Today was not a good day.  The list of things that went wrong for me is long, and irrelevant.  By tomorrow, most of what went so wrong today will be put into perspective and not matter (so much).  But I can’t shake the weight of the day off.  I even passed on dinner out with CS and Sun.  So I am sitting alone in the house.  Being left alone is a gift I am rarely given.  And I am wasting it by being sad.

I feel like putting on a Cowboy Junkies CD, mixing a martini and going into full-on mope.  But in about 30 minutes, my family will be home.  And my bad mood would only be made worse if I were to hunker into a good mope and have it be interrupted.

And there it is.  What I want right now is an evening to myself.  Alone with no TV, no family, no responsibilities nor expectations.  I want silence.  I want a night out of my life when I was single: Come home to an empty space, turn on relaxing, thoughtful music (or not), curl up with a good book (or movie), and say nothing to no one for hours on end.  And not have to ask for the quiet or feel it is a gift to have it.

On second thought, I AM going to dig up a Cowboy Junkies CD and mix a martini.  Mope? Maybe a little.  I will turn the lights down and stay in a room with no TV once Sun goes to bed in less than an hour.  And I will relax and allow myself to have this bad day.  And this evening that will be mine.

Nola starts her day aware that she has an early morning appointment.  The appointment goes off without a hitch.  Well, except for the tears.  Nola’s client is teary over the demise of her marriage.  The client leaves, but the negative feelings stay with Nola.

She moves on to reading her e-mails, including a reminder that a friend is due in New Orleans in the afternoon.  Her friend wants to have tea at the Ritz Carlton.  Even this early, Nola knows she’ll want something stronger than tea.

The day passes.  Nola tells her husband her friend is due in but she’ll still be home no later than 6pm.  She immediately thinks, “This won’t go well if I am late.  And drinking.”

In the early afternoon, Nola gets an e-mail from another client asking her to revise her will to take into account her recent marriage.  The irony of her morning appointment is not lost on her.

An hour earlier than is her usual time to quit the day, Nola leaves her office to meet her friend at the hotel.  She drinks Sazaracs, her friend, Bloody Marys.  They talk about love, marriage, divorce, name changes.  And careers and children and traveling.  Time slips away as the sunlight disappears through the frosty windows.

Then Nola gets a call from her husband.  It is 20 minutes after the time she’d said she’d be home.  She wants to stay with her friend and enjoy the freedoms of, well, freedom.  But she instead calls for the bill and the friends part.

Nola enters her quiet home.  She sees the bathroom door closed and knows her husband is bathing their daughter.  She enters the bathroom, hugs her husband and marvels at how much her husband and daughter resemble each other.  She inquires about their day and is given a babbly description of their trip to the park to feed the ducks by Sun, as interpreted by Captain Sarcastic.

She gets a cup of milk ready and takes Sun into her ready arms.  Sun is already falling asleep.  Nola carries Sun to the nursery and lets the music of the lullabies fill the air content to let the world pass by her as though through the windows of a moving car.  Nola’s life, as viewed by an outsider, is dull and uneventful.  She is grateful for the interludes into her clients’ lives, but grateful more for the peace her own life gives her.

They take their daughter to Oktoberfest.  This is Sun’s second.  She marvels at the oompa band, still too young to enjoy the Chicken Dance.  She is too shy to be comfortable on her own feet; she hugs her mother’s legs when set down.  Her parents are happy to hold her and not fear her getting lost in the crowd.

They enjoy bratwurst and stuffed cabbage rolls and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes.  The adults drink German beer and wines.  There is laughter and joy.

They leave the Deutschen Haus and decide to get ice cream.  They drive to Brocato’s and park on the street.  Sun’s father carries a now-shoeless daughter.  Sun’s mother looks back at the car several times, knowing she turned the headlights off but wondering why they are still lit.  After half a block, Sun’s mother turns to go back to shut off the headlights.  Three steps back, the lights go out.

Sun’s mother turns again and walks back towards her family.  She catches eyes with her daughter.  Sun laughes.  So does her mother.  They hold each others’ gaze and laugh lightly, no one paying them any mind.  They are caught in the moment like it is its own planet; held together by an ephemeral magic.

In what passes for a cool Fall day in New Orleans, I took the opportunity to enjoy the weather.  Sun and I walked down the street to the little park on the corner.  The school kids were sitting on the table and avoided us.

I took Sun to the slide and let her come at it on her own.  After some time of walking the grounds and finding the drain fascinating, Sun finally found the courage to climb the stairs of the slide.  I climbed with her.  She wouldn’t go down the tunnel-swing and opted instead to walk across the swaying bridge to get to the twin slides.  Her and I slid down together.  She loved it.  She then tried to climb up the slide.  I’d help her climb up and slide down, laughing all along.  Then she worked up her nerve to go down alone.  I was very proud of her.

