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I’ve got to admit to working my ass off lately – only I’m not losing my ass, matter of fact, I’m gaining around my middle by hunching over my desk and allowing everything but work to fall apart. My lower back is so arthritic, I’ve been getting up from the desk chair like I’m 80. I’ve got a twitch in my right eye. Now I pulled a muscle in my neck just coming upstairs. To top it all off, I decided to start running again to address the expansion of my waist and now my left piriformis is in a knot. Let’s not get me started about the hot flashes that make sleeping all but impossible. Basically, what we got going on here is a complete life imbalance. And I don’t need a life coach to tell me all work and no play makes Rachel a tight wad of stress.

So I need T to come home and balance me out. Tonight it is T minus 4 days and I’m reaching my lethal limit of her absence. And my imbalance has veered so far to the right that I’m on tilt.

To combat this issue, when I got home from Pilates this evening, I saw Roy lounging for the lord on one of his plastic chairs on the bayou and then I saw Andree up on their porch – I offered both a nice ice cold Tecate and brought some slices of Manchego cheese and rosemary crackers (dregs from the pantry I haven’t replenished).

The weather went from oppressive to wonderful and Andree said the humidity was down at 46% and a lovely dry breeze was gently blowing.

Jerri waved from her porch and came hobbling out on her sprained ankle to join us and we lingered into the twilight when suddenly fire trucks appeared across the bayou and R&A speculated whether one of the trucks was Moon’s – our captain – next thing you know Moon pulled up his big red truck on the bayou – he said a wire had fallen off the side of a house and was sparking. Then he told us he had just finished a delicious meal of paneed beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Roy poked on Moon’s round belly and said, “Well.”

Balance – it’s what I’m seeking – I know how to find it – but I have a penchant for trying to get it all in at once – like if I could get all my work done while T is gone then I can play with her when she returns but that isn’t the way life works – tomorrow seems to find new work, and play seems to get pushed further out, and so sometimes you got to take matters into your own hands and strike a balance all by yourself. And that is what I did.

I called Joe to see why he hadn’t mowed the lawn because you can barely see Arlene when she goes to pee. This is how it went down:

Joe: I don’t come begging to mow anyone’s lawn, you gotta call me.
Rachel: Whatever, can you come cut it or not?
Joe: [Laughs] Your ex friend been trashing you bad.
Rachel: Must be why she is my ex.
Joe: Know what she told me?
Rachel: No
Joe: You a dike.
Rachel: I am a dike (although officially I’m not since I look like a girl).
Joe: No! She didn’t say you is a dike, said you got a dike living with you.
Rachel: I do. What’s your point, does this have anything to do with my grass not getting cut?
Joe: No, you know I love you, but I ain’t gonna beg to cut nobody’s grass. I don’t need money. I got me a lot of money.
Rachel: Well are you gonna come cut the grass or not?
Joe: Sure honey, for you I’d do anything.

Last night, I took Loca and Lucky for a long walk in the twilight. The oppressiveness of summer’s heat waxing was offset by a slight breeze – and I mean slight. As I rounded the bayou coming out of the park, I heard a shuff shuff sound behind me and then a man drawled, “Is your hair naturally red or do you dye it?”

Without turning around, I said, “Who wants to know?”

The man said, “Nobody.” Then after a pause and some more shuff shuff from his bicycle, he said, “You sound like a natural.”

As he pedaled off I caught a glimpse of him – a tall glass of water with slightly long hair riding down Esplanade.

Finally, the tipping point again, where I can count on one hand the number of days before T returns. Of course, she comes and I go. But soon we’ll be off to traverse the beautiful coastline of Croatia and enjoy many other Eastern European splendors. That soon can’t come soon enough but if the time passes anything similarly to how these three days have passed – I will be blinking my eyes and returning – so grant me time during my sabbatical of stillness and awareness and of pure and utter joy.

Bam refuses to play Mr. Nice Guy to anyone – even family. He has been feigning indifference but for no reason batted Arlene’s head and gave Loca a run for her money today confirming that he is fighting for dominance at the LaLa. The dogs and I ran to the office to take cover. Stay tuned.

