So I’ve been speaking to people about dogs – here a dog there a dog, hell Tin and I even looked at cats at the shelter despite the fact that a litter was born under my neighbor’s house sometime a few months ago. One woman said to me, “I just want to make sure you will keep the dog because this time of year, people long for a dog because of the holidays.”
Well mam, I wanted to tell her – welcome to my life, because I am among many things a card carrying cliché – this time last year I had two dogs and two cats and a house on the bayou and thought differently than I do now. But that was last year, this year my household is very different – the footprint has changed, and the paw prints have definitely disappeared from the floorboards.
Is this why I want a dog? Hmmm, let’s see. No. Why I want a dog – part one:
The only remaining animals from last year is Heidi, the German Shepherd rescued in 2010. If you know anything about German Shepherds you know they bond with one person even though they are a family dog. And Heidi bonded with Tin and Tin with Heidi. So when Heidi is at the Blue House, Tin misses her. So when we are home in our cozy house, I long for a dog who will be here at the Spirit House.
That’s part one. Part two is I want a dog for me.
I’ve grown accustomed to walking a dog to City Park and getting my morning constitutional and now without a dog, I’m not pulled to complete my ritual alone. Well I do venture out for walks and do it alone, but it does not bring me the same joy that a trusty companion by my side does.
Part three is I miss my four-legged companions of yesteryear.
Arlene was such a joy to have around from the time she crawled out of the carrier at SFO airport and climbed up my neck till the time I carried her to the vet one last time. I still think about her. I still dream about her.
Part four – because four is my lucky number – is that my mother told me she would come back as a dog. And I miss my mother too.
So I’m blue for the holidays – I miss the creatures I clung to in my life who transitioned to another – and my son who I waited 50 years for will be at the Blue House (how color appropriate) on Christmas and so yes, lady on the other end of the receiver, I admit, I’m a cliché because I want a dog since I’m blue for the holidays, but I don’t want just a creature to temporarily assuage my blues, I am looking for a companion with whom to share this wonderful life.
A friend invited me to dinner this week and we went with another couple. The couple have just met – each about a year after a divorce with grown children (read: in their 20s). My friend and I marveled at their joy on finding each other at this time.
A friend of mine’s daughter who is 14 went to a dance last night for the first time and was nervous and giddy on departing and vague upon return. The boy she is interested in went with another girl from another school – his attraction to either remains ambiguous.
A friend of mine was over for dinner and we were speaking about another friend who has hooked up with a guy who she was lukewarm about at first, but now into it a few weeks, is trying to decode his text messages and obsessing about what he is thinking. My friend wants her to stop and to just try and let it all be sexy and nothing more. [read: lots of luck]
A friend of mine has a few dates, another friend is breaking up with her boyfriend, another friend proposed, and yet another went out on about six dates in seven days – like that.
A friend today told me she is having a hard time in her relationship – that it might be ending – that it is incredibly sad and she is not quite sure what to do.
As winter turns its corner, and holidays gather steam here, my friends are falling in and out of love, I say to everyone who passes through my door, “Be Love or Leave.”
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
~ John Updike, Brazil
I went to see Philomena yesterday and I’m still haunted by Judi Dench’s performance. Or should I say Stephen Frears’ directorship. If you’ve never seen Frears’ The Queen, I suggest you rent it now because it was a movie that was so very English in its subtlety and so spot on powerful in its performance. The same with Philomena.
Recently, people have been posting quotes by Nelson Mandela and how he forgave his captors and his oppressors and how he lived the Revolution he began through integrity. Madiba is how he’s known in his homeland. Madiba is a loving name for a larger than life man.
And Philomena embodies Madiba’s philosophy – she is a sweet, kind older woman who was dealt a bad hand at one point in her life, who through an arc, not readily apparent till the end, becomes the hero of her own story.
In an age when heroes are about how aggressive or assertive you can be, Philomena is a jewel and a cautionary tale against anger and vengeance. She is Jesus Christ. She is Madiba. She is powerful in her understated kindness and forgiveness (even of herself).
