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Today, I called the realtor and told him I’m thinking of selling the house. He walked me through scenarios and I hung up the phone. I then went and picked up Tin and we played in the park and I looked around the historic Irish Channel and thought, okay maybe we could move closer to his school. Maybe.

Then I came home and we went about our evening life. I made dinner and we sat at the table and the house was freshly cleaned and the windows gleaming. And beyond the large rectangles of glass, the gloaming was descending on the bayou and the lights were twinkling and we were talking and I felt a stone in my stomach.

The babysitter came with her mother’s boyfriend and he said nice house, and I said, “I called a realtor today because I’m thinking of selling it.” Like that. He said, “Oh that would be a shame. It’s so beautiful.” I said, I know.

I then went out and on the way to the book event that I was headed to, I called a friend who was in the middle of dinner and said, “I called a realtor to see about selling the house.” And she said, “You have been processing this for a while.” I then called my Aunt who is now in charge of being my surrogate mother since my mother no longer answers the phone where she has passed on to and my Aunt said the same thing.

At the book event, I read my essay which is a synopsis of my dream of being a writer and how I dreamed I would be the Madonna of novel writing but instead I started blogging in 2004 after amassing many great rejection letters.

Much earlier in the day, I went for a walk with a dear friend who had cancer some years back and fought her way back only to lose everything she had in Katrina then she fought her way back from that too. And she told me she gave up the Great life to be a Bohemian and never looked back. I spoke with my life coach after walking with my friend and told her I wanted to discuss the house and my emotional attachment to it and she walked me through a scenario of losing it and it felt like, Free at Last, Free at Last, Great God Almighty I am Free at Last. Not like, OH MY GOD HOW COULD I EVER LEAVE THIS HOUSE, which I thought would be how it would feel.

For see, this house represents a dream. A dream to return to New Orleans and raise a child and be in a lovely home surrounded by beauty. I think it is someone else’s dream that I stole. A friend in California said she imagined every time I went home to New Orleans that I was going back to this beautiful old family home while instead I was going to a slum in Metairie off Veteran’s Highway where my mother lived in a rundown apartment building on a street that ran from Vets to the I-10, which was ironically named Independence. So I hijacked this person in California’s vision of who I was and made it my own. And this isn’t the first time I have gotten my identity through something akin to mail order.

Here was my new dream: I will go home this way. I will live in a big beautiful house (luck threw in the bayou) and I will have a child and I will be happy.

I drove home from the book reading and went into the In and Out to buy a pack of cigarettes. (No judgement okay, I’m coping.) And I ran into an old neighbor from the American Can and what are the first words out of his mouth? “How’s the house?” and I said, “Harold, I called a realtor today.” And this grown man, older than me, started crying in the In and Out.

We had to walk outside so that I could comfort him. Yes, that is my life. My life coach thinks I have gotten more enjoyment from watching other people enjoy my house that I have and along the way I’ve forgotten how to enjoy it myself and I could, actually, just toss this burden aside, bury the $500K I sunk into this house, and live a new dream in a new house, live the life that awaits me, rather than the one I envisioned (or someone else envisioned).

So for now, I’ve poured a glass of wine and will go outside on the front porch and smoke a cig and contemplate the bayou and new dreams. And I might cry.

A while back I received an email from a publisher collecting essays on New Orleans so I wrote one and sent it in. Recently, I received an email saying the book, New Orleans by New Orleans was published and was being launched and I could even read it at the event.

I went, curious because more than anything, I couldn’t remember what I had written.

I even thought this evening of not going because I was in a mood.

Then a friend text me from the event and said, “Did you know that you’re in this book that is being launched here tonight?”

So I was lucky enough to move out of the long line I was in into the author’s line and get a book by the hair of my chinny chin chin, because they sold out. Therefore, I was able to read what I had written before accepting the notion of reading it to others.

Interestingly enough, because it/I mentioned my mother, I actually felt her there beside me while I read. And more interestingly, in the essay I was half heartedly bemoaning that instead of becoming this great writer, I am a character in books in New Orleans without ever having published one of my own. And there I was, reading from a published book, with my writing in it, and I felt, well authorial.

This happened to come on the heels of being at the Smoothie place the other day after Tin’s swim class when I witnessed two teenage girls trying to park their parent’s car and ramming into the car beside it and then trying to just drive off. Me and another woman of a certain age called them out on it to which the girl said to me, “Is that your car?” in a very sarcastic tone and I said, “No, but I’m an adult and you are a child and you hit that car and we need to find the owner.”

The woman who was my compadre in this event turned out to be a woman named Lorraine Neville – she said, “Neville, like the New Orleans musicians” and believe me, I had heard Neville the first time she said it. When I told her my name, she said and I quote, “The writer?”

Huh?

So tonight as I was listening to the authors and artists reading their works, and waiting my turn to go up and read mine, I was listening to Kimberly Nagle read her essay, which she introduced herself by saying she writes plays and would love to see one of hers performed in this city that she loves. I was listening to the beginning of the essay and halfway through she mentioned her daughter’s chemotherapy, casually almost, and my ears perked up.

Now let me tell you why. The woman seemed vibrant, not downtrodden, she had a gleam in her eyes, not the downcast look of someone burdened by the unfair life of having a child with cancer, and I looked at her as she read instead of following the words in my newly acquired book and I felt like I wanted to hug her. I would have walked up to the podium but it seemed not the thing to do.

So afterwards, we exchanged autographs and I hugged her. And then I hugged her again. When I walked out I realized I had probably overhugged. Since I lost my hair most people have thought I had cancer and have hugged me, and now people hug me so much, I’m getting used to it. But I always feel like this is a little odd, how much I’m being hugged these days now that I’m bald, and yet, I too, have become a hugger.

