Christmas in Paradise: Gin makes you sin or there ain’t no cure for the blues except the Blues
Last night, a friend and her daughter stopped in to bring their holiday baked goods as they have done every year for the last eight. It’s their family tradition – she bakes goodies from her great grandmother’s recipes. Delicious treats such as rosemary shortbread, cocoons, oatmeal cherry chocolate chip cookies and a jar of dukkah spice and all wrapped up in a beautiful bow. Ahhhhh, the holidays and my merry friends who come a calling.
I had begun my day with the blues when I said goodbye to my son as he transitioned to the Blue House and it had taken a while for me to come around and not be engulfed with woe is I. What shook me out of it was when I spoke with Flower, who talked me off the ledge about a situation and she said, “You know this reminds me exactly of when you … and then you … and it was … .” Bingo – I told her – that’s exactly what I thought, I’ve been here before and met this person before – it fit so wonderfully in her life’s metaphor that she always brings up around these conversations where all of us are on a spiral and events keep coming around and we experience either deja vu or for us lucky ones, we perceive the event through changed eyes. “Run,” she said, “Run far away.”
Flower is Russian and maybe that is why she has the sensibility of a wise old mensch.
My Zumba class had been cancelled, which is why we had this time for a call and I came home and before my baked good fairy friends arrived, I hung up with Flower and came across this photo I had taken earlier at Morning Call where I went for beignets and cafe au lait with my aunt and uncle and Tin. A woman dressed like Santa? – no one was quite sure – wearing red sandals with red fleece leggings and all sorts of other not quite right costume parts had come to our table to deliver to Tin a miniature candy cane. The folks at the next table asked me (possibly because I was wearing a Santa hat) who the woman was – I have no idea I told them but she’s kicks, huh?
Later, as I munched on rosemary shortbread, another friend stopped by and I made us a French greyhound – my gin cocktail of choice if I’m getting fancy. It’s Gin, St. Germaine and SanPellegrino Grapefruit – the SanPellegrino not only taste so fresh, last night when I poured it from the can a grapefruit seed came out! – Now that is fresh.
The three of us laughed and ate goodies, while the 13-year-old stared at the electronic light of her iPhone – and then my gin-drinking friend and I went a few blocks down the street to D’Mac’s on Jeff Davis.
There was a blues band tearing it up on the corner stage and a host of people donning Santa hats (including myself – cuz Baby It’s Cold Outside) and there was the great festive feeling of Christmas dive bar merriment going down in there. The bartender was wearing this earthy zigzag pattern wrap dress with knee high boots and had warm-toned eye make-up dramatizing her dark Spanish eyes – she looked to be left over from when D’Mac was La Finca – a watering hole that sprung up serving the thousands of Hispanic laborers who came to New Orleans post 2005 Federal Flood to work in construction. I had gone to La Finca many a time to pay some of my day laborers who worked on the LaLa. My friend and I were mesmerized by this bartender – she was a refreshing change from the usual tattooed grunge hipster gals we see all the time behind the bars here. She looked like a no nonsense woman who could cut you with her eyes.
The blues around Christmas are a cliché but like other time worn traditions, it depends on how you hold the blues as to whether you will keep on falling till their ain’t no bottom or whether you ferret out the stories to add to your war chest. The types of memories that you can recall on the porch later on or turn into a song like Christmas in Paradise: