Today the 100 Men Hall was going to have the most magnificent St. Joseph Altar. Months ago we met to make the cuccidati:
The heart of Mary made by yours truly
There were multiple baking days of Italian cookies with Linda Belou and friends, a beautiful label designed by Ann Madden, and lucky fava beans bought at Central Grocery in New Orleans – we have pounds of them! We were so excited about the altar – alas, COVID-19 isolation made it impossible.
In Sicily, the drought caused a famine and the people prayed to St. Joseph and they were delivered. The fava bean was the crop that grew so it’s considered lucky to keep one in your purse.
We have no famine now – perhaps our abundance is about to be curtailed by this pandemic, but for now, Ann dropped off spicy greens from Bunny’s garden, and Kandi left plump ripe strawberries on her porch for me when I delivered her St. Joseph bag today.
My dad’s name was Joseph so I know St. Joseph watches over me.
I’m watching Ava Duvernay’s When They See Us. It’s a tough one. Tin and I watched the first episode together and I realized it was too much for him; it is too much for me. There is a scene where the family is visiting one of the boys and the mom tells him he needs to have something to look forward to and I paused – huh? – something to look forward to?
What do I have to look forward to?
There are obvious answers – watching my son grow up healthy and strong.
There were the things four weeks ago – seeing the 100 Men Hall flourish. I might have said being able to take a vacation – something along the lines of a camper with Tin, Lord Chill and Stella driving across the U.S. There was a latent desire to build a nest egg for retirement since I’ve depleted my 401k slogging through the last nine years of dwindling contract work.
Something to look forward to is special. When I was young it was about getting my book published. In my 30s and 40s, it was having a child. The future held all the magic.
Now, I don’t really look forward to anything. I hone in on what’s in front of me. I go to sleep each night grateful I made it through the day. I wake up each morning grateful to be in my bed and alive. The 2005 Federal Flood, 2008 Recession, COVID-19 and the 2020 Market Crash are proof tomorrow is and will always be iffy.
On my walk this morning I saw a yesterday-today-and-tomorrow bush in full bloom. That was exciting. The Brunfelsia pauciflora is a nightshade plant endemic to Brazil – there they call it Kiss Me Quick. The flowers last for three days and change color each day – white, pink and purple.
I moved to Bay Saint Louis in July 2018 because I wanted to leave New Orleans. I was in a bad relationship with the city. I remember driving back and forth between Bay Saint Louis and New Orleans and the thought of moving three blocks from the beach sounded perfect.
My friend Laurie said, “Of course it sounds perfect. Everyone wants to live on the beach. But you don’t live on the beach, you vacation on the beach.” No, I told her, I want to live there. And now I do.
This is my happy place even though daily the adventure feels more like slogging through a dense forest jungle than an open air beach. Luckily, I have had so many years to perfect noticing what’s good. Today on my stroll through town, which is mostly empty since we are shut in for the COVID-19 epidemic, I noticed a house with a sign – The Happy Place – then blocks later I saw another house with a similar sign. It’s confirmed – when three or more declare a place Happy, so mote it be.
I began writing this blog one year before the beginning of the end. It was 2004, and I had gone to New Orleans from San Rafael to be near my mother, whose health was spiraling downward. My friend needed a dog and house sitter for the summer, and it proved the perfect respite from my too busy life in the Bay Area. I would walk to the dog park every morning by Cabrini and meet my friends with their dogs. Life moved slower, disconnected, and easier. By May the next year, my husband and I had packed all of our belongings and moved to New Orleans. It was to be my rehoming, but it became the undoing of everything that had preceded it.
The story of what happened next is now etched into a laundry list of losses – evacuate, 2005 Federal Flood, divorce, house terrors, job loss, hair loss, house loss – so many losses that kept stacking up in what felt like the end of days. I had to work my way out of that worm hole and start looking for the blessings (read: start manufacturing the blessings) and so they became so: adoption, my bald became my beautiful, untethered from a 9-5, I took a leap and bought a blues hall, and on and on.
Now, here in 2020, the year I had declared my year to soar, to really expand my vision, here once again I am met with the end of days as COVID-19 has clipped not just mine, but every person on this planet’s wings. And yet, because I have learned that the end of days is a way of being, I am not scared.
At first, I jumped right into imagining where the opportunities are – the Hall as a home schooling hub, video meditations, outdoor movies where the six feet rule could apply to families on blankets. Then I stopped myself because really the one thing I haven’t done during any of these end of days events is stop.
Now the end of days presents an opportunity to stop – I dreamed last night I was self soothing. I said to myself – there is enough. This came from years of living in the end of days. I have been conditioned and repositioned to survive the end of days
I had a ritual once, it was that I had to write in this blog. I had to write in a journal. I had to record. Capture. Then I had a child and I had to write about that experience on another blog. And then life got really interesting, so layered there was no way to sit down and write a paragraph or a line to describe it, so I crawled inside this cluttered mind of mine and started weeding out, purging, regurging, repurposing. I meditated. I walked. I moved. I shifted.
My rituals have not aligned. My go to’s are not even recognizable. My own self has unfurled.
I spoke today with a friend who has had a breakthrough in a memoir she has been writing for four years. She feels confident she has a book that is publishable. She thinks this is the next step. I say this without cynicism: I don’t want to know the next step because I’m fixated on the raising of the leg to make the step before it is a step before it is a next.
I don’t know how I came to this perspective which is not one – it is a swirling mass of creation once again as if I too have just realized the mist is clearing and now I’m busy creating where once I was waiting.
I’m not good at this blog anymore. I’m not good at writing, at journaling, documenting. I don’t know what I want to say.
The woman you see here lost all that she was, and she is becoming yet again.
Tin tells his friends not to mess with me, he says, “My mom’s the nine-tailed fox.” The nine-tailed fox is a shape shifting fox, beautiful woman, spirit in Naruto, Tin’s favorite Japanese anime.
I tell him I am part my mother and part my father and that dad part is undiluted Latin and Sephardic fire blood. So don’t mistake my good (mom) nature for timid, because the nine-tailed fox will come out and then it is flame on.
