The artists have returned to City Park to paint the live oaks with their heavy branches and moss dripping down as well as the pre WPA bridges that cross the lagoons and the barn red structure that sits by the old meeting hall. They have their wooden easels and oil paints and their hats and big white canvases all set up. Another sign that summer is over.
We were due to have yet another storm pass through New Orleans early this week but it never came. Instead there has been this thickness in the air that can best be described by trying to imagine you got up and took five Valiums and then walked out your door. That’s about what it feels like. But there is something about this humid, thick, air that has its benefits. Hair and skin stay moist even…
I think the thing about so many deaths and illnesses being the main topic of summer when it was supposed to be the summer of a birth is that it makes you become a miser of your time and you start counting up your years and your possible years left and those around you and their years left and soon before you know it you have this very limited view of the world. The Mayans…
There is a line in Caddyshack where Bill Murray is teaching the caddy how to play golf and he tells him, you have to get down, and “be the ball.” You got to get your head in the game was what a 7-year-old told me once when we were playing Fish and I was losing. Today, my housekeeper said you have to project to the universe what you want to get back. I was tilting…
We had a sub for Michele in yoga today, and she talked a lot about how our thoughts tend to get in this circular pattern and we focus in on one thing and then endlessly analyze and rehash it – whether it’s somebody we felt did us a wrong and we play out all the scenarios in which we respond or also simple things like I need to go the gym, I need to go…
Loca and I left for our walk a little after six this morning, when the sun had not risen and the houses around the bayou were backlit as if the water, the structures, the trees were all a negative image, overexposed to some pockets of light. We walked over to City Park and the Museum with its night lit facade looked imposing and made a statement at the end of the boulevard that is the…
I was speaking to a friend last night and we were talking about someone we know and I said it appeared like everything was coming up roses for them, and my friend said, well, things are not always what they appear. And she’s so right. We make assumptions that sometimes prove to be so far off the mark, it almost sounds like we pulled our thoughts out of a completely different script. Today, the washing…
I have a tendency to absorb stress and overwhelming demands and then later, much later after the fact, I have my meltdown. I’ve got a slow slow trigger and like a pot of water trying to boil at a million feet, it takes a long time to see the bubbles on the surface. But I think lately I snapped. The stress of the summer finally added up to bubbles. Sure, Portugal helped relieve the pressure.…
I was talking about my mom and her condition to a good friend, and my friend said, “She’s doing better now, right?” And I said, “Yeah, well but then what? What’s happens now?” And my friend said, “Well, the hardest part of this is not having any control over that answer.” And there you have it. It’s the question I’ve been asking on a time loop that has become like a rutted groove in my…
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…