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Before I sign off into my night death to reawaken into the life that I inhabit, I thought of Tom Waits singing I Wish I Was In New Orleans and this is because a couple I saw on our walk home from the grocery store today said they are leaving New Orleans again because the Universe had pointed them away (again) and I know how most of us here are always leaving New Orleans at some point in our lives, but we stay, I told them maybe because driving home from Whole Foods WWOZ talked about my son being on top of his godfather’s shoulders while they spoke with Herbie Hancock and that experience (all 30 minutes of it) was enough to emphasize what I already know and that is even though I consider New Orleans a dangerous place for a black son, it is the place that most aligns with us inner self and his.

Today, I was on my way home listening to WWOZ and the music was Evan Christopher’s The Remembering Song from his album of the same name. The DJ came on afterwards and said, “I ran into Evan the other morning at Louis Armstrong Park and he had his godson on his shoulders and they had just been speaking with Herbie Hancock.” HIGH

LOW – Before Tin was coming back from school I cleaned out the family pool, which had sand from when one of his younger friends had dumped some in there. My yard guy helped me empty, turn it over, and wash it out, so by the time he had come home it was being filled and pristinely ready. He got in immediately and played. Then I gave him two peanut butter cookies that my friend had brought over for Mother’s Day and a glass of milk. Then I made him a quesadilla. Afterwards he wanted to get back in the pool and he did. While I blinked he had taken a load of sand and dumped it in the pool even though we had just had a conversation about my cleaning the pool and how we don’t put sand in it. LOW

I was reading a book review in the New York Times of Anne Enright’s Making Babies and this was priceless:

It’s actually not that easy to destroy your baby, Enright concludes, and she offers a perversely comforting thought for the worrywarts among us — usually we’re the ones who need protecting. “You must always check a silence,” she writes, “not because the baby might have choked, but because it is in the middle of destroying something, thoroughly and slowly, with great and secret pleasure. It is important to remember this.”

I found out who the mysterious C is, who left me flowers by the site of my natural disaster, and it all made perfect sense. It came from my neighbor around the corner who was spreading some love around the neighborhood. A mitzvah for her, for us.

Today on the way home from Franklinton, we got off at our exit and a car was broken down with a women standing by the trunk speaking to the car in front of me for a very long time while the light was red. When it turned green the car in front drove off but the woman remained, and was now crying. I rolled down my window and asked if I could help – she said she ran out of gas, that her husband was home carless and without a stroller with their two year old, she had just finished her shift as a waitress and thought she could make it home, and that she was having the worst mother’s day imaginable – cars were honking.

I said get in. I took her to the Shell station that was all sold out of gas cans and then to her apartment to see if her neighbor had a gas can, and I said to her along the way the only thing I had at my house was a watering can. Her neighbor didn’t have a gas can and so she grabbed her watering can.

Each time she got out of the car, Tin would ask, “Can I go too?”

She put a gallon of gas in her watering can and we went back to her car where the traffic was backed up for miles and finally she got out and put the gallon in and the car started. Hurray! we both said.

Tin asked, “Where’s she going?”

I said home to restart her mother’s day. I told him in the best possible world it would be nice if we could all perform a mitzvah every day.

He said, “I want pizza.”

Oh the mother lode, it is possibly the weightiest topic we could ever try to articulate. Tin and I drove across the lake to see my aunt and cousins and feast. They know how to put on a spread – roast beef, corn on the cob boiled in coconut milk, cornbread salad, green beans, two kinds of potato salad, rolls, and a dessert table that was buckling under its own weight. I ate too much!!

I brought my aunt a blueberry bush I had picked up at the Green Market on Thursday, and she gave me a Harlequin Glorybower tree that she has been nursing since a sapling off of her big tree. It might be just what was needed for that fallen palm.

My aunt always said she wanted a large family and well, now she has one, they almost total 25 with children, grandkids, and now great grandkids in the works. I’m glad I’m part of her family too.

Her son built her this magnificent bottle tree:

Bottle trees are common sights around New Orleans and the South, but truly my aunt’s is a beautiful one. Knowing that the lore is the bottles capture evil spirits and keep them from getting into your house, I started thinking I need to build my own bottle tree at the LaLa VERY SOON.

Here is a lovely passage from Eudora Welty’s short story Livvie:

Out front was a clean dirt yard with every vestige of grass patiently uprooted and the ground scarred in deep whorls from the strike of Livvie’s broom. Rose bushes with tiny blood-red roses blooming every month grew in threes on either side of the steps. On one side was a peach tree, on the other a pomegranate.

Then coming around up the path from the deep cut of the Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue.

There was no word that fell from Solomon’s lips to say what they were for, but Livvie knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house – by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again.

Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did…

I was telling my aunt and uncle the challenges of a three year old and my uncle laughed uproariously and said, “I can remember when you and your sister were that age and your parents left you with us and you TORE OUR HOUSE APART.” As my Puerto Rican friend said the other day, as you were as a child so shall it be for you as a mother. I guess karma is killer.

