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Yesterday was a fitful day of distemper and I went out and rode my bike to get over it. Of course, my tires were flat and my pump didn’t work, and the Shell station pump where I drove the bike to didn’t work and the guy couldn’t come out to help, and I came back and finally got my neighbor’s pump to work and by that time it was high noon, the bells of Our Lady of the Rosary wailing and the sunlight bouncing off the hot concrete into my weary and worn eyes.

I rode. I rode. I rode.

I rode through City Park, which was unusually quiet for a Fourth of July, I rode down the bike trail along the bayou out to Robert E. Lee, and up along the lakefront and by the defunct Mardi Gras fountain and over the torn up street that leads out to West End where all of the restaurants of my youth have vanished into the storm, where the old wooden bridge from Bucktown is gone, where a big iron pumping station sullies the vista, where boat houses remain empty and in shambles from the storm, where the light house has been rebuilt to eighty times its original size and the red roof is missing, where people still fish off the end of the spit that juts out from West End. I rode and rode and rode trying reclaim something that I felt like I had lost.

I circled around West End where Fitzgerald’s, Brunings, Fontana’s, all used to be. Bastille Day is approaching and with it the two year anniversary of my mother going into the hospital and the subsequent denouement of her life. I knew then what I know now, that it was the beginning of the end, with all its finality and lack of fireworks, and just plain and simply sad and lonely on the other end of the ghostly pier that awaits us.

I’m in transition over here, an orphan, faced with more repairs that I can/want to handle on the LaLa, staring my resources in the face, dangling on a threadbare string that no longer supports me, about to begin something new whose promise is abstract, and I want to tell you the sand is shifting beneath my feet. I do not know what to do – do I sell the house? do we get a roommate? do we move into my office and rent out the front? I do not know what to do and frankly, I’m weary from thinking about it – since May 2005 when I bought this house sight unseen I have been pouring everything I have in me into it and it is still costing me, taxing me, and weighing me down. Is it worth it?

“When I’m feeling the pain, the bayou is calling my name.” ~Tab Benoit

I contemplated death yesterday riding along the ghost town of West End because at some point that is where we are all headed. I thought about stones in my pocket, and walking into the bayou, a la Virginia Wolfe, and then I remembered the kid. Right.

I walked this morning with an old friend, and we talked about this period in our lives, our mothers recently dead, our bodies moribund, our inner selves still grasping to understand what is going on inside and outside of us. He said he thought dying was much more of a comfortable idea than it had been in the past. And I said, oh yeah, I agree.

But just as he said that we were passing a street that was a riot of pink and white blossoms from the chocked full Crepe Myrtles that lined the street and yards, there were blossoms everywhere and I had this vestigial desire to reach up and grab a bud and force it to bloom like I had for my mud pies as a child when I lived on Louisiana Avenue. I thought of a fellow blogger’s recent entry contemplating a life in a single walkabout entitled Schools Out For Ever.

We never leave off the jones for that innocence of childhood, we never come full circle to accept where we are now, we never fully understand where we are going until we are already there and gone and by that time we have put our own spin on what happened. In all honesty, I rode home and sat on the banks of the bayou under an enormous oak tree and watched turtles sticking their necks out and fish jumping and thought, right now it looks this way, but tomorrow it will look different again.

I would like to thank everyone who purchased fireworks and set them off on the bayou last night. As a visitor said, “You live in a glorious place,” as we sat on the grass and watched the bottle rockets, tie dye rockets, and fireworks up and down the banks of the bayou.

Interestingly enough, just hours earlier T and I were talking about selling the LaLa and moving to higher ground – meaning a place that doesn’t want to suck me dry of all the resources I have (or don’t).

I was objectively watching friends parenting the other day – the style conflict, the subtle way that one wants to dominate the other’s actions. What a mess. I was thinking about this in the morning when before me in this Sunday’s New York Times were two articles, one on the unfortunate fact that the sudden opening of gay marriages will also swing open the door to sticky, messy gay divorces and the second was in the magazine talking about how Infidelity can actually help. I wonder about that – but I haven’t read the article yet.

I was cruising iTunes still having some purchases left on my gift certificate and feeling the need for a summer playlist and came across Beyonce’s Your The Best Thing That I Never Had because I saw a man the other day, a someone who I had had a thing with, and wow, I don’t remember him. It’s almost like I murdered him and that entire part of my memory, the premeditation, the action, the aftermath are all blacked out of my mind. Like poof, he/we never happened. And I wonder if that is the mind’s way of allowing my memory to co-exist with my current inner bliss (or rather the state I aspire to).

I want to say I have learned this about life, that I can’t even vouch for myself and my past actions or even predict my future ones, so how difficult is it to understand another human being whose head you are not in or privy to? What motivates the people around me or makes them who they are? And now try to translate that into co-parenting. I watched my friends navigate the awkwardness of having spoken without thinking, having set off a chain reaction based on past interactions, and then having arrived at no better place than when they started except maybe a place that was more raw, more tender to the touch as if a scab had been picked.

In the summertime, people go crazy and kill each other, and most killings are crimes of passion, but the worst crimes are not the ones that are lethal, the true crimes are the every day cuts, that accumulate overtime and leave us like a sieve incapable of holding onto any emotions even the supposed keepers.

A fellow blogger recently lost her hair because she had chemo and the growing back of it became an adventure. I was born with the grace of thick and abundant hair (thank you mom) and I have always spent a lot of time obsessing over it – getting the color right, getting the cut and length right, and getting it done right. When my mother hit 70 she started losing her hair, in clumps, and it got thinner and thinner. Luckily, she had too much hair, if there is such a thing, and her thinning hair at 70 was what most women have at 30. What I wasn’t prepared for having now gone through menopause is the change. The change in my hair. My hair resembles nothing of its former self. It is coarse in texture. My new natural color, dark, has never been the color of hair in my life. My hair is still abundant but now unruly. It is someone else’s hair, not mine.

It is my 52 year old hair and frankly I’m sick of the whole hair conversation. I’m sick of spending money to get my hair just right. I’m sick of people commenting on my hair – I like it this way, I liked it that way. I’m sick of my hair.

A friend of mine shaves her head and she looks great. She has her husband use clippers to get it all the way down to the nub. She has a might fine head. I’m not that brave.

My hair is short short short again, much like I wore it in my early 20s and you’d think that is easy, but even this short, it does not seem like my hair, it is my 52 year old hair, this coarse, unruly, dark hair that is sitting on top of my wrinkled saggy 52 year old face, that is topping the 12 pounds too heavy 52 year old body because I can’t lose the menopausal thickness, that is all resting on the 52 year old feet that have lost their padding and causes me to walk almost on tip toes when I get up in the morning to pee.

It’s not the whoosh of old age arriving, it is the slow decline that is glaring and discomforting.

I can’t find a novel I want to read so I’m back into my poetry – I read through Lavender’s chapbook twice, and a few ins and outs of Montlack’s Cool Limbo, and returned again to Mark Strand’s Man and Camel where this poem stopped me and left me breathless:

Mother and Son

The son enters the mother’s room
and stands by the bed where the mother lies.
The son believes that she wants to tell him
what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,
always her boy. The son leans down to kiss
the mother’s lips, but her lips are cold.
The burial of feelings has begun. The son
touches the mother’s hands one last time,
then turns and sees the moon’s full face.
An ashen light falls across the floor.
If the moon could speak, what would it say?
If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.

We went to see Tree of Life last night, winner of the Cannes Film Festival, and a departure from the norm. An escape from reality. A deep dive into the juxtaposition of loss reality and accumulated myth. A truly remarkable film in that even though dinosaurs appeared at one point causing the entire row in front of us (and us included) to erupt in the giggles, it still managed to keep us all in the theater on a Saturday night and not walk out like we thought we might do at one point.

There is no time organization to the film, there are babies who become children and then there are adults who never seem to age as their children do. There are big splashy scenes about eruption and waves and end of world apocalyptic wonder and there is serenity and musical rise and fall.

I wonder what we watched last night, it wasn’t a film.

We left the theater in our drug like state and ran into friends coming out of Midnight in Paris, one exclaimed “I’m glad I went to college because I got all the references” and we said, “We’ve just journeyed into weird.”

