I was wondering why the professional photographers I know who occasionally post their photos on Facebook and Google+ really capture the spirit of the people, the moment, and the feel for what that second was like. I looked at the Mardi Gras photos in the newspaper and none seemed to come across the way my friends’ photos did – here’s one from Marc Pagani, got us en media res – you can feel the excitement:
Last night, we went to friends’ house to celebrate their 5th anniversary with a fish fry and a group of people that no one told Carnival time is over. Tonight we have dinner at another friends’ house. It’s 7:30 and Tin is humming Carnival time in bed even if yesterday he said in his sleep: Mardi Gras is over and now it’s Jazz Fest and I’m super tired.
The world is crazy.
This morning I read that they are banning the wearing of pajamas in public and that a teenager hung a raccoon in the tree outside his school to protest more blacks being bussed in (is it 2012?).
And we just all have to keep on keeping on.
Yesterday I was telling a friend that I’m starting lent today along with all the Catholics in the world. I give up alcohol for forty days. My friend asked why I, a Jew, would be observing a Catholic holiday and I said because I can. But I was reading a friend’s blog this morning and saw that perhaps the tradition had some roots in Judaism, a religion that certainly knows how to suffer and commemorate suffering probably better than most.
I like the whole idea of Lent because I think it is good to take a break from the ordinary and get distance from it. It’s easy to stop and meet friends and have a cocktail, or have a glass of wine with dinner, or look forward to a cosmopolitan when we head to Meaux Bar for our now infrequent dinners out. But the truth is there are other ways to polish the apple, and giving up alcohol for 40 days goes a long way in helping my waistline avoid empty calories.
So ashes to ashes, pounds to dust.
Today is Fat Tuesday and we are about to head out in our costumes to the Marigny to catch the St. Anne parade as it wends through the French Quarter all on Mardi Gras day. We’ve eaten our weight in king cakes, we’ve caught sparse amounts of beads having sat out a great deal of our parades due to illness, we’ve played our Mardi Gras playlist and heard Mardi Gras mambo, mambo, mambo, Mardiiiii Gras maaaaaambo, down in New Orleans at least 80 times.
My neighbor reconfigured the shopping cart as the Concordia, my other neighbor is hunting a grey cape to disguise his devil’s tail, we have our sandwich boards ready and so, one mo’ time.
C’est le bon temps rouler.
I’m reading a book a friend from Tin’s school recommended called Simplicity Parenting. The good thing is that it is falling pretty much in line with the Simplicity Being that I’ve been working on in my Plan B. The simple truth being that I am wresting myself from the place of being that has had me in chains for the last 16 plus years.
We all know the drill only too well. We arrive at a place in our 40s that feels comfortable and then we stay there out of fear and out of complacency. We experience joy in flashes, but no longer when we hear a song like One Love from Bob Marley, do we want to throw our hands up and dance in ecstasy.
It’s easy to forget that we are the directors and writers of our own narrative, blink and if you see a framework, you might soon inhabit it, so don’t think you are not the creator. I blinked many times and saw the life I am living now, but to get here I had to shed the scales from my eyes, which I also let grow.
Simplicity parenting is about decluttering life to get it down to the essentials of a parent and a child being in harmony. Simplicity being is very similar. It’s about decluttering your life. If you find yourself overwhelmed; stretched too thin and stressed out by the effects of having too much stuff, too many choices, and jumping through the days too fast … simplification gives you the ease to realign with your true self, your real age, and with your own world rather than the stress and pressures of someone else’s world (paraphrased from Simplicity Parenting).
It’s easy to look at these words and say, oh yes, that is what I need, but to take the important steps to get there is not as easy as it may sound. A friend had suggested I try a little Ram Dass who was one of the gurus that helped me towards this path. I’ll never forget what Dass said that when you start moving towards this state of enlightenment you will start losing friends and people around you unless they too are evolving towards the same life path.