My cousins were all headed to the creek after their kids napped – Tin is off naps, remember? – and we were still around when they were ready to go so we were going to join them, but then it was a little nippy and the creek is ice cold so I decided we’d head on to my mother’s grave and then home. In the truck, Tin had a meltdown that there would be no creek and when I tried to explain that it was too cold, because you see there is no sun right now, he looked out the window wistfully and said, “Sun, try to warm up please.”

Meanwhile, we changed out the Christmas flowers and put sunflowers in mom’s grave and since I was holding Zebra and Ellie the Elephant, I placed them by my mom’s headstone to say hello:

Tin, of course, had a meltdown and wanted them back instantly:

And I told him tough luck because this is mother’s day, and that is my mother buried in that grave, and I miss her and want her to experience Zebra and Ellie too and he just had to get over it.

He asked me for a hug, and so you know how the rest of the story goes:

We passed a good mother’s day.

I woke this morning after a long day’s journey through conversation and pizza and there was a pair of panties on the floor, only they were almost small enough for a barbie doll and I realized they belonged to my friend’s daughter who had been in the pool. Sign of the times.

I read in the NYT that Loudon Wainwright said if families didn’t break up there would be no need for art and so I think that pretty much sums it all up. Today is Mother’s Day and I am making the trek to see my mom’s family in the country, where life churns in a different way.

For all the things that I could say about my mother, I still sum up her life under the title track, “Love is my religion.” The rest is just the details.

Here are some pics from the weekend –

Drum circle and Broccato’s lemon ice in Fortier Park on Thursday:

Helm paint with Tin entertaining himself (and others):

Crescent Pie & Sausage where Tin fashioned a phone from his straw to call Zagreb and Mama:

Flower left by mysterious “C” by the gate entrance (site of the fallen tree):

Family pool all blown up (a disturbing piss yellow color):

The magnificent yellow and black butterfly that flew into our garden yesterday:

I took some interesting pics in the last day and a half and will post them when I remember to bring my phone up to where my computer is. It will happen. My friend with her beautiful blog posts Wordless Wednesdays that are always so beautiful they make you want to live her life.

But I digress. Last night, I went to sleep in a tizzy, woke up to write, and went back to bed and slept the sleep of the dead. Not for long of course, because the 3-year-old was up and at em early on. I woke this morning and found a note I had written when I was speaking to my friend, it said, “I’ve watched you have a series of victories,” and that is what I was thinking about while I was bracing for the day.

I decided we were going to Zumba come hell or high water. I text my neighbor and said I appreciate you offering to cut up the palm but I’ll call my worker rather than you do it. (he has enough on his plate.) And so as we were on our way to Zumba I told Tin we needed a plan for the day, but suddenly a plan grabbed us and took us to where I wasn’t even thinking we’d go. The guy came to cut up the palm, so we couldn’t leave, and so Tin and I made breakfast – turkey bacon, scrambled eggs and toast with butter and honey and tangerines. Tin ate like a 300 lb person. We then decided to blow up the family pool and that took a good part of the morning.

Then we decided that people should come join us so I text a few and one responded and next thing you know we had three kids in the pool and adults on the screen porch talking. My good friend whose partner has flown home for an unexpected funeral came by, my friend with her two kids came by and we porch hung from the afternoon till bedtime and it was all very good, very good indeed.

The things is we all have had other lives, but now we have this one. As one of them said, “Everyone is talking about success, but if you think about it, we have all made it, we are successful, it’s not something we are striving for or need to.” Amen sister. In the conversation we found we had way more in common than we would have imagined, the same wild streak, the same sorrow, the same desire for a life that let’s us simply be.

At the very end of it all, one said to me, “I’m sorry we have come here and taken up your time and given you more to do.” I said, “What!” The opportunity to let Tin run with his own peeps and me sit on the porch and talk about life, past present and future with friends in a meaningful way – YOU HAVE BROUGHT ME A GIFT TODAY.

It rained all day, but for me the sun was shining, bright, brighter and brightest. Long live friendship!

I woke way too early, I went back to sleep, and my horoscope for today had a good message so I took it and ran with it.

May 12, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
If your life is a circle (and you’re standing in the middle of it), are you going to spend energy turning around, giving equal focus to your past, present, and future? Of course not — if you did, you would get awfully dizzy awfully fast! Your life is actually more like a line — a very squiggly line, full of odd doglegs and weird little curly cues. But the important thing is, no matter how many times you veer off the path, you have to keep your general direction moving forward!

Actually life is probably more like my Russian friend tells me, it’s a spiral that gets wider and wider and every time you come back around to where you have been you hope to be on the next rung so the intervals take longer; the whole idea being you keep encountering similar challenges in life but as you evolve you meet those challenges further and further apart and you are more evolved when you meet them again.

But the message here is like Tony Soprano once said, “You keep going. You pick up the pieces and go on.”

