Art imitating life
So where did I leave off? Was it somewhere where I was tip toeing through the tulips and espousing grandiose feelings of joie de vivre? Perhaps, or if not, let’s start there. I’ve come to realize that life is what you make of it and your body and your mind can be transformed by your will. Seriously.
Does it happen often? Not often enough. I’d have to say that four days into Tin loving on me like there’s no tomorrow has made me feel claustrophobic – not just for me, but for him. I feel like telling him, honey you need to get out more because his clinginess has become unnatural to his normal independent self but I understand where he’s coming from so I’m indulging but only to a point. I’m loving on him like crazy but my son is the constant negotiator and so I’m also aware of how he is playing me when he’s still just a little kid.
So today I insisted that he go out to the boat parade with me and go swimming with his friend. He kicked and screamed, but he did it. And I got to sit on Rodney’s porch and have an ice cold Amstel Light brought to me as I chatted with friends/neighbors going to and fro. Across the bayou, almost as an after thought, was the LaLa, still and quiet, no one on the porch.
From Rodney’s porch, Tin was still in command – he wouldn’t enter the house and wouldn’t indulge anyone in conversation except a little chihuahua name Pip he took a liking to.
I conversed with Rodney’s neighbor – a young man about to have his fourth child – you heard right. He just got home from working on Bourbon Street and he was spent. It’s Essence, he reminded me. It’s hard to believe Essence is going on right now – today was chock a block full of talks I really wanted to go hear but I was trapped like rodentia so I had to do other things. As the boat parade got underway and friends of mine in crazy costumes cruised by in canoes and pirogues, I instead, left the comfort of the porch and went into the backyard to take Tin swimming with his friend.
And swim he did – like a fish. He chased me in the pool and he was faster than me (ahem, I was going backwards, but still). And so I realized that here we are, he and I, and everyone else, in life, in it, doing it, and again, I was asked if I was his grandmother, and I said, no, I just became a mom at 50 so I’m his mother – and yes, whatever this looks like from the outside it is very great on the inside.
I left the bayou, my old home and drove to my new home where yes, another dog had left a gift for me to pick up and yes, there is no glorious bayou outside my window, but inside is home, and it feels like it, and all of the things that await us in our precious life have already taken root, and outside there are fireworks overhead and I felt the need to say that today, it has been a good day, and tomorrow will be another.
This photograph I took – it’s artistic inclination purely happenstance – a product of some glitch that created art – as if this photograph were a mirror revealing the constant reframing my life has demanded of me and the constant beauty that erupts spontaneously:
