Dangermond.org

The weather dipped overnight into a much more fall feel, but yesterday was summer by any other name. We found our groove back here in the LaLa Petite, with Tin digging his Moroccan bed #2 and Tatjana in the kitchen making us some bolognese sauce, and me throwing around all my balls. The internet was on the fritz yesterday and assuredly it was because everyone had been using it too much and it needed a rest.

Last night, while Tin ate his pasta and I had a glass of wine, we awaited our first guests, and harmony fell over the LaLa. Well, except for Blekica who was suicide bombing the front and back door of the main house trying to get in under any cost. I was happy to see her this morning which meant she didn’t sneak into the house when the guests came in.

This was a big week – a major push to get out of the main house, a transition for Tin to leave the comforts of his own bedroom (he says, “We’re not in there because we are going to the beach.”), a big gala for Re-Bridge coming up, fall greens planted in the front garden, and beginning to think about a new and compelling space for research for my work – let us all stop and say Amen.

Amen.

Last night the tent was not a success – Tin loved it to play with it but believes the only thing to do when inhabiting a tent is to stand up in it. He can’t see the reason for sitting much less sleeping. So the broken tent was disposed of this morning and the twin futon was brought up and now in the corner of the room lies his second Moroccan bed.

The dogs are skittish and Loca managed to take a honking bite out of Heidi’s head and I told her that if she continues she is going to be voted off the adventure. She’s shaking in her paws and looking very contrite.

But this morning the whole system found harmony and the plumber showed up and changed all the flappers that have deteriorated because of the chemicals New Orleans puts in the water (not to mention the hard water), and toilets are all humming, toddler is content, dogs are pacified, and partners – well we’re winking each other as we scurry here and there, because it’s all good.

The last 24 hours have felt like a mudslide – we were doing the final push to get the house ready to rent and I was setting up the “pop up kid’s room” or tent up in my old office for Tin when I fell on it and broke it. What are you going to do for goodness sakes? Meanwhile, my first real client for Greenlight Global Research just got real-er if that is possible and wow, let ms just say. Then the Re-Bridge gala is this Friday and I have received 101 phone calls about this and that and I have a larger than life portrait of the Bubbles for the Bridges invite sitting by the front door scaring away the nutria. The twilight turtle saved our lives – that is all I have to say.

And well, let me just say this about that, someone said to me today that wow, this all sounds like a major transition and I said yeah you right, but it is a far cry from the hell I was living before – there is nothing like creating your own world and inhabiting it – so what if it all comes at you like aufruf at a bat mitzvah (if you don’t get it, that is everyone throwing candy at you after you successfully are called up to read from the Torah).

Yep, it’s all good, but it’s all now! Yikes!

You know those long format holiday greetings that some people send around, which is their way to catch up with far away friends and family? I was thinking about that sort of card and what mine might look like for 2011.

While you can go back and connect the dots and see patterns, in the midst of living, life often seems haphazard and chaotic.

I could start my letter like this: Dear loved one, at the beginning of this year, the economy was still roiling from the utterly complex and at times absurd financial bubble we had been in and I was faced with new directions in my job and also with ongoing maintenance projects at the house that Rachel built on the bayou, also known as the LaLa, and I jumped into the year with both feet and with a few ugly monkeys on my back. I remember distinctly when the air conditioning system was being evaluated in the addition and the suggestion was to run another vent up to where the desk is and I said, “But if I have to take a job in an office, then this might be where a bed goes because we might rent out this room.” Then I said aloud, I have been working from home for so long the thought of being in an office makes me flinch. And the worker said, “Then why would you contemplate a job in an office?” Good question.

Then I began to imagine other jobs and what they would be like and I started making a note on orange paper of jobs I might like to have, might like to create, might like to be and hung these individual notes on my office door. I had 22 notes before I knew where I was going. One of them was to open a hair salon.

I then had a conversation with someone who asked me, “When are you going to give up who you might have been, and realize who you have become?”

I’ve found this out about life this year – that if you open yourself up, many people will come forward – some are Cassandra’s, some are earth angels – but your mission in life is to get right with your own soul and let your soul recognize from which direction the light is shining. I was able to see with piercing accuracy a paper tiger versus kryptonite.

That is only one part of 2011, I had yet to even formulate what the message about Tin (yay!) or Tatjana (good, better, best) would be, before I decided that I prefer to send a photograph instead.

When I was in my thirties I asked a twenty year old where he went to dance and he asked me, “Techno, Jungle or House?”

And I said, “Huh?”

T had a few of her students over for a little get together and I asked them what they are listening to and what they are dancing to. They’re listening to Shoe Gaze music – say what – yeah, you got it, gazing at your shoe type bands the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Wye Oak and Best Coast. What they dance to – are you ready for this – The Archies’ Sugar Sugar, Itty Bitty Pretty One by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (okay so these I knew) and Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend and Dancing on My Own (I actually owned one Robyn song – Robotboy, which I like), and ReMix to R. Kelly’s Ignition as well as some Swamp Pop like Allons a Lafayette by The Cajun Playboys.

Since my happy feet have returned, I’m primed for some get down dancing.

I remember when I married my first husband, a Catholic boy who converted to Judaism to be in my family, we went to a reform synagogue on Esplanade Avenue. I remember being almost physically ill by the woman playing the cello, the books that read from left to right, the absence of Hebrew, the absence of yamulkas, the absence of all I knew to be Judaism having grown up in an orthodox household.

A long time has passed since then and I’ve found myself holding a much broader view of what religion is and could be and why it works for some and not for others, and its place in community. I read with interest about a Reform rabbi who has rewritten the prayer book adding thought pieces by Jonas Salk all the way to John Steinbeck. The metaphors for god have been enlarged, the gender language neutralized, and I thought that sounds good. And right.

There has been some squeamishness within the Reform congregations across the country about the new book, but of course there would be, people stay with their religion because it’s comfortable to them not because it is dynamic and progressive. But isn’t it nice to think that even within the staid confines of something so institutionalized as religion itself, much less in a religion 5772 years old, a little light could shine?

A thousand years ago Steve and I bought a Nolli Plan and planned to use it in many different places and it has wound up being one of those things you schlepp here and there but that never gets used. In rethinking our newly launched lifestyle, Steve relinquished his hold on the Nolli plan, and I turned it over to Tatjana to create our headboard/art piece/Rome map wallpaper. She’s busy at work on this project as I write.

Today in the paper, there was a photo of a new wallpaper that gives you the map of Paris and it was used on the wall behind the bed. What goes on?

Am I a cliché or avant-garde – it is really hard to tell.

After school yesterday, Tin and I walked to the Soraparu playground where the other kids were playing and in comparison, he looked so tiny! Usually I don’t take him there because it is that time of day when the older kids are playing and they tend to be rough and tumble. A mother asked me how old Tin is and I said two and a half, and she said he looks like he’s barely old enough for school.

Perspective.

He’s in nursery school 4.5 hours a day and he ripped a book yesterday instead of napping and he’s small but getting sophisticated in his understanding of relationships and dynamics but still very unclear about where he is in relation to the rest of the world. He’s a toddler in other words.

I was reading an interesting article on child stars in the Times Picayune this morning written by Stephen Whitty – I could not find it online to repost – but he speaks about interviewing everyone from Jodie Foster to Anne Hathaway and the take away is this, there’s no reason to advance, allow, or be complicit in making your child a star – Q.E.D. Michael Jackson. Their talent will surface and will find it’s own path, your job as a parent is to make sure they have a childhood, because lord knows, when you grow old, you always have the fairy existence of your childhood to think back on.

The church marquis says:

Hard times aren’t going to rule my mind.