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Okay so I didn’t know that Tin had no school and we got up, made lunch, fed him breakfast, got him dressed and drove all the way across town to find out that school was closed. Now I would have thought MLK would be a reason not to have school but since he’s off for a week for Mardi Gras and a week and a day for spring break, it never occurred to me that there was more holiday time a’ coming.

So then we had to unwind everything we had wound up and of course this put a curve ball in my exercise plan (to pick him up on the bike), and interfered with both T or I getting anything done today – not that we had a big agenda, but we had planned on uninterrupted morning time.

Then began the task of doing – so I made spaghetti with meat sauce with a red gravy and picked lettuce from the front yard and made a salad. Then we all ate on the screen porch because the weather is so beautiful right now.

It ended up being a day that was not shades of Manic Mondays from my past working life, or Moody Monday when I was not thrilled to be doing what I had to do, but rather Mundane Monday – a Monday of just eating, piddling around, and doing.

And there you have it – no arc to this story.

If you ever watched Rosanna Rosanna Danna on Saturday Night Live you remember her tag line was it’s always something. And so it was that I watched Martin Luther King give his speech in 1963 in D.C. where he says that we will not be free until the Negro is given citizenship. And I thought the rhetoric now is until gays can marry. And I’m sure polygamists are lining up as I write.

See it’s always something. It’s always someone who is disenfranchised and wants a piece of the pie.

So where do you line up – do you believe the pie is limited, or limitless? Can all God’s children have a piece? Or only those chosen by other people?

It’s like marijuana leads to heroin as far as arguments go – give the blacks equal rights and what’s next? Gay’s want equal marriage. Polygamist want equal marriage. Immigrants want equal opportunity.

It’s always something.

And no end in sight.

Some people don’t understand why people live in the path of a hurricane. They don’t understand how we deal with all the crime (we don’t). They don’t understand why there’s no place to shop, horrific schools, and people eat a diet that would make John Belushi flinch.

But today is why we live here. It is January 15th and it was a picture perfect picnic day where in a sleeveless sundress, we took over the picnic table by the playground and had a most wonderful day.

I had spent the morning trying to recover 1500 contacts from my database that syncing MAC’s Address Book to Outlook’s Contacts to my iPhone had created. A most stupid thing. It goes on all the time. I was able to get all but 500 contacts back. 500 – who are those people? Will we ever speak again? So I declared this day anti-technology day and went outside.

We threw the football, we tackled, we ate, we talked.

And best of all, Tin got some boy time in with Evan.

and we obey by lounging for the lord – still in pajamas contemplating a picnic in City Park today because the weather is so awesome. I love the Gulf South, New Orleans, and a winter’s day spent outdoors in my tee shirt.

I’ve been reading the most engaging thought pieces, articles, tweets, Google+ posts, and hearing people speak of a new way – just finished an article about motivating students by having them take rewards for excellence and pass it on to those who helped them, about workers who receive vouchers that they in turn give to those who helped them along the way, about a real hard look at how politics have shaped the disparity in the U.S. economy in the last thirty years, about how media and companies should be telling a story that is complicit with their customers’ experience and desire, and all of this makes me think that one day I might be having a conversation with Tin that goes something like this:

When you were born things were different, there was poverty all across America, and 1% of the population was richer than kings and the rest struggled. Students at law school would tear out critical passages from books to ensure the failure of their classmates. Education was only available to the very rich and the rest were mindlessly shuttled through standardized tests built to nurture the status quo. People in power – politicians, police, and corporations – were narrow minded and short sighted.

Can you believe it, Tin? Could you believe the world you were born into has changed in such a drastic but wonderful way? Now, no child goes hungry and everyone is afforded equal health care and education, as well as opportunity. We all have gardens in our yard and fish from clean waters. Grocery stores are where everyone brings their surplus to share with those who did not have a good crop year. Our elected officials represent the majority of our voices that are aggregated from everyone’s own internet access which is free and unregulated. Crime in New Orleans and elsewhere has all but disappeared except for the petty thievery of a stick of gum or two. Isn’t America great?

Saints = Superbowl = 2013 = New Orleans!

I’ve lived many places in my life but never has a place has so profoundly felt like home as the city of New Orleans. After driving over 800 miles to get home yesterday, I hit the twin spans as the sun was setting in purple, gold and red technicolor over Lake Ponchartrain. I could have told you I was home with my eyes closed by the potholes that only Louisiana delivers. No matter, my spirit soared as soon as I was over the water and about to touch down on the other side.

