Dangermond.org

The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you’ll have. Anne Quindlen

Tatjana and Tin were at the Orange Couch the other day with Tin wearing headphones and watching his Louis Armstrong DVD on the portable. He had his drumsticks in hand and people kept asking if he is a musician.

He’s two and half people! I mean really.

But today when he and I took to the streets to follow the second line from Canal and Rampart down St. Claude to the Healing Center, and he was blowing his toy trumpet, the people kept coming up to him and saying, “I know him, he’s the musician that was at Sound Cafe with Shamarr” or “He’s the musician that was in the Times Picayune” or “He’s the musician I saw Mardi Gras day blowing his sword.”

So maybe at two and a half Tin is the musician.

Perhaps who we are is predestined or formed before we even know what is happening. I was just speaking to a friend who had been visiting Nicaragua, and told her I lived there when I was very young. When I was in the first decade of my life, I lived in Managua and San Salvador and Panama. The imprint those countries left on me is what makes me cling to the humid and fecund city I call home, New Orleans. My friend was describing Nicaragua today and she might have been writing about it back when I was a little girl because I remember my mother crying about the poverty outside while we lived lavishly in a hotel downtown sipping cafe con leche and eating pan dulce. My friend writes:

Nicaragua is a beautiful country with lush landscape (active volcanoes, beautiful pristine beaches, two amazing lakes, etc.) and very original colonial monuments. Managua is very ugly, probably not the same you lived in, which I assume was pre-earthquake (1972). After that and the years of war subsequent to the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the city buildings and landmarks that were destroyed by the earthquake first and the Somoza bombings of the capital in the war, were never reconstructed. Leon and Granada, the two virreinal capitals during the colonial years are in much better shape, especially Granada, which is very well kept due to money provided by foreign tourism and donations from European countries. it is nice that it is not too touristic because if feels authentic and popular.

It is sadly very, very poor with major inequalities between rich and poor and a very inadequate infrastructure. The Sandinista revolution apparently did not accompllshed much and after Daniel Ortega won (or fixed, as many people say) elections in 2006, the danielistas, as they call them to differenciate them from the Sandinistas, have regained control of the country and become the new rich and corrupt. The country is politically tense and divided as Ortega manipulates the media and neighborhoods committees, and the opposition remains divided unable to offer a strong front. Everybody is convinced that Ortega will fix elections again next year.

Today, one day before the 6th anniversary of the Federal Flood, the Healing Center opened on St. Claude Avenue. Around here nothing gets started without a second line and some music and dancing, but unlike in Treme when a guy says, “Where’s Troy?” as they were waiting on Trombone Shorty, this time it was “Where’s Chuck P?” since it was his Cafe Istanbul (and Suleyman’s) that everyone was second lining down to at the Center. Watch Darryl aka Dancing Man 504 tripping the light fantastic. Yes indeed, a fabulous time was had by all.

I’m going to a conference on the West Coast on Monday and I will miss the 6th anniversary of the Federal Flood, the first day of Tin’s pre-school, and the humid, oppressive heat of New Orleans as I plunge into the land of long sleeves and overcoats.

We brought Tin’s school bag with him on Friday – items like rain gear that he has to leave at school:

He met most of his classmates and was led around by the nose by one of the older girls right off the bat.

Still the class he likes the best is the New Orleans brass instruction he gets on Saturdays in Armstrong Park.

As Irene is blowing the east coast, Germany is cold and rainy, Zagreb is hot and stifling, New Orleans is hot and humid, and in San Francisco people are wearing overcoats to work. There is weather happening all around.

I left for the West Coast in 1990 determined to find myself and instead I found someone else – this person who craved security and order and needed money in order to live. That was so not the person who left New Orleans. There in San Francisco, the living ain’t easy, yes there is abundance, but that bounty comes at too dear a cost. Daily life became the ritual of survival and how to make a buck. In my marriage at the time, we had come to an agreement to be able always to live off of one another’s salary so that we could always have breathing room for us both to pursue a life that we envisioned. This vision came crashing to a halt when the dotcommers exploded and ruined everyone’s life.

I came back to New Orleans to return to that simplicity and instead found myself fat from the west and carrying over my newly learned avarice unable to detach from money and its trappings. I built my house around that idea that what I had been striving for in the west would now happen in the Gulf South.

What kind of fool am I?

I’ve been clinging to someone else’s idea of success. I’ve been measuring myself by another culture’s benchmarks. I’ve been following the wrong gods.

The hurricane force that is trying to whip me back to my core is scaring the daylights out of me. But I say, bring it.

Funny how life is, that the moment you think you have it all figured out, something changes. I am spending the better part of my journey to open my heart, opening my sense of humor. And this morning I laughed out loud – belly laughed. Good for the soul. But I digress, I meant to write about the fact that a few years ago a good friend of mine told me I need to learn to accept help in my life. And she counseled that I should identify a few people to count on. So I did.

But you know what? Those haven’t been the ones who have helped me, well some have, but what has been the true wonder is that people I didn’t expect to help me, came forward, on their own accord, and made my life easier in small and big ways.

This morning it was a colleague, who shares a mind with me, who made me laugh so loud, I almost spit.

Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, he announced this yesterday to the world, and the world responded. One of the greatest innovators of our time, a leader unparalleled, a man who did his own thing and we, the people, were the beneficiaries of his vision. Don’t yet underestimate what his technological creations did to open up the world to a global dialogue that is yet to be digested and understood.

I hung up today after an hour on the phone with a long-time source of mine who listed out all the major changes that were happening around his world and I thought that change in and of itself isn’t bad, it’s just challenging.

As Ovid said in his Metamorphoses, “There is nothing constant in the universe.  All ebb and flow, and every shape that’s born, bears in its womb the seeds of change.”

A guy I know used to write all his letters in verse, and he was an attorney. It was pretty interesting. And another friend decided to write a haiku a day for one year, also interesting. Today, a friend asked how my summer had been as she’s been gone and we were missing each other – I summed it up for her in verse/haiku:

I just wrote Tarantino an email because he is filming a movie – a Southern spaghetti western – here in New Orleans called Django Unchained. I told him he needed to use the music and or the musician – Evan Christopher – in this movie as his band when he is traveling is Creole Django. And that would just be too cool for school.

Someone just asked me how New Orleans is and I sent them this video. On any given day, a brass band erupts, a guy gets off his bike to dance, a Lucky Dog truck strolls by and life happens.