I’m sitting here waiting to throw my old Blackberry and my old Samsung phone into the bayou. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting. What I’m waiting for is for Verizon to start selling iPhone which I hear will happen this fall. But what am I really missing? I see so many iPhone users with their eyes staring at the little screen, absorbed with their apps, and GPS, and other moving features that I wonder if…
A friend of mine said he has an early memory of a flood in Cincinnati, where he was standing by the front door and watching a boat go by on the street. He was two years old. Most people can’t remember anything from before four or five years of age. At least I can’t. I can barely remember anything these days. My mind has become a sieve. When we were at the zoo, Tin was…
On New Year’s Day we took a walkabout with our guests to City Park and I brought them under the big oak tree to listen to the wind chimes. A man was laying on a blanket not too far from us and my friend’s German mother, camera in hand with a lens as big as a telescope, went over and started speaking to him. Turns out he was the one who designed the chimes in…
I remember when mom was in the hospital she kept making a circular motion in the bed and telling the nurses she was making room for the baby. And she was. She left a big space in my life that a baby is filling up. In the meantime, everyone at the LaLa stopped their swirling motion of making room for a baby when the baby actually showed up – Gadzooks! It is quite amazing how…
For some reason, all of my significant partners in life have been atheists. Today’s Christmas – not a morning that Jews are stirring because there are no gifts and there is no tree. But here at the LaLa where we live, we have a Christmas Story and it goes something like this, my mother who is now angel knew that there was one thing in my wonderful life I wanted more than anything else –…
Tight-ends of Comfort and Joy ‘Twas the night before Christmas in Faubourg-St. John And not a creature was stirring, off the bayou or on— Not a tweet from a bird, not a flick from a fish, Not a twitter through cable or satellite dish. The cowboy whose dog-leash had lassoed the gator, The special-needs ducklings whose meals, fully catered, Were crashed by the nutria looting our shores, The half-sunken castaway crafts without oars, The boards…
It’s that time of year again, post Nov 1st (read: post Hurricane Season), and the heat is gone and the air is crisp and cool, and right at this time of year, when most of the country is starting to put on snow clothes, is when we count our blessings. A November stroll through the park is magical with the cormorants drying their wings in the trees, a Great Blue Heron standing in the shadows…
We woke this morning to a silvery grey fog that hung and clung to landscape here on Bayou St. John. As Loca and I walked through the spooky park this morning, we marveled at how quiet the fog makes the world. It’s interesting because one of the lores of the South is that it is so hot people have their windows open and you can hear the private conversations for miles because voices travel easy…
Loca was a perfect angel this morning, having spent the better part of her day sulking in her bed yesterday after having lunged after a poor innocent dog who just happened to be walking by her house. She did hop all the way to the park, but it wasn’t because she wanted to run and lunge on a dog. And she greeted a few dogs in the park very politely almost making me smile because…