Then we walked to the swings, and met a neighbor boy and his grandmother.  After swinging, we began our walk home.  Sun didn’t want to be carried.  Instead, she walked and kept her eyes pealed for acorns and leaves that passed her muster.  She found enough to fill both of her little hands.  When we got home, we sat on the front porch enjoying cool glasses of water and admiring Sun’s treasures.

While in the office yesterday, I remembered my sister was taking Sun for the night.  I had forgotten to give Sun an extra hug.  When I got home yesterday evening, the house was quiet.  Quiet like it just isn’t anymore; quiet the way it used to always be.  It was serene but hollow.

CS and I made reservations for dinner at a restaurant friends had given us a gift certificate for last Christmas.  We were shown to a small table with a white linen tablecloth.  I didn’t even think to look if this place had highchairs.  We ordered a bottle of wine.  And we talked; we talked about politics, the economy, our jobs, our very lives, and, of course, we talked about Sun.  We talked and talked.  Just the two of us, without interruptions to get food to Sun or move things out of her reach or entertain her to keep her from getting too loud and disturbing other diners.  No, it was just us, a couple.  It was decadent, like having my entire body dipped in chocolate.

But I couldn’t help but feel like I was visiting someone else’s life.  Like the life of the friends that gave us the gift certificate, who don’t yet have children.  They, like we used to, go to such restaurants at their leisure.  They don’t give thought to whether it is too quiet a place for a baby or whether the menu will have something a young toddler would eat.  Ah, that freedom!  How I miss it.

Having Sun was the most positive life-changing event of my life.  And I count my blessings every day.  However, there are victims to having a child: quality time alone with your spouse; quietness.

I took great joy in knowing I would not be awoken early this morning by Sun.  But my internal clock went off just the same.  So I groggily lay in bed.  Relishing that I could hear birds chirping.  I haven’t heard the birds in over a year.

On this, the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we have:

• procured a generator.
• stocked up on food stuffs (including booze).
• filtered lots of water.
• gathered flashlights and batteries, hurricane lanterns, candles, fans, a radio, our satellite radio, and the contraflow map.
• filled one car with gas and parked the other in a high and safe garage.
• assembled phone numbers of friends, families and neighbors.
• secured several options for places to go in the event we need to leave.
• packed all photo albums and stored them in a safe, dry place for the duration of the storm.
• prepared checklists of what to pack if we leave.
• called Vet to get pets’ rabies documentation in the event they get boarded.
• prepped my office and CS’s shop.

And now, we wait. We wait to see whether we will stay or go.  This decision is likely to be made Sunday.  Tomorrow, we will wait some more.  What I resist my damnedest to do is watch the Weather Channel or the local news for the next 30 or so hours.  They will know nothing concrete until Sunday.  So why risk my cuticles, my nerves, my very sanity for the media to churn this story?  I can’t and won’t do it.

So, what does one do when the majority of the city is leaving in droves and the nervous energy is all but electric?  I read, play with Sun, nap, twitter, watch TV, span time with CS, call family and friends.  My mind stays on the weather.  Doubt creeps in—I start to get unnerved when the city really thins out.  One of my four neighbors has left already.  But I let reason and season guide me.  I am stubborn but ultimately am more reasonable than stubborn.  And my family members, all born-and-raised New Orleanians, know when to leave and how to stay and be safe.  I trust their seasoned experience far more than all the weathermen combined.

This waiting sure gives new meaning to “long holiday weekend.”

I wrote some time ago about Sun’s hemangioma, or strawberry mark.  Several of you have e-mailed me inquiring about how she’s coming along.  I appreciate your concerns and wanted all to follow her progress.

This is Sun’s leg now:

Today, we had her ninth laser treatment.  The doctor tells me that he is “completely confident” Sun will not need surgery for her hemangioma.  He is delighted with her progress and warns that her leg is likely to have “texture issues”—the texture of the skin is likely to be a bit wrinkly.  But he expects the redness as well as the raised-ness of the mark to continue to completely dissipate.

Overall, we are very pleased with her treatment and have no regrets about the course we took.  I do believe she is too young to remember this experience, and, really, she seems fine as soon as the treatment is over.  So it isn’t too harrowing on either of us!

At this point, the doctor tells us the mark will go away on its own and the laser treatment is just hastening the process.  And having come this far, I am willing to continue with the treatments so that it will be gone before Sun is old enough to be asked directly the rude questions we continue to be asked.  I was surprised to discover that other children are far more kind about it than adults.  And if I can shield Sun from that rudeness by hastening the mark away, then that is the path we will continue to go.

Thanks again to those of you who e-mailed me.  It really meant a lot to me.

CS gives Sun her baths; that is their special time together.  Occasionally, I am called on to do it and find I do it wrong—too little water, the wrong toys, I get water in her eyes.