She’s a woman with whom I’d like to sit down to tea and how she chooses to live her life is humbling.
The woman asked me what trait I am looking for in a dog and I said, “Kindness. The same thing I look for in a human.”
How does a dog show kindness? I believe it is obvious. I have known sweet dogs that make me kinder and I’ve known aggressive dogs that make me irritated and aggressive myself.
I’m looking for a dog or let’s just put it in the parlance of the day, I’ve opened myself up to a dog. I’m coming to the finish line of this difficult financial year and I’ve been avoiding any complex financial consideration so that I could get to where I am now and that is on the upswing. Thankfully I have more work and 2014 is looking more robust than this year.
And that means I have started thinking about a dog again.
As soon as I opened the doggy door, I’ve had encounters. Tin and I drove to Belle Chasse to see a dog named Edward, who had one blue eye and one brown eye and growled at Tin when he went to pet him. An instant no. Then there was the blind Jack Russell that gave me pause because it meant to me blind destruction of my house. Then there was Major – a throwback because he was not a good fit for one owner and perhaps he was a good fit for me – “He eats rocks. You don’t have rocks around there in New Orleans, so you don’t have to worry about it. But he needed an operation to dislodge a rock. His father ate rocks too.”
And there was 6-year-old Chance – good in all ways but his propensity to stand guard at the door and dictate how things would ebb and flow. A “GREAT” fit for me and my son. But I dwelled on Chance and I couldn’t get there.
So last night, after seeing the photograph of a sweet girl who walks like an angel, I knew we had found our puppy.
I was thrilled. But then I weighed the costs and I couldn’t square those with our reality. There is the trampoline I want to get for Tin for his birthday. There is Santa, Kwanzaa and his birthday and there are bills and ongoing items that need addressing and the angel was beginning to stress me out – my heart was saying yes, but my head was saying not now.
I’m not good with choices. I’ve come around to believing that I’ve always been someone who just wished someone else would come in magically and say, “Rachel, if you do this, that will be good. Or don’t do that because it will end up bad.” And I’ve kicked myself unmercifully for choices I’ve made that have turned out to be bad choices. “Who knew?” I ask myself time and time again, it could have gone this way or that, and it went that way. Who knew? This time though, I made my choice not to go with what my heart dictated – the little angel puppy who glides across the floor and looks as cute as any puppy dares – and I said to myself, Rachel I said, she could be the heartbreaker – but all of your choices are good ones because you make them and if it turns out that your choice this time leads you astray, then you will come to understand later why you made it and why at the time, this was the right choice because it led you here, to this moment, which is exactly where you are supposed to be no matter how things seem to appear.
I noticed several things about what this year looks like versus other years. My posts on this blog have been cut in half as I started my other writings on race and parenting. And both have suffered from my indulgence on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Since the Times-Picayune quit publishing a daily, I’ve taken to getting my news off FB – I figure if something happened, I’ll hear it there unless I’m getting an alert from the New York Times – otherwise, it’s radio silence around here. So I say to myself at times I won’t go on Facebook or Twitter and I’ll just exist in a vacuum — then I break that promise.
I’ve taken to reading more and more and that has also led me to withdrawing more and more from an active life of here and there. In doing so, I’ve come to almost dread the occasions when I have to go out there and do whatever is out there unlike my former self who was a street rat by nature.
This morning after Zumba, I came home and did a quick shower/change and went to services at Anshe Sfard, the oldest synagogue in New Orleans and the only one that invited Martin Luther King to speak when he was passing through New Orleans in the 50s. I had met the rabbi at the Hanukkah Second Line and he had invited me to come. Everything about this shule down to the smell of the books made me think of my father and my years growing up under the shadow of his tallis and his voice – the deep rich baritone that sang at full volume causing everyone in the synagogue to turn and look at us – some respectfully and some not so. I was welcomed like the lost child by Esther and Sharon who adopted me immediately and the man who lived in Greenwich Village in the 60s and met the Beatles and then lived in Cuba painting murals on bars while Castro was coming to power and I was growing in my mother’s belly.
