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My friend Antonio makes the best flan, second only to my mom’s flan. And I love flan. So when he brought a flan to the Hanukkah party, I quickly stashed it away in the fridge for me, myself, and I. Then every time I go by the fridge it calls to me – take a spoon and eat a bite, it demands of me.

Luckily two friends stopped by last night to light the menorah and have a glass of wine with me on the back porch (with the table top heater that is now starting to chap my lips) and I served them each a slice of flan – everyone agreed the best flan in the world!

So glad I was able to share what was left of that flan because it was going to be me wearing that flan on my butt for weeks to come if I hadn’t.

Yesterday, the end of the week, I was finishing up some emails when I saw that two people had been killed at an elementary school in Connecticut, before I could finish reading 27 people were dead, 20 of them children. I just started crying. And kept crying until I went and picked up Tin from school.

Today had been a special day, the one earth one voice organization brought their glass globe to the Waldorf School and performed Ise Oluwa, an African song that says that which the creator has made can never be destroyed. Around the world millions will sing it at the exact same hour on December 21 – the end of the Mayan calendar.

Tin was singing that song as another school was undergoing an horrific tragedy.

I went to pick him up at school and even then still couldn’t stop crying to think about how those families will be able to recover from the horror. I was burning mad about gun laws and how Louisiana refused to pass more restrictive gun laws in this last election and yet it cut the budgets to mental health care institutions. Tears of sadness, tears of grief, tears of anger all roiling and then I saw Tin and got down on my knees to hug him.

After playing in the park and speaking to other parents about this horror, I drove him to La Jouet and let him pick out any Thomas the Train he wanted. He picked Spencer, the grey one.

Hello God, are you out there, are you listening anymore? ~Dolly Parton

I hate guns – I loathe guns – I believe that all guns should be destroyed. I do. I do. I do.

In China children were harmed by a knife wielding maniac today while in the U.S. of A, 27 are dead from two gunmen. Hello God, how horrible, how tragic, how supremely unfathomable.

Suffer the little children. Dear God.

I’ve added an extra lyric:
Hello God, are we out of our minds
We’re just sick here
No one can speak about it anymore
We’re in great need of gun control

Two monks were once traveling together down a muddy road.
A heavy rain was falling. Coming around the bend,
they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash,
unable to cross the intersection.

“Come on, girl,” said the first monk. Lifting her
in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

The second monk did not speak again until that night
when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer
could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,”
he said. “It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I left the girl there,” the first monk said.
“Are you still carrying her?”

A friend and neighbor makes a holiday CD every year. She spends a month really thinking about it; she’s a musician. Every year they have a theme and this year it is a compilation of Paul Simon songs. I was listening to it on the way to bring Tin to school this morning and was floored by his lyrics – “the nearer the destination the more you’re slip slidin’ away.”

As I drove, Late in the Evening came on and I was singing away and Tin said, “More.” He particularly liked the part where I belted out, “It was late in the evening, and I blew that room away” as I played air guitar. Simon wrote that song based on a dream sequence he had had as a teenager with a vision to become a rock star. Imagine that, he did become one. Well pop star, rock star, something like that.

The gift of music is possibly the best of all. I passed a guy in a truck drumming his steering wheel and getting down and I looked at the people of New Orleans beginning their Friday and thought, yep, New Orleans is my drug, and music is truth.

Today at Waldorf, The Good Earth Singers are inviting us all to SING together with 15 million people around the world, at the same time, the same song, Ise Oluwa (“That which the creator has made can never be destroyed”), from the Yoruba Tribe in Ghana. Awesomeness.

One of the silver linings of throwing a party besides the party itself is getting things cleaned that otherwise wouldn’t be. Having removed the toaster, the coffeemaker and the rest of the daily items that line the marble countertops, it was time for their semi annual cleaning and bulletproofing. So piece by piece I started last night after Tin went to bed. And then as is evident for the change in me these days, I stopped and went to bed. In yesteryears I would have been up finishing the job. Now things happen in piecemeal.

I was speaking to E yesterday about how relationships happen in time and place and each one holds only that in its wrappings, trappings and memories. It’s very difficult to look at where you are now through the eyes of where you were before. Albeit more of me is revealed in each relationship and so little by little, half a century later you began to know who you were as well as who you are.

