They say whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. I’ve always thought of New Orleans as hanging in the balance, a sort of faded beauty. When I stepped out of the airport after being to Boston, Nantucket, the new Jet Blue terminal at JFK, I thought, “Oh my.” Even before you are out of the plane, the smells are obvious – a sort of fecundness permeates the cabin, then you enter Louis Armstrong International Airport…
With a hint of fall in the air and the Cabrini girls wearing their plaid uniforms and trying to park around the bayou, I think nostalgically about school days past and school days future. I was hoping the intersection between past and future – my mom – was going to evolve into a multigenerational thing as we adopt and raise a child. Right now, I’m calculating the enormous amount of energy it takes to deal…
The meaning of life is to live it. Life is not meant to be comfortable, it is meant to be lived. All these sayings are fine except when you are standing in the hospital room looking at your mother, who is unresponsive, and so when I put my head down on my pillow at night, the wish I have for my mom is for her to be comfortable.
We took the ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket this year, instead of flying – I hate that tin can of a plane as well as the ups and downs of the flight there. As soon as we got on the boat you could see that Nantucket look everywhere – I don’t want to call them Arians because that is not it – but there is a certain look to the people going to Nantucket and…
There is a test where you put a marshmallow in front of a child and ask them if they want it. If they respond yes, then you propose something to them – “I will leave the room for twenty minutes and if you don’t eat this marshmallow, then when I come back, I’ll give you two marshmallows.” This is supposed to assess if your child has what it takes to delay their gratification – something…
Last night, standing in JFK late in the evening, ready to come home, I watched a mother and her son enter the scene, sit down on the floor and begin to interact. The boy wanted his toys and he wanted to dump them all out. She allowed him to pull out a couple of toys. He chose two black sleek airplanes and he wanted her to play with him. He said he wanted to destroy…
While I was returning from Europe, I picked up a Herald Tribune. I had been avoiding news while there and had glanced once or twice at Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal while in hotel lobbies but on reading the headlines had opted not to be in the know. The Tribune was pretty interesting as it was dedicated to the global concerns of women from every angle imaginable – from microfinancing success stories to…
I’ve been meaning to call the mayor myself – Mayor Nagin that is – and ask him just what is going on. I get updates from a stream of different organizations that are involved with pushing for progress here in New Orleans. But today, one day after the four year anniversary of Katrina, I’m not sure we, the citizens of New Orleans know more than we did pre-K. Over the last few years, I’ve eavesdropped,…
I suffer through the winter with Tatjana wanting the crappy tomatoes that are imported from god knows where and I saw like a mantra – wait till summer, wait till it is tomato season. But this year despite the tomato bush reaching maturity, despite the tomatoes fat on the vine, all of them died an early death. In the grocery store every tomato we bought sucked. In the green market, the tomatoes sucked. In Nantucket…
I walked Loca through the park this morning, happy to be home, happy to be here in New Orleans, happy that Loca was behaving. I saw a woman looking at a bird in the tree in the middle of the lagoon. I said to her, “It must be fall if the cormorants are back.” She said, “It’s an anhinga.” I told her I thought it was but I had been corrected by someone when I…