My two events tonight that I was venturing out to attend – I’ve nixed them as well, preferring instead to stay home and hang out with me. My BFF.
I’ve found myself in the clutch of taking one thing at a time rather than the myriad endeavors that used to overlap in my life. The riches of catching up with a friend on FaceTime yesterday made me snuggle up on the couch and joyously give my friend my all. The books deserve my full attention and not an attempt to read, clean, cook or exercise and so I find myself curling up with a book on my sofa looking outside at the large oak trees that I see from the tops of my windows. I’m cooking like a freak – for me! It’s crazy – I’m not cooking for anyone but me (and Tin) and it’s fabulous. I’m eating like a Queen. I gave a cauliflower a wine and bay leaf bath and then roasted it and enjoyed every single bite.
It’s hard to say if my writing has suffered from extending myself to two blogs – and having picked up work that scatters my day over multiple projects – I haven’t suffered because I’m narrowing my choices down and my to do list is as grand as ever but there is nothing marked URGENT on it, which gives me this sense of sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
I’m 54, so it’s not as if I’ve entered old age, but I’ve walked through some threshold that is calming and indulgent and although I came through kicking and screaming, I can assure you I would implode if you tried to make me walk back through the door I came in. Here is plenty good, better than good, and it’s expansive too – something I find the most unusual is that in narrowing my concerns I’ve broadened my mind.
It’s been quite the week starting with returning after midnight on Sunday night to Tuesday’s latke extravaganza (24 dozen gluten free and vegan latkes fried and eaten) and menorah lighting to Wednesday’s kindergarten presentation complete with latkes, candle making, and dancing the hora, to Saturday’s homecoming celebration honoring the four year anniversary of the first time I laid eyes on my son to his friend’s birthday at the Monkey Room to a playdate uptown.
I came home and cleaned the bathrooms! I changed his bed and cleaned his sheets! Next up, wash my sheets, dust and vacuum and mop all the floors. Yee ha! Someone’s got to do it.
But I want to talk about giving right now, because that is the reason for the season and I was most impressed at Thanksgiving time when The City of Love church was seen (and interviewed by me) paying for people’s groceries.
This afternoon, on the drive to his last playdate, Tin unprompted said that he was grateful that his friend Adrian had come to light the menorah with him, and he was grateful that Tatjana had given him Belle, and that he was grateful about Heidi. I told him that I had been grateful today for hot water that poured out of our pipes as I was taking a shower – oh what a feeling!
I spoke with another mother today who has thyroid problems and she spoke about the lethargy that plagues her and I told her how it affects me. I was always this person who could give give give of myself until I just utterly wore myself out and then I was pissed off at the world because nobody was taking care of me. Then I lost all my energy with this auto-immune disease and now I’m so content to sit on my sofa and read a book or watch a good film. I luxuriate in resting and going to bed early. I love nothing more than not doing all the things that I could be doing these days.
I’m grateful that I give to some but more importantly I give myself permission to just be. It’s incredibly freeing and has been a long time coming. So for those of you just getting your holidays started (I’m in cruise control for the rest of this season), kick back and curl up with a good book and a cup of tea and remember to give to the most important person on your list – yourself.
I pulled out all the wigs, bought a few stocking caps from the second hand store (including one that looks like a chandelier) and got the boots out, and the sweaters hung all for the 85 degrees it has been here in New Orleans. Humid days with barely a Gulf South breeze blowing, and you’d think we would know what to do with ourselves but considering there was frost on the ground just short of a week ago and tomorrow it is going to be 47 degrees – we don’t.
