the end of the world, the universe provided. Good to keep in mind.

If you can fog a mirror, then you are hearing a lot of negative press these days, and it is infesting your brain. Two years ago, we were maintaining our houses the same way we are doing it now, only a little more joyously. Yesterday, when Rudy stopped by to tell me more about the termite treatment I need and the boards that I need replaced and the flashing that should have been put in over the openings of the screen porch, I stared at him dumbly.

In the past days, I’ve had more friends complaining about their house woes – the maintenance that they can’t afford – the worry that it will never end. Well guess what? It never ends. When you live in a harsh climate like New Orleans, you must keep up as if it were your life boat that needed sanding and polishing and oiling and sails mending on a continuous basis. You didn’t sign up for this – think again. You did.

Most of my friends wish they hadn’t bought a house now, wish they were living in an apartment, it’s such a strange string of conversations that I’m almost starting to think they are all absurd. Every one of my friends lives in beautiful houses, houses they have converted to homes, and yet, now they regret and fear the future in those homes. Hey, I’m one of them for goodness sakes, my LaLa, the ark that I have been building and fixing and maintaining suddenly turned on me one day like a snake that came out of nowhere. I got up one day and said enough of this, I’m done.

But now what was the next thing that came to mind – now what. So we started thinking about the now what and things started gelling and opening up and we saw a way that this could all work if we tweaked this and did that and suddenly looking into the future didn’t appear as rough seas as we had imagined. Actually it almost seemed like clear sailing but we aren’t going to give into that illusion too readily.

The mind is a terrible thing to have when it is hard wired into popular sentiment – when everyone is up, you do foolish things, when everyone is down, you want to kill yourself. Sometimes it is far better to be a contrarian and march to a different drum, but it takes measures – screens, smokes and mirrors – and it takes a creative mind to imagine your life differently than the status quo or convention. You either approach it as liberating or scary as hell – but I am going to advocate for being the outlier – I think you can always win at a game you invent.

The other day I was walking through City Park and noticed how the light was changing, coming in at the horizontal slant that signals fall. The ducks were leaving shadows in their wake. I sent a tweet to City Park saying fall is beautiful in City Park or the like, and they tweeted back, take a photo we have been looking for fall. I wrote back “how do you photograph shadows and light?”

This morning the lagoons had a low mist hanging in the air softening the water’s edge and trees that grow along the banks. It’s true that fall turns us back to a soft focus, the harsh glare of summer is gone, and we get more misty eyed and nostalgic as we see kids going back to school and recall our own school days. It sort of makes you want to say life was simpler then, but was it?

Tin was messing around with the lock on the truck door the other day when we were driving to school and I remembered a time we were headed across the lake to see my Mama, my mother’s mom, and I opened the door and almost fell out but my mother grabbed me and clutched me so hard to her as she shut the door that I can still remember her heart beating in my ears.

It’s funny how a simple change in light can stir memories such as these.

When you wake up in the morning and the first thing that crosses your mind is what a beautiful day, you know that you are getting it right.

I got up this morning and walked the dogs in the pitch black of the morning and then came home to prepare Tin’s breakfast and his lunch. His carefully assigned breakfast and lunch. Monday is Egg and Toast day for breakfast and it is Tuna Fish and Cracker Day for lunch. These assigned days have helped figure things out and keep the whining at bay. Only after fixing all of this, I went to go wake him up for school and found a sick little boy who had fallen off his bed and was sleeping on top of all of his stuffed animals on the floor.

Sick Day!

After attempting to make yet one more meal that didn’t get eaten, I gave up and came upstairs to power through emails and work and since an email got jammed in my outbox and kept me spending most of the morning trying to get it out, I just decided at some point that this day wasn’t going to go as expected.

But it is another BEAUTIFUL day here in New Orleans. Thank goodness for that.

Yesterday was a glorious day here in New Orleans and a neighbor/friend text me – Bike Ride? – and an hour later we were careening down the bike path that follows the bayou out to Lake Ponchartrain. Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe the ride (a large Louisiana pelican followed us in flight for most of the way) and there was even more reward when we got to the Lake and rode up the ramp to have the City on one side and the Lake on the other bookending our view.

