I tried to cram too many things into today and then I came to the conclusion that sometimes you have to push the envelope – work, friends, child, garden, dogs, partner – put all in the blender and hit GRIND. Sometimes the best place for a woman to be is out on a limb, dangling by a thread. Gotta love it.
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and that is true. Sandy at Pontchahoa Kennels where our dogs stay sometimes said that Heidi is too old to learn – she’s five. So I have given up on trying. Used to be we’d get to the corner and I’d have to work, work, work with Heidi to get her to sit while Loca performed beautifully. Now I just have decided to praise Loca for her good habits and ignore Heidi’s shortcomings.
Because of Tin’s dry skin, he more often than not gets what my mother always called a bird bath. A wet washcloth wipe down. Today I was in the park and all of the ducks and swans were by the playground making a ruckus as they dipped in an out of the water washing and preening and screeching. It’s either that time of year or they got really dirty last night. No one was talking, so not sure. But these birds had a much more immersive bath than Tin gets most nights.
When Faulkner decided to call his novel Light in August was he referring to the “light” (pregnancy) or was he really talking about the color of bourbon in his glass as the August light hit it just so? Today walking through City Park after the hard rain from last night, I saw the light in August that hasn’t been here until today. It’s August 23rd and up until this morning the light has been something to avoid – we’ve had two straight days of heat advisory (which means the heat index is well over 114 degrees) – the sun has been harsh and unforgiving – but today, the light had softened and for the first time I saw the early signs of fall. I saw it in the way the light fell on the trees and through the leaves with a calm slant rather than a dead on magnifying glass piercing ray-gun.
Another neighbor stopped in yesterday and admired the cucuzza on the counter after I had written that entry on this vegetable – said that her family calls it cucuzza (with a k) and since her family knows produce, I’d have to say it’s only some of the Sicilians here in New Orleans that say gugootza and I stand corrected.
This here is a cucuzza and my neighbor brought it to me – only he, like other Sicilians in this town call it gugootza. It’s squash like summer squash but it has a gourd type body and shell.
I was all over the Ogden today for the family day event and went through a lot of different exhibits from the painting called the Holy Trinity which had Elvis, Jesus and Robert E. Lee in it to large heavy oils of Southern landscapes, one being a street uptown to a room with photographs from Katrina. It’s been five years and after the first photograph I couldn’t turn away and I couldn’t stop from crying.
Five years is not enough time to grieve what happened on August 29, 2005. I don’t even think we have a name for it – the levee failure, Katrina, The Storm – it is still too powerful to be called the same thing by everyone it touched.
I’ve written many times of my rich heritage being the daughter of a Cuban born Sephardic father whose parents haled from Constantinople and a mother who was raised in the pine forests of Washington Parish, Louisiana. The cuisine alone was as rich and varied as the terrain my parents came from – crisp platanos fritos, black bean and rice (aptly named in Cuba moros y cristianos) to kibbe, tabouleh, and baklava and arroz con pollo mingled with jambalaya and field peas served with cathead biscuits and a healthy dose of chicken and dumplings.
I married two Italian men, one whose stout Sicilian mother could cook like a house on fire (they owned a restaurant in Bucktown) and a Dutch guy and along the way picked up more culture and recipes – from Italian sausage cooked with peppers and onions to rabbit piccata all the way to Grandma V’s applesauce cake. Then I met Tatjana and she brought her own Eastern European ways into my world along with Arsen Dedic, Natali Dizdar’s music and some delicious cuisine like rozata, Dingac, burek (borrowed from the Turks), Dalmatian cod stew.
Then along came Tin into our rich cultural tapestry bringing with him his own force of culture just by the color of his skin. I don’t know where his ancestors hale from as blacks from the Chicago area are as diverse as they can be with the first nonresident recorded being a Haitian, and the population exploded with the blacks relocating to Chicago from all over the south during the great migration, but if you generically call Tin African American and think how expansive and rich is that cultural heritage then I’d say we are a tribe of three with a gumbo past that is ink dark in its richness.
Today we went to the Ogden’s family day event and kids from the Young Audiences performed African dancing and drumming and what a show they put on! Tin was mesmerized by all the drums and played every one of them then he watched with fascination as the young boys and girls danced with wild gyrations and rhythmic beats. And I was looking around at the young girl dancing, and the handsome boys drumming and the teachers and mothers and other children there and was so proud of the culture he brought into our life that I joined in by making the same sounds Sephardic women make behind the curtains for aufrufs* – it’s this gutteral, feral, back of the throat sound of joy and celebration. Hey, I fit right in.
[*note: aufruf is after the child is bar mitzvah’d or married, the women and children who sit apart from the men in a mezzanine area throw hard candy at the child or couple up at the bima (altar) and shout in these guttural eh eh eh sounds. I was in a synagogue in Israel where the women were actually up in a balcony and if that wasn’t enough they were behind a curtain and the sounds were so animal and primal at first I was freaked out.]
When my mother was living I told her to let me take out a life insurance policy on her so that I could pay her burial costs. That never happened but she did manage to hang onto a small policy that paid about two-thirds of my half of her burial. Now with other costs arising that involve structurally making the grave sound for eternity (my aunt dumped a bunch of sand on it to keep it from sinking) I was faced with a new cost. But then I got the call out of the blue about her insurance policy that she had with an old job. So they sent me the paperwork and I filled it out and today I received the check.
$15.36 for overpayment of her premium.
I opened the envelope and just had to laugh. Such are the things of life. Meanwhile when you don’t live right by your mom’s grave, you can’t be there to add dirt to it, to mow it, to make sure the flowers are just so. And keep the grave you must. I thought when I got that call that it was a blessing, a gift in disguise, instead it was a poignant reminder of how life is always filled with the absurd as well as grace.
Corporate responsibility
Odwalla started out with a good program, fresh juice but then it wanted to be huge and next thing you know e coli happens. The eggs from Iowa are being recalled as I write – but investigative reporters like Michael Pollan are exposing the absurdity of buying eggs from far away lands and making shoppers like me smarter. BP’s corporate responsibility flew out the door when the oil spill crisis happened and now I don’t know a person who can ever think good thoughts about this company that was once at the top of their game.
Social responsibility
And after the federal government said it was okay for corporations to give political dollars any way they want this past January, Target decided to back an anti-gay politician – guess what the people heard (be sure to watch the video clip of the protest).
Our responsibility
And what about Pakistan with the floods – these people are in dire straights and from what we are hearing the response is not happening fast or large enough to make a difference. People don’t know enough, because if they did they’d care enough, and send money RIGHT NOW – I made my donation to Doctor’s Without Borders. A good place to start. ANY PERSON IN LOUISIANA OR THE GULF SOUTH WHO HAS TEN DOLLARS ARE MORE SHOULD SEND PAKISTAN A DONATION – IT’S OUR TURN TO PAY BACK THE WORLD FOR THEIR AID.