The Hanukkah decorations came down, the Santa stockings came out (Santa does visit Jewish boys and girls), and now the Kwanzaa table with its red, green and black colors is taking form. But first we pause for the Homecoming Anniversary. Tomorrow will be four years since the first day I laid eyes on Tin. In four years, my life has stretched to dimensions heretofore unknown – yes, this is parenthood and it’s a daily miracle.
I was trying to introduce the concept of smores to Tin tonight so I pulled out the gluten free marshmallows and the chocolate and realized he had eaten all the graham crackers but I remembered there were two that were left in the truck so in this chilly night I ran out in my jammies and grabbed the uneaten two and then came in and built a small fire out of matchsticks to melt the marshmallow and the chocolate and he ran around me and was fascinated and when it was all done he said, “I’m not going to eat that!” So it all went in the trash. That’s motherhood.
I always knew I wanted to be a mother, could be a mother, would make a good mother, but I’m here to tell you mothering is not a test where anyone can gage how you are doing, especially you, it is a work in progress, and a constant mess and triumph delivered in a flash of a second, and ever malleable and fallible in its essence. Motherhood is freaky weird and fucking awesome. Who knew? No one can describe it, inform you about it, or even warn you well enough to steer clear of it.
Tomorrow we celebrate my son’s coming home. And I get to say: I’m Tin’s Mom – yay!
I was trying to explain to Tin that his world is expanding as we flew to San Francisco to go to a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. Tin does not do well with greetings and new people and there could be an underlying reason for that as he was shuffled around as an infant and perhaps he “greets” people smiling at him and trying to introduce themselves with the trepidation it deserves. But as we were going to be meeting a lot of people and greetings were in order, I introduced to him the ever expanding universe he is living in with us at the core then his kindergarten family, his New Orleans family, his Spain family, his Croatian family, his Atlanta family and now his San Francisco family. It seemed to have done the trick because he was a much better greeter than he has been before.
But as his world was expanding, mine was shrinking, as I came full circle with a journey I began decades ago when I left New Orleans for San Francisco. We arrived at the Hilton straddling Chinatown and North Beach and the view gave way to Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill and the bay beyond.
I have mentioned to Tin several times that our name, Dangermond, is my married name and even though I am no longer married to the man I kept his name – so I also mentioned on this trip that Steve would be there and he would meet him. From our hotel room, I pointed out Coit Tower and told him Steve and I had gotten married there a long time ago. “What happened to Steve?” he asked. “We broke up,” I told him. “Like you and Mama,” he said. “Exactly,” I said.
We walked down to the bay to see the sea lions and I had a strong deja vu of having gone down there with my niece, Miracle Baby, when she was the same age as Tin. That was before her father was sent to prison for the second time. That was, as my sister-in-law said, in happier times, when there wasn’t so much water under the bridge. I took Tin to the same store for Lefty’s that we had taken her to and bought him a pair of left-handed scissors.
We then had a lovely Thanksgivukkah with our Jewish friends and the next day, went to Friday night services at Temple Emanuel where we were treated to a play about Hanukkah, as well as songs about Hanukkah, and a very very very short service – right up my alley. The next morning was the bar mitzvah and although the service was longer, I caught one of those images suspended in a time warp where I was watching my friends called to the altar, now parents of a 13-year-old boy called to his bar mitzvah – I watched them speaking at the bema to their son and a newfound realization sprang in my thoughts that despite the odds, and I wouldn’t have put them in their favor, that they have clung to each other and carved out a life unlike others who had seemed more adroit at this strange institution – here were my friends as husband and wife and child – parents – sparkling careers – the whole nine yards – all of them crossing a threshold in their lives and us, the spectators left to gage our own shortcomings and achievements in the mirror they held up.
I don’t remember growing older, when did they?
At the end of the service, the kids were called up for the aufruf whereby they are given candy to throw at the bar mitzvah’d child. Tin marched right up there as if he had been doing it his whole life and watching him made me question seriously whether the decision to not raise him Jewish is a sound one.
