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I went to see E the other day as quitting smoking in the midst of all the other chaos in my life was probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Well, the truth is that I started smoking because of the chaos and it truly wasn’t helping so why keep it up. She said I often talk about the fact that watching my mother be so vulnerable to my nutty father is what made me decide to never be vulnerable to anyone, particularly a man. But in fact she thinks it was my own vulnerability to my father’s crazy whims and my mother’s distant alcoholism that made me decide to never allow myself to be vulnerable to anyone.

A friend was telling me the other day that she is looking for a man who she would allow herself to be submissive to – she said it would be my gift to him. But he would have to be worthy.

Ah, and so there is the rub, who is worthy enough to love and accept a woman who is equal parts vulnerable and strong?

Dunno.

For me, I would have to trust the person implicitly before I would give the gift of my submission.

The black swans that populated City Park were taken away by the Federal Flood and then replaced by kindly zoo keepers from other parts. Only those didn’t last either. Seems a black swan, like a black young man, are hard to keep alive in this city. And yet they are so beautiful to behold.

Yesterday, at the sculpture garden in City Park, the groundskeepers had cordoned off a nest where the black swan was keeping her five eggs. She was pulling her feathers out and tugging on the weeds in the ground to continue to fluff her nest.

I thought about that swan this morning and how we’ve been waiting and waiting for her or one of her to give birth to some baby swans having tried every year with no success. I was walking Heidi through the park, something I haven’t done in a number of days, weeks, since Tatjana moved out with Heidi.

I realize now that Loca had actually been a godsend to me, keeping me walking every morning to be able to cycle through the craziness. In her absence, I quit walking and started smoking. Obviously, the former was a better option in hindsight.

But I’m here to say I’m proud of myself. Yesterday, my friend with the lot came by and said that his appraisal had come in so very low he was having it redone. Then my agent called to say there is a glitch with my appraisal and the buyers had rewritten their offer. And I can’t sell the house for what they are now offering. So rather than pick up a pack of cigarettes, I just took a few deep breaths and said “I believe in the bigger picture. This is small.”

As I walked through the park and thought about the black swan’s eggs, and thought about the young man who was gunned down in the Lafitte area yesterday, and thought about whether or not I was keeping or selling the LaLa, it seemed to me that nature has a way of cycling through its rapture and horror seamlessly, why can’t I?

Ever notice in old science fiction movies how the people are bald? Well, at swimming the other day a woman walked in who could have been my twin – I mean cue ball head and all. I thought now would you look at that. Maybe all those movies from the past were really images of the future as we all develop alopecia from the stress of modern life.

There have been so many people I’ve met here in New Orleans that have contracted autoimmune diseases, I’m beginning to wonder if we don’t share something in common – namely the 2005 Federal Flood and its collateral damage.

A client asked me recently to revamp their website and take off the references to Katrina. Perhaps, the references to Katrina are only now beginning to manifest themselves in our bodies.

I have mentioned before a woman I sat next to at a conference a few years ago in New York – who happened to be the motivational speaker – didn’t know it at the time, but she left my side and went up and delivered a rousing talk about how to think differently about change. The key notes of her talk is that sometimes you need to place more awareness not on the goal, but on the journey to the goal – that sounds like a cliche, I know – but she gave a visual, say you are a trapeze artist and you are about to let go of one bar and grab hold of the next – it is right at that moment, in the interstitial of the act, that the most possibilities occur – so be aware.

So I’m not having to force myself to take a leap here, I have leaped. What I’m trying to do is not close down during this transition as a part of me would like to just shut everything out so that I can have my space and I have already put on some blinders about where I want to go, so that is shutting out even more people and events. My goal is take the blinders off and to take the transition a little slower and to allow the possibilities to enter.

My mind works like a list. Sell house, check. Rent apartment, check. Quit smoking, check. Buy lot, waiting. Build house, waiting.

I need it to work like this: Enjoy today, check. Savor that glass of wine, check. Get on the floor and play with Tin, check. Eat slowly, check. Go for a walk, check.

A friend was on her way over to the LaLa right before I left for D.C., she said she had been listening to a woman who ran a marathon and when asked by everyone who she was going to sponsor or run for, she said she put on the back of her jersey, “I am doing this for me.”

And so when I was in D.C. lying in bed, I received an email from a friend admonishing me to take care of Tin during this transition period. As if, I thought, Tin wasn’t the most important part of any of my decisions.

I left on a Saturday morning and returned on a Tuesday evening and the emotional ribbons that flapped in the icy wind while I was gone begged for me to pick up the phone and call someone who could help me make it just a little bit longer, help steady me on this wavering bridge, help guide me into the light. But my mom is dead, so I couldn’t make that call. I said to myself as I rode a wave of depression that this too shall pass. I told myself as I became anxious that nicotine withdrawal was certainly complicit. I was having a hard time envisioning what my life looks like right now and that’s because the canvas has been painted over to get ready for the new picture. Of what?, fear asked me. “Will this time be different?” smart mouth cynicism lashed out. “Yay, I’m free to move forward,” the optimist said.

I snuggled myself and said it doesn’t matter what, when, where or who, what matters is you. Me, myself and I. This time is for me.

Love After Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

In 2009, we went to a friend’s house for the inauguration of President Barack Obama and his family into the White House. We dressed up, we surrounded ourself with like-minded friends, and we danced and hollered the night away riding the high of Obama’s HOPE dream.

