Whose life is it anyway?
The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you’ll have. Anne Quindlen
Tatjana and Tin were at the Orange Couch the other day with Tin wearing headphones and watching his Louis Armstrong DVD on the portable. He had his drumsticks in hand and people kept asking if he is a musician.
He’s two and half people! I mean really.
But today when he and I took to the streets to follow the second line from Canal and Rampart down St. Claude to the Healing Center, and he was blowing his toy trumpet, the people kept coming up to him and saying, “I know him, he’s the musician that was at Sound Cafe with Shamarr” or “He’s the musician that was in the Times Picayune” or “He’s the musician I saw Mardi Gras day blowing his sword.”
So maybe at two and a half Tin is the musician.
Perhaps who we are is predestined or formed before we even know what is happening. I was just speaking to a friend who had been visiting Nicaragua, and told her I lived there when I was very young. When I was in the first decade of my life, I lived in Managua and San Salvador and Panama. The imprint those countries left on me is what makes me cling to the humid and fecund city I call home, New Orleans. My friend was describing Nicaragua today and she might have been writing about it back when I was a little girl because I remember my mother crying about the poverty outside while we lived lavishly in a hotel downtown sipping cafe con leche and eating pan dulce. My friend writes:
Nicaragua is a beautiful country with lush landscape (active volcanoes, beautiful pristine beaches, two amazing lakes, etc.) and very original colonial monuments. Managua is very ugly, probably not the same you lived in, which I assume was pre-earthquake (1972). After that and the years of war subsequent to the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the city buildings and landmarks that were destroyed by the earthquake first and the Somoza bombings of the capital in the war, were never reconstructed. Leon and Granada, the two virreinal capitals during the colonial years are in much better shape, especially Granada, which is very well kept due to money provided by foreign tourism and donations from European countries. it is nice that it is not too touristic because if feels authentic and popular.
It is sadly very, very poor with major inequalities between rich and poor and a very inadequate infrastructure. The Sandinista revolution apparently did not accompllshed much and after Daniel Ortega won (or fixed, as many people say) elections in 2006, the danielistas, as they call them to differenciate them from the Sandinistas, have regained control of the country and become the new rich and corrupt. The country is politically tense and divided as Ortega manipulates the media and neighborhoods committees, and the opposition remains divided unable to offer a strong front. Everybody is convinced that Ortega will fix elections again next year.