At the end of our trip, I was extraordinarily grateful to see people I love happy – my friends who hosted us, Steve and his partner, my friend who runs the dry cleaners on Columbus Avenue, and the several gal pals I visited with who are not with partners now but who are strong and vibrant and welcoming of love in their lives. It was a good trip, a fine roundtrip to come home from and fall into my own bed and sleep without any tangled thoughts of whether I should have done this or that because all that I did led me here, to now.
I am where I am supposed to be no matter how things may seem to appear. The heart is a muscle and the more you use it, the bigger it grows.
During Passover, the youngest child asks, why is this night different than other nights? But this holiday season all of us are asking why is Hanukkah falling on Thanksgiving creating Thanksgivukkah. The answer my friend is so complicated it makes my head burn but the short answer is:
The quirk of Thanksgivukkah is that the Hebrew calendar, which follows the sun and the moon, and the Gregorian calendar, where Thanksgiving sits on the fourth Thursday of November, has aligned this year so that the two holidays are on the same day for the first time since 1888, 25 years after President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a holiday.
You cannot imagine the stress of trying to celebrate both holidays and in my case add on a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah in the same week – Oh Brother Maccabee! Not to mention, this year, the Dangermond household has decided to also include Kwanzaa in our holiday celebration. Look out folks we have just ramped the winter holidays up to a new level here and it starts today. So grab your book of matches and let’s start lighting some candles.
I post this* [below] every year as a reminder of what Hanukkah is, but if you look at how Hanukkah overlaps with Thanksgiving – they are both holidays that offer thanks for our bounty and for the cornucopia of our bounty’s elements, then you can’t help but see that Kwanzaa, a holiday initiated by African Americans to celebrate the cornucopia of an African heritage brought to bloom on American soil overlaps as well. Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are about remembering who we are in the diospara. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are about how grateful we are to be surrounded by loved ones who bring light into our dark days.
This month is Native American History month. The irony that there is only one month each to celebrate African American contributions to our culture as well as Native American is in and of itself absurd. What is even more absurd is that Native American History month falls during the same month as Thanksgiving, which for many Native Americans is seen as a day of mourning. How telling of human resilience that when asked how do Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, most will say they spend it in the company of their families and loved ones around a meal.
The fact that all of these holidays so wonderfully overlap to create a reason for the season is what is making me joyous this holiday season – I’m giving thanks that we got through another hurricane season here in the Gulf South; I’m thankful President Obama has opened doors in Iran; I’m grateful for my son and having the privilege of watching him grow; and I’m grateful that we were able to buy a house after letting go of the dream house that I built after the 2005 Federal Flood. In our house, we have decorated for both Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, the Hanukkah bush stage will morph to our Kwanzaa table and the blue lights will be replaced by red, green and black cloth. The menorah will give way to the kinara.
In the end, the message is the same, in this family of color, we celebrate oneness, our cornucopia of difference that has given birth to who we are. With love, I would like to thank you for reading and joining us on our journey. And by all means, proceed with love.
I’ll leave off with a quote from Mourning Dove who was born in 1888, the last time Hanukkah and Thanksgiving joined together on our calendar:
…… everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.
~ Mourning Dove Salish 1888-1936
*Hanukkah
The story of Hanukkah is the story of religious freedom. In 168 BC King Antiochus (pronounced an TIE uh kus) the 4th, who inherited his kingdom from Alexander the Great, set up an idol in the Jewish temple and ordered Jews to worship it. He was a zealous Hellenist and wanted all people to follow Greek ways. A revolt led by Mattathias and his son Judah the Maccabee to overthrow Antiochus raged with the odds against the Jews; they were ill-equipped and vastly outnumbered [think the Saints or David & Goliath or Rocky). But the Jews were fighting for their homes, their faith and their freedom as the Syrian mercenaries were not. So, in the winter of 165 BC the Jews were victorious and marched into Jerusalem.
The first act was to clean the temple and get rid of the idol. When they arrived, there was only a single flask of oil to light that should have lasted one day. It miraculously lasted eight.