I was at the deli counter at Canseco’s tonight with a friend ordering Cuban sandwiches to go eat in the park with a gaggle of girls. My friend said, “I like your girlfriend, she’s calm.”

I said I like her too. And she is calm. She calms me.

My girlfriend is half way around the world and coincidentally was having the same conversation – her good friend asked what do you do for R? And she said I help her relax. And her friends said, “You calm us too.”

Her mother even told her how splendid she makes things when she is around.

Do I have to tell you why she is so special when an acquaintance, a best friend, a good friend, not to mention her own mother have called out our her special powers within the span of a week.

If indeed she is not splendor itself, then I think she put a spell on me.

Reason #2378 why I love T – today I was at a wine tasting and someone said they were reading my blog and I was writing about T being away and it was “so dramatic” and “so intense” and I had to laugh inside because THAT’S WHO I AM – BIG and INTENSE – and who loves me? My love slav does and she adores my intensity.

In a subsequent conversation someone was referring to a mutual friend as very typically American and I jokingly said yeah that is what I am and the same person guffawed and said no way. What is it then? We had a string of conversations with Latin and Brazilians saying they would not date an American again because they were tired of “I need my space’ or “You’re too much for me” and then I had some side conversations with friends who said, “I’m only dating Americans because I’m done feeling left out” = people, what is it?

I just wrote about how I feel more American than anything – but also I’ve written about all my men friends who have said point blank to me “Rachel, you’re too much for the average bear.”

Thank god I found a person – forget her sex, forget her national origin – let’s just say she is a person who loves my volume and knows that when I love her, I love her like a house on fire and when she is gone away from me, I miss her like “self is in mutiny” – and this is only the tip of my flame. There’s more to come – if I had my way, we’d be granted 50 years of flame on.

I am naturally an impatient person, but I’ve learned through love to quiet that tendency and to offer patience. It’s my gift to those I love. I still need to work on patience with those I don’t love.

I was standing in line at DeBlancs on Friday waiting to get my prescription filled and fanning myself furiously as my hot flashes have bordered on demonic, when a friend in front of me was waiting for her HRT script while the woman in front of her was getting birth control pills.

One of the five clerks was going through a file of restaurant menus because the pharmacist was saying she was so hungry she could eat paper. The clerk said, “Well, you could say this one is open [holding up a menu from Mandina’s] since Katrina, but it ain’t the same as it was before. Some of these need their own file.”

This morning before my bike ride I was reading New Orleans Magazine and Errol Laborde was writing about Bucktown – a place that is so indelible in my mind because I know of no other place like it in the world, only recreations of it in movies. Bucktown was a slice of Americana, of New Orleans, unlike any other place. Rumor has it the name derives from the ability to find a whore for a buck there among the fishermen, but the area was more about families than about licentiousness.

Old timey houses with screen doors that gave way to Formica tables and rusted metal chairs with seats covered in plastic leather, black and white televisions still humming, and a yard with old appliances and laundry hanging to dry. The path by Sidmars following the 17th Street canal was a cluster of squatter houses and fishermen’s boats that led across a wooden bridge since redone into a concrete and steel haphazard structure to look at and negotiate. A few iconic restaurants survived the city’s greed to put in a paid parking lot – one exception was my first husband’s family business – Fontana’s – which had long closed.

But today, it’s all gone – everything from Brunings to Sidmar’s – wiped away by Katrina and in its place a grotesque set of pumps and iron locks have been installed to keep the next storm out.

Even Al Copeland is gone – not due to the storm but his cigarette boats and lake house were a part of the landscape – his ghost has no place to haunt.

These are the Louisiana places that will never return post Katrina – now part of our collective memory – and while what has taken its place is possibly better or safer, lost is poetry as Laborde writes, and romance of Bucktown, one of the few places in the world where time had stood still.

F put out a spread last night at the Turkish party complete with a musician playing Turkish background music. As the party cranked up, so did the musician and the girls wrapped scarves with coins tight around their hips and the men raised their arms to the air Turkish style and we began dancing. Y called out in guttural yells as we all joined hands and danced in a circle.

The music, the food, the dancing – a very Turkish way to spend the evening – to feed the senses.