But getting Sun down for the night, that is our special time.  I play no musical instrument; my fingers are not meant to be over piano keys or guitar strings.  But in getting Sun down for a nice night’s sleep, she becomes my instrument.  I know just when to pat her back as opposed to scratching it.  I know instinctively when to sing along with her lullaby music and when it will only work as a distraction to her.  I know when to rock, when to dip.  I know when to give her my fingers to squeeze.  I know when to hug her closer to me and when to release her to herself.

I know Sun’s nighttime habits the way a musician knows the limits of his instrument—when to call its bluff and when to heed its warning to proceed with caution.  I know the results I will get from tweaking a movement one way or the other.  I know when to come in for an encore and when to walk away and let the artisan’s work be left to play in the memory of the audience.

I know this because Sun and I have developed a routine over these 14+ months.  I know this because I am Sun’s mother and it’s my job to know.  I know this because I long to know it; I know the days of me strumming my daughter to sleep are limited and I best make the most of the precious time I have of her needing me as a part of her nighttime ritual.  And I do and will make best of this sacred time between us.  Because that is my choice as her mother.

Sun likes to hold my hand when she is readying herself for a nap.  Actually, she likes to hold just one finger in her small hands.  She’s done this since she was born.  She’d hold your finger as she bottle fed. 

My mother commented once that Sun has my hands.  I looked more closely.  And although her thumbs don’t appear to be double-jointed like mine (and the thumbs on my mother’s side of the family), her hands do indeed look like mine.  And my hands, in turn, look like my mother’s and, in turn, her mother’s.  The shape of my fingernails resemble my father’s nails, and my brothers’ nails look like mine too.  But the movement of my hands remind me very much of the movement of my mother’s hands.

I never quite realized the similarity before.  I have never been overly fond of my hands–they are small but not delicate or striking.  And my cuticles are always ruined; but that is my fault and not genetic. 

It took me using my hands as a mother to Sun to realize I had my mother’s hands all along.

I cannot say enough how much I like love crawfish bisque.  It may well be my all-time favorite dish.  Growing up, my mother never made it, not once.  The first time I had it was at my best friend’s aunt’s.  That bowl set the bar very high.  My grandmother would make it every couple of years.  Maybe.  Sometimes less.  The reason you see it so infrequently is that, done correctly, it takes a lot of time.  All together, it probably takes a full day to prepare.

First, you need to boil crawfish.  Then pick them.  Then clean the heads.  Cleaning the heads is the worst part of preparing this dish to me.  Not because it is as gross as it sounds (it isn’t much more weird than peeling the tails) but because you have to snip off the noses of the crawfish.  This rips my fingers to shreds.  Here’s what four look like cleaned and ready to be stuffed:

Only 146 more to go.  Yes, the recipe I use (from Marcelle Bienvenu’s “Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make A Roux? A Family Album Cookbook” –great title, eh?) calls for 150 stuffed heads.  That’s a lot of heads!  Now, the next step is to stuff said heads.  To do that, you chop bell peppers, celery, onions, garlic, and crawfish tails and mix that together with stale french bread crumbs.  You then mix in more tails you did not chop and saute in oil with lots of salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper.

Cooling crawfish head stuffing.

Let the mixture cool.  Then stuff the heads and roll them in a mixture of seasoned and plain breadcrumbs.  They will look like this:

Bake them until golden brown in a 375° oven (about 20 minutes).  At this stage, go crack a beer.  And give yourself a high mark for Effort.  You have come far and done well.  You are clearly at the point of no return and the rest, as they say, is a cakewalk.

Okay.  Now, the recipe calls for sauteing more crawfish tails (the recipe calls for a total of four pounds of crawfish tails) with salt, cayenne pepper and paprika.  The recipe suggests 1 tablespoon of cayenne.  That will blow my mouth apart.  We used 1/2 tablespoon this time, and that seems juuust right.  Then you add warm water and roux to the pot.  Well, damn. If I hadn’t read ahead, I’d have been in a pinch because I make roux and don’t buy it.  So before I get going on this step, I make that roux first so that I can add it without having to take my cooking pot off the stove.

Pontchartrain Pete doing the work of the sous chef.

In yet another pot, saute green peppers, onions and celery until they are tender then add them to the main pot along with more water.  Cook vigorously for 2 minutes.  Add more water and cook for 15 minutes at a lower heat.  Then add green onions and parsley and let cook 10 minutes more.  Use this time to also cook a pot of rice.  Your hard work will be rewarded with a lush pot of this:

Everyone you know, and some you don’t, will invite themselves over for dinner.  Seriously.  It IS that good.

And the best thing is that this is one of those dishes that tastes better the next day after the flavors have had time to meld and relax.  So leftovers are as decadent, if not more so, than the first eating.

Bon appetit!