Later, to commemorate the victory, candles were lit for eight days. There was an interesting dispute between the followers of Shammai and Hillel (Hillel and Shammai were two leading rabbis of the early 1st century BCE who founded opposing schools of Jewish thought, known as the House of Hillel and House of Shammai). Shammai advocated lighting the eight candles moving downward to a single candle. Historians believe Shammai’s basic view was that the glory of Israel lay in the past and there had been a steady downward trend among the Jews. Hillel’s followers foresaw a glorious future for Judaism. Symbolic of their faith and hope, they advocated a rising crescendo of light. Of course, they prevailed. Today the candles are lit from left to right.
The basic issue of the Maccabean struggle was religious freedom. The Jews fought for their right to worship God in their own way. Not long after the victory, war broke out again, this time Judah was killed in battle and the new colossus, Rome, bestrode the Middle East. The Hebrew state [Israel] was crushed until May 1948. It is interesting to speculate on what this victory of the spirit has meant in human history. If Judaism had been destroyed in the second century before Jesus, would Christianity have come into the world, or Mohammedanism? Both were products of Judaism and both derived sustenance from the living Jewish people.
The confluence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah along with the arrival of cold and damp weather as well as all of this happening at the same time as my friend’s son’s bar mitzvah is enough to make anyone discombobulated.
As I approach the holidays or rather as the holidays encroach on me, I’m taking stock of how things are at this very moment. I have not had a glass of wine or any alcohol for three months. I managed to decorate the house for each holiday from Halloween to Hanukkah. I’ve been cooking up a storm and enjoying my new journey into gluten free.
So when I think back to where I was last year at this time – out of my mind – and where I am now – at peace – I’d say that whoa, what a difference a year makes.
My life had started rolling like a little ball accreting into a bigger ball until I could not even face myself in the morning. And then I tugged on a few main arteries and watched the whole house of cards tumble in on itself. Done. I was done, done, and done.
What ensued was a major reframing of my life that took away the foundation of my dream house, my career, my hair, my relationship, my pets, and the memories and dreams that had propped me up. None of them came with me into this new life. Not a hair on my chinny chin chin.
I thought about this recently when I was trying to figure out why there is always so much collateral damage along my journey and serendipitously I opened up a book that a woman had written about Black Angels. She made Black Angel cards to go along with the book of interpretations and divination. I opened the book to The Changer.
You are transforming the foundation of your soul.
You are transformation manifested in a human soul. You embody change from deep within. … Primarily, your divine work is creating a metamorphosis in others’ values and beliefs. … People can be uncomfortable with your evolution, and thus you may frequently suffer the loss of friendships. Transitioning from an old self to a renewed self is a serious practice for you. … Sometimes you get tired of transformation, but you can’t step out of it because it’s your nature.
Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, Thursday is the first time Hanukkah and Thanksgiving have been at the same time since 1888 and it won’t happen again in my lifetime. Saturday, is the four year anniversary of my mother’s passing and it’s my friend’s son’s bar mitzvah – he was just a tiny baby and now he is ready to take on his own sins. Next week, we will have the first Hanukkah menorah lighting at the Spirit House. The following Friday, we will celebrate Tin’s homecoming anniversary (4 years).
The earth is spinning and where once I was accreting and accreting then I changed course and started shedding and purging and now I do believe I’ve reached a nice body weight – something I can live with inside and out. I’ve taken my time to rest and renew. It’s kept me from writing as much and it has brought me to reading too much. My monastic habits have suited me during the second half of a year that was fraught with so much change in the first half that not even those closest to me could keep up with where I was at any single moment in the advent of my new life.
Every year, I get to know more about who I am. Each upheaval offers me an opportunity to renew. Even traditions can alter and morph. This year, we will celebrate Kwanzaa as well as all of the other holidays – why not? – why not make every day from now till the end of the year a celebration? Bringing light into the darkness and giving thanks for our bounty.
I just continue to believe in the best possible outcome in the best possible world.
