My friends, who have become mothers, have changed irrevocably for the better, in becoming mothers. I visited D then L, and both have more breadth to them in their role as mothers. I am not quite sure what my role is in the world – adopt a child, foster a child, be a great aunt, Big Sister, – it’s a difficult matter at my age to decide to begin when most women my age are…
I’m here to tell you that San Francisco is operating as if Katrina never happened. You’d never know it but life goes on there like nothing ever happened over here. But what’s eerie to me is that as I ran around the Embarcadero, I had this strong ephemeral feeling that San Francisco too could have a major disaster and be changed overnight and that no one can predict when it will happen, but it will…
Picked up a copy of Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” and read it on the plane ride to California. People say we look alike – of course we do, she’s an Irish Catholic and I’m a Spanish Jew – there you have it. There were lots of good and howlingly funny points in her book – one of which echo’d from my hen party the other night and that is “Disturbing the dating ritual leads to…
I dined with a friend who is the original Samantha from Sex in the City – I don’t mean the real person whom the character was based on, I mean that she invented Samantha a long time ago by way of who she is and has become. A fascinating woman whose beauty and irreverance are always a joy to behold. My favorite quote from her is that in her world, it’s all about hands and…
Sat next to a couple from San Diego on the flight to San Francisco, both originally from New Orleans. He had just returned from buying his mother’s house in Eastern New Orleans and plans to move there and rebuild it himself. He said he was a carpenter, then a developer, then in hardware, but that all of his life, or at least the last twenty years, have been preparing him for this moment.
I told G there were three epiphanies in literature that are indelible in my mind – 1) Joyce’s protagonist from “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy’s, epiphany that his wonderful life is an illusion because his wife is still in love with her first boyfriend; 2) the short story – can’t recall title or author, where the widow walks through the rooms of people in the living area and makes her way back to her bedroom and…
When I got out of Blue by the LaLa at midnight upon arriving home from California I wanted to throw my hat up in the air MTM style – E.B.White said “I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” In New Orleans, a helluva good time is always around the corner.
In the book High Fidelity, the protagonist, a man trapped in a boy’s mind says his biggest disappointment was to find out that all women don’t wear sexy, pretty panties. For women, the come-to-Jesus is when we learn that men aren’t omnipotent like our fathers – they’re vulnerable and fragile, just like us. It took me so long to learn that, it makes me wonder where the hell my mind was during my twenties and…
After Swirl we took a delicious bottle of red over to R’s treehouse – she lives in a small apartment up a long flight of stairs – you enter on a porch that is surrounded by trees – where else on a Tuesday night can you sit outside on a beautiful night and find so much to talk about and feel so good to be alive?
I telephoned L, man of mystery, last night after the hen party to tell him he should be happy to know he’s a prince of a man – after being suffused with tales of men behaving badly, men with no manners, men with conduct unbecoming a gentlemen, I thought, phew, man, it’s a wasteland out there and I am either in a bubble or spoiled rotten or whatever – but whatever it is, I’m happy…