This year, for the inauguration of Obama’s second term, I went to D.C. with friends to stand outside in the mall and witness it up close and personal with over 800,000 others. This was short of the 1.8 million who stood there four years ago in 11 degree weather, but it still had a feeling of community and hope. Obama pointedly referred in his speech to gays, to climate change, and to gun control and there wasn’t a person nearby who was not saying Amen over and over as he spoke.

In four years, little has changed and enormous things have changed. I had hoped that I would enlarge my heart’s view to accommodate another person’s differing viewpoint and I found in the end that I couldn’t – I couldn’t compromise my values nor assume someone else’s. Similarly, Obama bulldozed the health care reform through but had to leave behind the humane pieces of it that was his true aim because he was ramrodded by such fierce opposition to his beliefs that the entire plan was almost left for roadkill. At the same time, while Obama was in the White House, I built my vanity house but learned too late I clung too fast to a vision whose time had passed, but I wasn’t flexible enough to accommodate the new time and so now I’ve thrown the whole dream under the bus because of my foolish intransigence. Obama was able to evolve on his views of gay rights, gun control and immigration. I was able too, to evolve from seeing the walls close in around me, to finally seeing doors that lead to new dreams and a new vision, to starting over, yet again.

Me and Obama, four years later, older, wiser, bent but not broken, still ready to walk across the threshold one more time, with less than innocent hope.

I was standing in Zumba on Monday a week ago when friends said they were headed to D.C. to the inauguration. “Why don’t you come?” Oh right, as if I could just get on a plane right now with everything going on, and … . “You know it will all be here when you get back.”

And so didn’t I scramble, for a flight, to finish my project, to try to find a ball gown, to contain the excitement and yet fear to be leaving everything that was in a gumbo pot bubbling over as if someone had forgot to turn the flame down. And sure enough on Saturday morning, I left, with three intentions – 1) to have fun, 2) to witness Obama’s second inauguration, and 3) to quit smoking.

Yes, that’s right, I’m a consummate multitasker and what better time to try to quit smoking than being in freezing cold weather, in someone else’s house, and having enough fun distractions not to care. And so I did it! Yay, here we are at day 5 of no smoking and I am just now starting to feel somewhat normalized.

I take long deep breaths in and hold them. How sweet the air tastes.

My smoking habit reared its ugly head when my physical health declined. You’d think the last thing I would be doing is smoking, but the truth is I needed a crutch, something to help me cope, and I fell back on my crisis tool – smoking. But pretty soon I had ramped up my smoking to include pretty much anytime that I wasn’t sleeping and I was coughing like a seasoned professional, stinking like an ashtray, and avoiding anything and everyone that was not conducive to my smoking habit.

I arrived in D.C. and felt the hoopla energy starting to ascend and the first stop for us was Georgetown and a fabulous dinner at Das Ethiopian, which turned out to be better than good. As a matter of fact, I’m still craving the delicate injera and the tasty spices.

The next day was filled with site seeing Saint Augustine Church, called the Mother Church of African American Catholics founded in 1858 through the efforts of emancipated Black Catholics. Where I held hands with a large dark skinned man and a short eldery African American woman for the Lord’s Prayer and had to hold back the tears as I was in the serious thrust of detox from smoking and my emotions were riding high. Then we walked to the African American Civil War Memorial, which you might pass if you were not looking specifically for it:

And then on to Howard University to snap a picture of the tree where the Deltas, the sorority of my friend’s mother and my friend and to take a shot by Minerva. The Deltas were founded in 1913 and so they are celebrating their 100 year anniversary this year. We stayed on the move all day, moving from one memorial to another memory to another photo opportunity.

My emotions were riding the wave of the inauguration, being away from home when home has been so chaotic, nicotine withdrawal, and and general sense of unease despite the fact that I was amongst friends and having a great time. Other than the effects of detoxing my body, my emotional theater is so raw that I would spin from deepwell sadness to overjoyed elation to malaise to wonder to anxiety to excitement all within seconds – and all of these ranges I attempted to disguise so that my friends wouldn’t think they had invited a freakshow.

I’ve been dogging it out with all these big decisions and changes and details and now the time has come to have fun!

More will be revealed ……

On my mother’s deathbed I asked her how I would recognize her if she was present in my life and she said, “Dog.” Something that at the time I thought was the amusing whisper of a dying woman who always had a little bit of the jokester in her.

But then when Tin was in the hospital to have his tear ducts opened and I called to her to be with me and thought I was blowing smoke in the wind, Tin later barked like a dog for an hour in his crib.

This morning as I was trying to get the wiggling stubborn refusing almost four year old into his clothes, I told him that I didn’t want to hear that he had pushed anyone since he pushed one of his dear classmates yesterday on the playground. i reminded him that he is not having his previously regularly scheduled playdate with one of his very dear friends because of aggression.

Now mind you, if I was in a different frame of mind, I would not be keeping Tin from playing with his friend that he pushed, I would be making him work it out and move onward from this behavior. But I’m not in a different frame of mind and caring for myself right now means avoiding conflict even if it means not having a teachable moment with Tin.

As I was growing exasperated with him for not letting me get his clothes on, and explaining how his behavior needs to be, he looked at me and said one word. “Dog.”

And I said to my mom, you may think this is funny, but it’s not. But nice to know you are here.