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So my neighbor just knocked on the door wanting his dog back. 

Fatma came by late in the day to have cay and as we sat catching up and planning grand trips to everywhere – a woman drove up in an SUV, opened the door and tossed appeared to toss a bulldog out into the street. The bulldog stood in the middle of the street disoriented, then stumbled over to the sidewalk and was running into things. Fatma and I ran out and thought the dog was poisoned. I called the vet and we picked it up and put him in the truck and took him in. He’s an older dog, blind, that looks in reasonable good shape otherwise. We don’t know who could do something so cruel. He’s in the backyard – disoriented still – and I will take him sadly to the SPCA tomorrow hoping his owners are coming looking for him. Maybe it was his owner who got rid of him. The vet thought that maybe someone tried to save him thinking the owners were bad. 

Still who dumps a dog – a blind one – in the middle of the road? And who wants a blind, smelly dog?

Here’s what I know for a fact today: when you meet the person you could fall in love with, you’ll know it – there won’t be any doubt. Whatever you do will be the right thing to do. I say this because everyone agonizes about every little thing they should do when they meet someone with potential – and as Gomez said a while back, it doesn’t matter what you do, if the other person is into you, you won’t do anything wrong. Meanwhile, I don’t think you stop trying, I think the old “you have to kiss a lot of toads to find your princess” is valid – everything moves you forward, everything prepares for what awaits you. 

I truly feel now that I am being followed by a moonshadow – some force so positive and lovely that I’m being caressed by its tendrils as it floats me along in the ether. Ivette sends me this after I tell her how I am feeling – how la muneca makes me walk inches off the ground:

There have been email volleys circulating around the neighborhood forum about a female mallard found strangled by a plastic grocery bag and the male mallard who has sat watch over her. One writes, “mallards mate for life” – and others lament “humans destroying nature” – and still others bemoan the “careless act of littering and destroying our quality of life.” 

Writing about loss, about longing, about tragedy and betrayal drips off our pens … while writing about finding, and becoming, and enjoying, and someone who gives you so much joy and pleasure are so difficult to put into words, which don’t come across as trite, sappy, sugary – juvenile, pedestrian, shall I go on? 

I feel the duck’s pain, to have lost love is a tragedy – and yet to have found someone you could be persuaded to love is the opposite of tragedy – it’s a sugar-coated miracle.

Something about this NYT quote of the day made me smile (only out of context with what he is really referring to):

QUOTATION OF THE DAY 

“You’re asking me to tell you how we’re going to get to a place we’ve never been, with a map I don’t have.”

COL. STEVEN DAVID, a military defense lawyer, when asked for details on the capital case against six Guantánamo detainees.

Don’t worry — that pain in your heart is probably just one of Cupid’s arrows, and it’s a piercing that looks good on you! It’s an awesome week for you in matters of the heart overall, with your sex appeal especially fiery on Tuesday and Wednesday. But, again, don’t worry — Thursday (and Friday too, plus through the weekend) brings energy that’s just right for letting what’s on your mind and in your heart be known. Hint: Just spill it, and let what happens next take care of itself, just for the moment. Live and love a little. No, make that a lot. You’re amazing.

 and late this morning I sent a text to J that said, “if more is to be revealed, I’m walking off the planet.” 

I had a date on Saturday night that now feels more like a journey than anything else. It seems like another lifetime ago when I stopped in at J’s house on my way to meet T to have a couple of glasses of champagne to take the edge of my nervousness – and then there was music, dancing, new friends, talking, and a strong gravitational pull that gripped and tugged at the ground beneath my feet – somewhere between tetonic shifts and uncommon attraction – another day dawned – and with it came a steady hum just below my skin – late on Sunday my friends set up camp on the bayou and applauded the front door of the LaLa opening and my date bravely emerging beside me – I was walking inches above the earth, just skimming the bricks – J was there in her boat waiting to give us an intervening respite from inquisitive eyes – the sun, the crisp air, the sparkling bayou could not have presented itself any better as a picture of Sunday’s promise – even the soft black lab puppy that emerged from neighbors and found its way into my house to be adopted by G, who wants to name her Love, fit inside this painting – and then at some second, minute, hour, unidentifiable time measure in the evening, when I was lying in bed and smelling Soap Opera & Verbena combined in some fashion that made my head loopy not because I lacked sleep or food (because I lacked for nothing at all) but because  I felt as if I had walked waltzed through the threshold of beginnings.

I went to take mom on errands this morning and our Saturday brunch was moved down to lunch – we sat in a booth in the dimly lit bar at Houston’s on Veteran’s Boulevard and I told her about Mardi Gras – brought her pictures – we traded quips by Ivette, we laughed about some of the goings on from the Endymion party, I told her about Fat Tuesday and my MGGF – and we laughed and laughed and laughed about a number of goofy fun things that have happened over the past week. 

She looked up at me at one point and said, “You are Wonder Woman, honey!” And I felt a twinge of sadness surface – just knowing that my mother was such a beautiful woman, still is, and while she had an interesting life – living all over Central America, Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the United States – she did hardly any of these adventures on her own – once on her own, she has basically kept to a radius of about twenty square miles of living territory, under a veil of fear and mistrust and paranoia. 

It is deeply satisfying to bring her into my life and share with her my friends, my parties, my details of drama and amor, as well as the pictures that I upload to her Ceiva (which is broken right now, hence having to print out MG pics). 

When I first moved back to New Orleans, mom disastrously went from being a blonde to a redhead and accused Henry of coloring it red by mistake.

I know I’m living her life for her. That is why it has to be bigger, bolder, and wider than just one person’s life. 

I thought about my friend, who was born a twin, but the twin died during delivery. My friend told me one day while we were eating crawfish and drinking beer that she had to live two lives – that she owed it to her sister.