I returned to escalating murder and mayhem – 18 shot – many dead – my son having to leave a playground as two men shot at two men two blocks too close. A friend’s brother attacked by a mob of 10 young black boys on Prytania Street – an ex con chased them down yelling out the window, that ain’t right. The police (suspicious characters in and of themselves) caught seven of the 10. And now what?

Oh my brethren, we have to make it stop. We have to heal your wounds, our wounds, this city’s wounds now and forever. This is paradise, this is our home. It deserves respect.

I saw two dead llamas on the I-65 within a quarter mile of each other – on the driver’s side, so on the narrow medium. They were snowy white and they weren’t goats or sheep, they were llamas.

Very strange.

Driving back from Ohio, I was listening to the Drive By Trucker’s Southern Rock Opera and given that I was leaving the Midwest where Cincinnati is the murder capital and driving back to New Orleans where we are actively competing for this title, right as I was passing through Northern Alabama and the Paul W. Bryant museum exit was a mile ahead, this part of the Southern Rock Opera came on as if to drive home the point:

I grew up in North Alabama, back in the 1970’s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Speaking of course of the Three Great Alabama Icons: George Wallace, Bear Bryant and Ronnie Van Zant. Now Ronnie Van Zant wasn’t from Alabama, he was from Florida. He was a huge Neil Young fan. But in the tradition of Merle Haggard writin’ Okie from Muskogee to tell his dad’s point of view about the hippies an’ Vietnam, Ronnie felt that the other side of the story should be told. And Neil Young always claimed that Sweet Home Alabama was one of his favorite songs. And legend has it that he was an honorary pall bearer at Ronnie’s funeral. Such is the Duality of the Southern Thing. And Bear Bryant wore a cool lookin’ red checkered hat and won football games and there’s few things more loved in Alabama than football and the men who know how to win at it. So when the Bear would come to town, there’d be a parade. And me, I was one of them pussy boys cause I hated football, so I got a guitar but a guitar was a poor substitute for a football with the girls in my high school. So my band hit the road and we didn’t play no Skynyrd either. I came of age rebellin’ against the music in my high school parkin’ lot. It wasn’t till years later after leavin’ the South for a while that I came to appreciate and understand the whole Skynyrd thing and its misunderstood glory. I left the South and learned how different people’s perceptions of the Southern Thing was from what I’d seen in my life. Which leads us to George Wallace. Now Wallace was for all practical purposes the Governor of Alabama from 1962 until 1986. Once, when a law prevented him from succeeding himself he ran his wife Lerline in his place and she won by a landslide. He’s most famous as the belligerent racist voice of the segregationist South. Standing in the doorways of schools and waging a political war against a Federal Government that he decried as hypocritical. And Wallace had started out as a lawyer and a judge with a very progressive and humanitarian track record for a man of his time. But he lost his first bid for governor in 1958 by hedging on the race issue, against a man who spoke out against integration. Wallace ran again in ’62 as a staunch segregationist and won big, and for the next decade spoke out loudly. He accused Kennedy and King of being communists. He was constantly on national news, representing the “good” people of Alabama. And you know race was only an issue on TV in the house that I grew up in. Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place. And when I first ventured out of the South, I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people. Ya know racism is a worldwide problem and it’s been since the beginning of recorded history and it ain’t just white and black. But thanks to George Wallace, it’s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent. And bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd attempted to show another side of the South. One that certainly exists, but few saw beyond the rebel flag. And this applies not only to their critics and detractors, but also from their fans and followers. So for a while, when Neil Young would come to town, he’d get death-threats down in Alabama. Ironically, in 1971, after a particularly racially charged campaign, Wallace began backpedaling, and he opened up Alabama politics to minorities at a rate faster than most Northern states or the Federal Government. And Wallace spent the rest of his life trying to explain away his racist past, and in 1982 won his last term in office with over 90% of the black vote. Such is the Duality of the Southern Thing. And George Wallace died back in ’98 and he’s in Hell now, not because he’s a racist. His track record as a judge and his late-life quest for redemption make a good argument for his being, at worst, no worse than most white men of his generation, North or South. But because of his blind ambition and his hunger for votes, he turned a blind eye to the suffering of Black America. And he became a pawn in the fight against the Civil Rights cause. Fortunately for him, the Devil is also a Southerner.

I left my friend this morning with her newborn baby. Last night after another newly made friend swooped in to take my place the new mother remarked “my how people are so generous when you have a baby” and so it is that every culture has a saying that a child arrives with a loaf of bread under his arm.

One angel is bayou bound – the next angel arrived at the ready this morning. That’s how it is with angels, with babies, with life.

I am going home to pick back up on my story and leaving baby Leo to narrate his own. One piece of advice baby Leo – never cast yourself as a victim in your own story.