These are not just in the romantic relationships, these apply to friendships, family and your relationship to place and time as well. Often, during these months of coping with Hashimoto’s and baldness, I have referenced the old me – the flaming red hair, the energizer bunny, the all giving, all caring and trying to summon that person into this new time has been jarring. Accepting the change in me has helped me refocus on the here and now.

I caught up with an old colleague yesterday, someone who I have history with, someone who was shocked to see a photograph of me as I am now. She’s moving on from where she was, and both of us were in agreement that change is inevitable and there is a time to move on and grow into the new self that awaits us.

I spoke to a friend who had recently had a miscarriage. She had hoped against her age to have another child and the miscarriage brought disappointment and readjustment in her view of what lies ahead.

This morning, I woke at 5 am and went outside with my coffee to the front porch to gaze at Venus still strong in the night sky. For about a half hour, there was silence, and then a din arose behind the houses, from the I-10 that runs through New Orleans, and with it the sounds of day waking up to the last day of the work week. TGIF.

Sonnet (With Children)
My love is like a deep and placid lake…
Not now, sweetie, Daddy’s busy, OK?
OK: my love’s a deep and peaceful lake…
Here, Daddy can fix it. All better. Now go play.
Um, my love, yes—a rose that blooms in spring…
You tell her Daddy says she has to share.
My love’s… My love’s a lake that blooms—no, that springs…
On the wall?! Her what?! No, wait—I’ll be right there.
OK—love, lake, spring, joy, flower bedding…
And why is the house so quiet now, I wonder?
Ah, fuck it! (Whoops! Don’t say that!) You know where I’m heading.
Don’t touch a thing—I need to get the plunger!
Forgive me, love, but time, as you know, is ticking.
So here: no you, no joy, no life. No kidding.

GABRIEL SPERA
The Rigid Body
The Ashland Poetry Press

I was coming back from the doctor listening to WWOZ and an Australian singer songwriter was on and her voice was so beautiful. She said that when she first came here she knew she wanted to come back and write music here because it was so different from Sydney and the music is so real here.

The DJ talked about how the music in New Orleans is about truth and it is music that is handed down from generations and it speaks about culture and families.

Yes, indeed.

Ahh, the agony and ecstasy of motherhood. Tin loves his presents when they are what he wants, and when they’re not he is an ogre. So we were moving into a downward spiral of him having consequences and losing the trains for a day that he wants and not getting the presents he doesn’t want because of his attitude.

One more opportunity to remind myself that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and that as adults we’ve learned to hide our disappointment.

So we’ve decided that we will make homemade granola together and bring some gifts to friends and he will get to see the joy of giving, and learn by them the joy of receiving.

And I said, we will write the thank you notes together to the people who went out of their way to buy and bring you a present because they love you.

He said, “I’m going to write you a thank you card.”

There you have it. Ecstasy.

You take any Wednesday and figure out what you are going to do with it. My morning started with going into Tin’s nursery like many Jewish mothers do and presenting Hanukkah to the uninitiated. It’s not about presents, it’s about telling history and remembering. The story of Judah Maccabee and the liberation of Jewish belief. It doesn’t really translate to nursery kids but it is nonetheless the story.

I then came home and worked on a project with Blueshift, the company I have aligned with to continue to do the work that I love with people I love. Refreshing.

And then I went to the Steiner study group that is reading Education as a Force for Social Change. And we spoke about Steiner’s vision of how economy has been built around competition instead of cooperation and perpetuated by academics in universities who teach what is doctrine and make it more so. And we talked about how there were these single cell organisms in the water and they decided to cooperate and through that decision came human beings as we know them today. Not through competition but through cooperation these cells got together and created everything that we know of human life today.

Tin had a tough day today. He didn’t appreciate the gift he received at Hanukkah. And he didn’t appreciate the friend who stopped to give him a gift. It was disconcerting to say the least. I polled parents, I searched the web and the answer was always the same, don’t give too many gifts (we don’t), expect your child to say thank you (we do), and help them to understand that this is important but give it to them in small doses because they are small.

Then I came home and put the covers on Tin and learned that another young black man was shot dead in the middle of the day. To think that this has no effect on all of us is ludicrous. And so, what are we going to do is the question. Someone commented on Facebook that it is the mentoring that is lacking for these young boys. Yes, it is, and …