I know you are busy.
I know tis the season.
I know you have lots of things to read on your bedside table.
I know. I know. I know.

But take a few minutes and listen to these poets reading some damn moving poetry and you will be replenished as if someone gave you more time and more peace in your heart.

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

We’re nearing that time when school lets out and Christmas comes and then New Year’s and then we rewind and repeat. Or rather this year, we move down our new path.

I wonder how many of you had a transitional year the likes of mine? I came out the gates of 2012 with a roar, ready to rock n roll, and suddenly got derailed and rethreaded and miraculously, re-energized.

This has been a year for the books or The Book about how losing is gaining and about thinking different.

Now sitting quietly and looking at the lights streaming across the bayou, and thinking of what the next couple of weeks have in store – visits from friends – visits with friends – and setting intentions for 2013 that are so different from those of 2012 that it feels as if I shed my snakeskin and emerged from under a boulder.

It’s December 17th and there is a fat crescent moon hanging in the sky. The big storm that was supposed to pass through last night didn’t come. The cold front that was pushing through is stalled. The lights on the bayou are as soft and dreamy as they’ve ever been.

And so here we go. I was speaking to a friend tonight who is finishing the Wire with one last episode to go. We were talking about Sex in the City and I told her about my rewatching the first season after my divorce, sick on my sofa on New Year’s Eve and how it all made me so sad. But, she said, the beauty was that it was dark, and they always lost, but they had each other to make it through.

And so for all of those people who helped me through this year, I’m grateful to you in so many ways that I can’t count them.

I was speaking to a friend of mine who said that her now husband told her many many years ago when they had first started seeing each other that he found an old prayer card in a gutted out home that he was working on and he prayed for nine days that she would find her higher path to happiness.

She said she would marry him on the 9th day.

Everybody has something to say about religion these days or even spirituality – what it means, what is doctrine, what is not, what to call God, how to pray. I believe that I was placed right here at the LaLa so that I could walk to my temple every morning – City Park.

The other morning I witnessed an anhinga in his gospel gown spreading his wings to his congregation of turtles who had assembled on the log to hear him preach. Amen, I said to them, AMEN.

Saturday we feasted on the bounty of our garden. We cut a big thick stalk of broccoli, we picked mustard greens, we harvested the last of the basil and we made a delicious lunch. Sauteed onion with greens, steamed broccoli, and pasta pesto with brown rice pasta. Yum.

There is no joy as taking food from your own yard to put on your table and turn into a meal. A meal that deserved a blessing – which Tin said.

Welcome, welcome,
Welcome to our table
Quiet Quiet
We all fold hands together,
Blessings on the blossoms,
Blessings on the fruit,
Blessings on the leaves and stems,
Blessings on the root,
Blessings on our meal.

Today on this beautiful sunny day, we made homemade granola for Christmas gifts, we jumped on the trampoline, Tin helped his neighbor make orange muffins, a friend came over and put his hair in twists and showed me how, and we watched Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in claymation yet again. I read a post on Facebook from a woman I know suffers from an auto-immune disease, she made a plea that you would never know that she is ill because her illness doesn’t manifest itself outwardly but she hoped others could understand that she has rough patches that they can’t understand.

Similarly, I spoke with a woman who gave up her son for adoption 54 years ago, and was convinced he hated her until she met him two years ago and he was filled with love. She went on to parent an adopted child herself, well two of them, again, you never know how someone might be suffering on the inside what doesn’t appear on the outside.

At the end of the day, as we basked in the sunshine and enjoyed our friends who are family, it was another day to be grateful that we didn’t wake this morning after a tragedy, we woke this morning with love at our fingertips and that alone is worth bowing your head to say thanks for – as someone said, if you said one prayer in your life, let it be “thanks.”

We put up the menorahs today – all 13 of them including the 14th which is the electric one in the window. And Tin kept saying he didn’t want Hanukkah to be over. Duh, neither do I, how do you get over having all those candles lit every one of these dark nights that always come too soon to be put away.

Tonight, instead, we had a special visit from Tin’s godfather’s parents, who came as they always do, bearing gifts – answering the question of what to do on the 9th night of Hanukkah – have visitors!

Tomorrow is Evan’s homecoming anniversary, actually his father’s birthday as well, and so it was a special joy to have everyone here and reading the train book that his mother brought – one that is not a Thomas Train book but an actual children’s book about trains – no faces – no creeped out underlying moral message – just pure simple train fun.

One sure way to beat the post-Hanukkah blues – be around people who love you and whom you love.

Last night, I went to see Anna Karenina and was looking forward to a date night with myself. Tatjana has been in Croatia for almost two weeks and it’s been difficult to get any time alone so I treated myself to a night out. Sunday meditations have been suspended, night time television watching has been a non event as I usually follow Tin to bed, and Heidi’s walks have been suspended or nearly abandoned.

I hadn’t read anything about the movie although I had definitely read Tolstoy’s novel. The movie was not what I expected, it was like dramas in dramas sometimes on stage and sometimes in character and at the end it was a story of a woman who feels trapped in her own life – stay with the man she doesn’t love because of her child, leave with the man she does love although he is a philanderer, or kill herself. Dear reader, we know how this ends.

Later, I met a friend at Bridge Lounge who had been watching Lincoln in the next theater. Bridge Lounge was packed with a movie crew celebrating the end of a shooting schedule. There was a big screen with images from the movie they are making and the cast and crew were all in a celebratory mood. Since they had taken over the place, it was almost like I was in the movie too. Again a movie within a movie within a life, within eternity.

It makes me wonder about what happens when you busy yourself daily and miss some of your stage cues, when to line up behind something or someone and when to walk offstage, when to bow, when to cry, and most of all, when to sing and dance, when to laugh.