“And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,
‘You owe me.’
Look what happens with love like that.
It lights up the sky.”
~ Hafiz

Yesterday, I had mapped out a plan for the afternoon into the evening. I was going to go and get paint to fix the front porch that I had had repainted last year, but then the repair man had set the tanks of termite poison on either side of the porch and left two large drum circles that had eaten off the paint that had now attracted debris and bugs and two circles of yuck. They need to be sanded and repainted. I had picked up Tin and it was raining and when we got to the paint store, the man was very nice and worked with me to get the color that had been discontinued figured out and after awhile he whispered, “Are you okay?” The question that everyone wants to ask, does ask, about the fact that I have no hair.

We had a whispered conversation amongst a busy checkout desk about how four years ago he was in his truck when he was struck by an 18-wheeler and a metal rod had gone straight through neck and chest. He showed me the scar, and then he asked in a lower whisper, “Are you depressed?” “Yes,” I told him. Tin was busying himself taking all of the things he could off a shelf while I was doing this, and the guy said, “My daughter is four, I missed out on three years of her life because I was dealing with the accident, surgery and rehabilitation. I’m 50, and I’m just trying get my life back together but it’s hard. My wife developed the same thing with her hair and thyroid that you have about a year and a half ago. It caused a lot of friction in our marriage.” I nodded my head. “It’s hard,” I said.

We started on our way home armed with my plan which was a friend with children had invited us to her house to play and eat pizza till it was time for us to come home and go to bed. My thoughts were on just get through the rest of the day. But Tin wanted pizza now, and so we went over to Crescent Pie and Sausage to get one. We sat outside and I put Bob Marley on my iPhone so that we could make the most out of the fact that it had started raining and the outer tables were getting wet but it was too cold to sit inside. The typical New Orleans scenario. Then the waiter brought the pizza, only it was burned. And unusual for me, I told him so. He said he would take half off. But Tin took one look at the black outer crust and decided he wouldn’t touch it. I painstakingly removed all the burn and then the waiter came back out and offered to bring me something else, macaroni and cheese or the like. I waved him off. Tin drank all his milk, ate a few pieces of the edge charred copa and we left.

It was raining.

We came home. Along the side yard I had planted ginger, some of it hidden ginger that from the bottom blooms the most delicately beautiful pink blossoms. I also planted hydrangeas, a yesterday, today and tomorrow bush that blooms exquisitely and a pink-leaf philodendron, as well as some beautiful bulbs that had already bloomed in the spring. This path has been my solace after we moved to the back and had to start using the side entrance to enter our home.

When the guys had trimmed back the Queen palms beyond recognition, the sun had entered where shade plants were thriving and put them in shock. But they had finally started to find their groove again, something that I felt I was still struggling with.

We had gone upstairs for me to find my wig and put it on. I’m in my “sick of being bald” mode and so I wanted to do something to cheer myself up. When we came downstairs, the dogs came running and knocked me over to get inside and I could tell that something was wrong, but wasn’t sure what. At some point, I looked down the side yard thinking that maybe in that short period, Loca might have dug to China again and I saw these large palm fronds lying in the side and it looked strange but I couldn’t tell why.

Tin wanted to go inside the front of the house and I let him, even though the house is pristine and clean awaiting our next guests, while I walked to the side yard to see what about the picture wasn’t looking right. The front Queen palm had broken off at the base and fallen in a straight line crushing all the plants underneath along the whole swath of the garden. I tried to move it but couldn’t. I called my neighbor and while he was coming, I went to check on Tin who had pulled all the cushions off the couches and everything out of the drawers and the living room was a huge disaster area.

My neighbor came and said we couldn’t lift it but had to chop it up where it lay and that the plants underneath were already destroyed so that it could just wait till tomorrow. It was raining. I came inside and began picking up the living room and just cried. I text my friend and said we can’t come over, Tin is too wild, and I’m too depressed. Then I set about making him dinner, reading him a book about being adopted, brushing his teeth and put him to bed about an hour and a half later.

I sat on the screen porch as he took everything out of all his drawers and threw it around his room. A very good friend called and said to me, “Of all the people I’ve known in my life, you are solid to the core. If anyone could get through anything it would be you.” She went on to say that things had come easy to her, her house was paid for, she barely had to work and when she did it was work she enjoyed and most of the time she played golf. But that she had watched me all my life work hard, do everything, and that she admired me. I cried again to have a friend who would call at such a time in my life and shore me up. One of the many silver linings in an otherwise very rainy day.

Into everyone’s life, a little rain must fall.

I got in bed later and picked up my Frankl book, he was describing how in the concentration camp, it was those prisoners who could not visualize a tomorrow that perished the quickest. I went to sleep and tried to visualize my tomorrow – Saturday was going to be a long day of figuring out what to do with a 3-year-old hell bent on destruction. On Sunday, we would drive to see my beloved aunt and family, the part of my family who rose to the occasion when my mother was dying and didn’t harass me, but just showed up and supported me. For that, I will always be indebted to her and love her. It’s supposed to rain all weekend but I visualized us in the country on Mother’s Day, my aunt’s expansive garden with all its beautifully tended flowers, lots of cousins for Tin to play with, a delicious feast spread on the counter tops to enjoy, and a place of love to give me shelter from the storm.