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A girlfriend of mine who has proven to be more adept at asking for what she wants from relationships than me sent me this: “Oprah once repeated something one of her guests said that sticks with me: When someone shows you who he really is, believe him!”

The best lines in poetry from John Keats:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The whole poem – Ode to a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I just love Richard Russo – if only I would have read this passage from his Bridge of Sighs the other day, instead just like when I was in therapy, I had to get to it myself and then have it confirmed later:

Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. . . . But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end–though who can say it’s wrong? How different things look then? Larger patterns emerge, individual decisions receding into insignficance. To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.

Even though I went to bed early, I didn’t get up until 6AM and couldn’t get out the door till 6:30 – had to hurry to walk Loca so she wouldn’t be Loca and also stay out of the sun because of the sensitivity of my face. We hit the park when it was still slightly dark and I swear I saw an alligator in the lagoon. If it wasn’t, then it was four nutrias holding on mouth to tail, so I think it was an alligator. Next I saw a big fat racoon running breakneck speed across the meadow and then up a tree. It’s like all the creatures that live by night were scurrying to find their daytime hiding places. Right now, I live among them. Had to wait till dark last night to walk Loca and had to get out before the sun came up to walk her again.

This morning, as we scurried home with the sun already making it’s way up, we were tailed by a large pelican that dive bombed into the bayou and then surfaced again to glide the water alongside us.

Article in the Times Picayune today says via a count of mail delivery, 86% of us are back in New Orleans. I don’t think so. I was at my dentist the other day and looking out the window to Lakeview and every house had a FEMA trailer in front of it. 86% – pishaw. That can’t be. But I’d like to think it was so.

A galfriend of mine was telling me about this guy she used to date, I know him now too, but she dated him about 15 years ago. She said, he is so cheap that if he was offered a grave for free, he’d dive in it. Swear to god, I could not stop laughing for about thirty minutes.

The other day speaking to my work husband over lunch, I told him about this chemical peel I was getting or was supposed to be getting but had gone to San Francisco instead and had to postpone and then I got home a day late and had to cancel and push till the next week. I was also telling him about my dating adventures and a new pair of shoes I had just bought in New York. And he looked at me and said with a piece of turkey sandwich still in his mouth, “What are you? The fifth girl of Sex in the City?”

Very funny, I said, and handed him a napkin.

I say this again, I’m more Ab Fab than Sex in the City, I never was a voracious dater like those girls, I was a marrier. Meanwhile, the chemical peel has taken me from looking like Glenda the Good Witch all the way to the Wicked Witch of the West. Hopefully, Dorothy comes next. Hard to say. But it sure has been a damper on my social life – can’t make the Voodoo on the Bayou, or the Voodoo Fest, or the Crime Walk, or other things that I would love to be doing rather than holing up in my house like a recluse. But all my girls have said they’ll come by to check on me.

The temperature dropped thirty degrees here night before last and today, it’s like Norway outside – cold, grey, and blustery. It makes me want to stay in, but Loca wants out out out – she keeps scratching at the window whining and moaning as if someone is tormenting her to death, when all along I’m the one being tormented.

My to do list runneth over and with little sleep, I decided to take things piece meal today. One baby step at a time rather than leaping off the precipice and attempting the mother lode in one fell swoop. And you know what, that seems to have been the right ticket. I’ve been able to methodically get done what I’ve set out to get done and I’ve done it without the usual bundle of stress associated with my normal to do list.

I watch Loca bound from the yard to the front door – steamrolling anything in her way – her head bonks against the glass in the front door. That’s usually me. But this me, is taking a sip of my tea, approaching my to do list gingerly with just the task at hand, not the larger picture to flesh out, and I like this – just one baby step at a time. There is something calming about a grey, overcast day and lack of sleep.

Early to bed, then not too much time later, my world turned upside down – or at least my stomach did – food poisoning? – something – all night wrangling with the devil and this morning, exhausted before I start. Loca didn’t get her walk and she has been LOCA! I didn’t get my sleep. House turned upside down. So much to do. Blech.

A long time ago, when I was working through my panic attacks about having returned to San Francisco when I wanted to be in New Orleans, I started a behavorial modification course that changed my life. Panic and anxiety disorder run rampant in my family among the women, and I learned that it is highly indexed towards Jews. Lovely. One of the things I learned is if you know what is going on in your body during a panic attack, you can counter attack with some handy tools they teach you. I developed a song, it was “You got my mother but you ain’t got me, I ain’t going to live in misery.” It went on and on and I’ll spare you the rest of the razor sharp lyrics. But today when mom called, depressed, in a funk, so gloomy she hasn’t gotten out of bed for a few days, I had to pull the song out of my back pocket and sing it.

I guess it’s perfectly natural that a daughter wants her mother to be happy and healthy. Just like a mother wants that from her child. But when either are depressed, alcoholics, victims of the darkness most of the time – well, it gets a little hard to handle even if you yourself have gotten up in the morning and said your affirmations and rewired your thinking and feel like you can climb back to the top of the world with only a couple of hops, skips and jumps.

I ain’t going to live in misery.

A nice healthy lunch:

1 cup shelled edamame………239 calories
1/2 cup frozen corn……………115 calories
1/4 red onion, chopped………..17 calories
1/4 T olive oil…………………..25 calories
Total calories……………………401

Here’s what you’ll find in a half-cup serving of shelled edamame:

120 calories
9 grams fiber
2.5 grams fat
1.5 grams polyunsaturated fat (0.3 grams plant omega-3 fatty acids)
0.5 gram monounsaturated fat
11 grams protein
13 grams carbohydrate
15 mg sodium
10% of the Daily Value for vitamin C
10% Daily Value for iron
8% Daily Value for vitamin A
4% Daily Value for calcium