How I miss my bike rides on long lazy Sunday mornings and I missed my pals at Swirl who were riding the MS ride this weekend – what perfect weather to camp out! Alas, my life has changed, so a stolen bike ride to the lake on a Sunday afternoon was good enough.

On the way back, we passed some men staging something by the lagoon in City Park and they had big cartons that looked like fireworks. Later that night, about 10:00, we heard thunderous booms and went outside to the bayou and looked towards the Magnolia Bridge and over by the park fireworks were lighting up the sky in brilliant red, blue, green and sparkly white – amazing! A perfect end to a perfect day.

The NOLA Timebank is up and running and today the NYT posted an article about a bartering system that is starting up in Greece. It all goes to show you that when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, people get pretty damn resourceful pretty damn quick. Good to know.

Remember the saying that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Argentina, China gets a cold, well that is the world we are living in – we are all globally realizing that our economic systems are stressed, our governments are lame, we’ve mortgaged our tomorrows, and a big WTF is crossing the mind of everyone who thought they had a plan for the future.

It almost makes our parents seem like they knew better than us – you know the parents, like mine, who didn’t plan for the future, who didn’t do all the right things, who instead just lived their lives day to day for enjoyment or for whatever was in their heads at the moment. We looked on them as baby boomer children with pity – tut tut – what did they know?

Seems like they knew.

I think back when I was a young child left with my sister and our nanny, Annie, the coifed water heater that was in our kitchen. My mother had painted a face and tied an apron around it and so was born our nanny.

It was by accident that we stumbled upon the Waldorf School and enrolled Tin there, not that we hadn’t always heard good things about the school but honestly prior to Tin I was blissfully unaware of schools except for knowing that it was an ordeal for parents everywhere in the United States. I knew nothing of Waldorf’s philosophy only that it had been conceived in Europe and had franchised out throughout Europe and America.

The philosophy at the school is that a child should not be “woken up” too soon; by pushing a child at an early age the child does not learn necessary skills that come through appropriate developmental stages. I was reading The Te of Piglet and the chapter on the Eeyore Effect. When it arrives at the Educator Eyeores, it talks about an idea of teaching where the goal is to impress the maximum number of Unpleasant Things upon children at the minimum possible age.

Mentally, emotionally, and physically, the human being is designed for a long childhood, followed by a short adolescence and then adult-hood – the state of responsible, self-reliant wholeness. What we see children experiencing now, however, is an ever-shorter childhood, followed by a premature, prolonged, adolescence from which ever fewer seem to be emerging.

I forget now and then that Tin is only two and a half and when I remember, I want to stop the world and just hang out with him here, now. It reminds me of Alan Watts’ Music and Life.

I have delusions of grandeur and often thought on returning to New Orleans that I would become a columnist at the Times Picayune much in the same way that Herb Caen was for the San Francisco Chronicle. I had dreams of singing the praises of this grand old dame of a city and its denizens and culture. Instead I came home to monumental changes – Katrina and the subsequent Federal Flood, the decline of newspaper readership, circulation not to mention columnists. And so I blogged thinking that through this medium I could accomplish much of what I wanted to do.

This morning the Times Picayune has an article about Dorothy Dix, a writer and columnist from New Orleans who was the first advice columnist, one of the first highly paid female writers and a New Orleans gal. She lived in a house across from where I lived on General Pershing back in the day, which was inhabited by a couple with a black standard poodle. I walked by Dix’s house everyday and thought about her and thought about the writing life.

It is a life that needs time – time to contemplate and to reflect – which does not really equate to the life I live now. My reflections are done in the space of seconds and not hours or days, my contemplation is only accomplished on dog walks, bike rides or drives across town. I’m a woman and writer and mother in search of time to be.

Dix had Ten Rules of Happiness that was reprinted often and everyone of her rules have crossed my mind, my writing, my blog at one time or another, mostly multiple times, mashed up in many scenarios. My ten rules could be summed up this way:

Fake it till you make it

Be grateful

Laugh at yourself – whatyagonnado?

Nod at the Cassandras

Quit catastrophizing

Forgive – especially yourself

Throw a party

Don’t wallow

Perform a mitzvah

Engage in work you love