Today – as usual – Yahoo’s horoscope provides me with my daily mantra:
February 20, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Don’t be too surprised if you feel a little bit weird or out of place amongst the people you’ll be with today. It is only natural for you to feel like a fish out of water during such a transitional time in your life. It’s normal to have a heightened sense of how different you are from the people around you, right now. Just take your time, and go at your own pace. Soon enough, you will start to feel more like yourself. You’ll grow more comfortable in your own skin.
A short time ago I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain for the first time, and it prompted me to pick up, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The first book was a study of black religion in America and the second a study of the black man in America. Baldwin’s novels are experiences that you can’t just dive into, you have to wade around because they’re harsh, and glaring, and awful, yet glorious.
We have a friend whose mother believes all black children should be educated at black colleges so that they pass through the whirling blades of cultural indoctrination into what being black in America truly means. She is not shy to tell us she believes our son needs to know this to know himself.
I have to say I don’t know anyone who doesn’t need to know what Baldwin is peddling. If you want to understand a least part of black culture, African American experience, of the friction and grease that populate the archives of what Black History Month is all about, start here my friend, read Baldwin.
His are not universal novels about other, I can’t look on his characters and see myself in the religiosity, in the other, in the artist, in the homosexual, because every pore of his characters are wrapped in black skin, black experience, and that experience is singular and only universal to blacks.
I struggled my whole life with my mother’s addiction wanting nothing more than to pull her through to the other side and it took nearly fifty years to learn that I could only give her love and support, but could not change or help her overcome. I was sitting in Zahara de los Atunes, when I read that Amy Winehouse had died of an overdose and I read that her mother had said that her death had been only a matter of time. I thought about this when I saw that Whitney Houston had died of an overdose and how her mother had come to her bedside once and said, I will not let Satan take you from me.
I was reminded of the power of addiction when recently a friend had succumbed for the umpteenth time, and I knew it was not a “ha ha” in your face act, but one of shame and helplessness and I also knew there is no way to reach out and pull this one you love out of the chains of addiction. So today, when a friend told us of the sadness of another loved one lost to addiction, I looked over at Tin who was standing in the doorway and stared really hard at him, through him, hoping he already has the core strength needed to not succumb – he craves a life of music – the otherworld of airy thinness – there are many there who found nirvana and ended only with the continuous hunger of addiction.
A child, a mother, a friend, a celebrity, I read with interest that Sinead O’Connor said musicians are sort of ephemeral, enduring the pain of life to bring joy to others. I still hear the lullabies my mother sang to me as a child and wish I could mimic her sweet voice but mine is low and husky, meant for other types of singing.
I read this post by a friend/blogger and I could not have said it better myself. We live right here near the parade route for Endymion but I would never invite anyone over for a parade that I don’t go to myself. The crowds are the worst part of the parade – however they have come to be, whether it is from the suburbs (but that doesn’t make sense because when I have gone to Metairie for parades I’ve never encountered the same), whether they are from Baton Rouge (who hosted a much beleaguered New Orleans crowd that evacuated during 2005 and so we owe them special thanks), or who these people are but it is this crowd that makes the experience of Endymion the WORST in all of Mardi Gras.
The only thing I can say is this, years ago, many years ago, my brother was admitted to Endymion, a Jew riding a top a horse when Jews were never allowed in before, and this year, for the first time in history, a black king is ruling over the Krewe of Endymion. So I don’t want to hold it against the Krewe or the parade, but really, the people who go to this parade are bottom of the barrel.
Well it is that time of year again – Endymion Saturday – and much like last year it is pouring down rain, only last year Endymion Saturday was also Tin’s 2nd birthday and we stupidly thought we would have a pool party since it had been so warm. Not.
Now it is raining so hard you can’t see out the windows but Endymion is saying they will roll at 5:30 and supposedly this too shall pass.
In the meantime, there is nothing like a rainy day in New Orleans to make you want to curl up, grab a book and joint the parallel universes that exist all around us. Speaking of those, in my dreams last night I joined a group of people who were headed to a swimming hole, it was high up on a hill and you had to climb a ladder to get there, but once up, you dove into the water and what was beyond was a big blue ocean.
Now this is the sort of universe I could easily call home.