Then we slogged our way through the Essence traffic closing down the French Quarter streets and causing traffic to come to a standstill on Canal Street, a street now given over to junk shops and athletic shoes but once the grand dame of shopping in this city where my mother took us as girls with her gloves and hat decades ago. We made our way across town and now that it was late over to Beach Corner where we bellied up to the bar and split a burger and played Essence-like music on the jukebox – Usher, Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Mary Blige.

I woke with the same feeling I had last night when I went to sleep, a feeling that I had ventured into something and become exhausted by it, and I still have a lingering feeling that the world is much vaster than I would ever be able to imagine. So weird or not, I’m going to recommend you see Tree of Life, because I don’t think any book or other film or work of art is going to give you that experience.

Yesterday a friend posted a note on Facebook that she is going to see an exhibit by Alexander McQueen and I asked if he likes Jews, when in fact it is Galliano who dislikes them.

A woman I met the other day was telling me a joke about three women who were rocking on the front porch and chatting and one said, “My husband loves me so much he bought me a mink coat,” and the other two women said, “That’s nice.” And then the second one said, “Well, my husband loves me so much he bought me a big diamond pendant.” And the two other women said, “That’s nice.” Then the two asked the third what she had received from her husband and she replied, “He sent me to charm school when we first got married so I would quit saying Fuck Off and say That’s Nice instead.”

Similarly, I was at a neighborhood meeting the other evening presenting the bridge project, when an elderly woman walked up to me and asked me where I was from, and proceeded to tell me she has lived in this neighborhood for 79 years and nothing is wrong with those bridges and I have gone too far. I smiled, my own version of that’s nice, but when I came home I asked my uncle for some fact checking. Next time I see this woman, I plan to tell her the truth, which is that my maternal family came to Louisiana in 1592 and that way before she was born, in the 1700s to be exact, my great, great, great, great grandfather Hugh Sheridan was a ship captain who sailed on Bayou St. John in from Lake Ponchartrain bringing supplies into the city via the Carondelet Canal. And one of his wife’s siblings married a Loreins, ahem, related to Santiago Loreins who left his property to his daughter and son in law Jean Louis Allard who then sold it to McDonough who gave it to the City, the property that is now New Orleans City Park.

Yes, my dear, my family was here way before you and so next time one of you old blue hairs corners me and asks me what my pedigree is, I’ll just have to whip out my distant grandpa Hugh and the rest (some were pirates I must warn you) and so combined with my father’s heritage from Cuba via Constantinople, Turkey via Toledo, Spain I am not only from here, I brought all the stuff with me when I came.

Isn’t that nice?

• You are about to go on a journey and you realize a life of often traveling has stopped without you noticing it.
• You’ve changed your hair so much you don’t recognize yourself in the bathroom mirror at 2AM on your way to pee.
• You cannot lose or make peace with the 12 lbs that showed up like a fatty natty boo boo around you.
• Your toddler behave likes a angel when you least expect it and like a warthog, doused with gasoline and lit on fire when you do.
• Your reading has been condensed to one page a day and usually late at night so read twice.
• You haven’t heard from the person you were supposed to hear from a lot.
• Your entire family are strangers and strangers are your entire family.
• You realize your last supporters are throwing you a safety line because there is no longer any room for you on the ship, and the rope is frayed and thin, and you yourself can barely get a grip.
• The waiter has recited the specials and it is longer than the menu.
• The person who comes out to say hi to Tin in the car is high and that is why she is acting weird.
• You look across the restaurant and see a woman wearing her hair a certain way, her hair color is silver, like spun precious metal, cut in a pixie and striking. You ask yourself if you can dye your hair to look silver instead of the mish mash color it keeps wanting to be and you realize once again you are thinking of changing your hair.
• Friends sometimes rub you the wrong way like when you said to one “I simply can’t do it” and she responded as if you were saying “I can’t not pee in my pants.” (read: the wrong way)

Just got my Bill Lavender chapbook and in the beginning:

French Quarter Haikus

when daria reads
a poem in
russian I
wish I’d never learned
any language