I went for a walk today, taking advantage of yet another beautiful day in New Orleans.  On my walk, I saw some things that stood out:

1. Six (6!) For Sale signs in yards.  That’s a lot for the three streets I walked.
2. One Mardi Gras ladder (click here if you don’t know what this is). Yeah, you rite.
3. Older neighbors playing a round of the Washers Toss Game.  I had to Google what they were doing as I had never seen it before.
4. Many homes nicely decorated for Halloween.  That’s not the thing that stood out.  What stood out was the one neighbor that painted black, white and green polka dots and/or stripes on their pumpkins and the other neighbor that was installing his Christmas lights on his eaves. Yeah.

It was good getting to ground-level and seeing the neighborhood so up-close.  I need to get back in the habit of doing it regularly.

Pete needed to go to the New Orleans’ main library recently.  He knew I’d want to join him on the third floor: the Louisiana Special Collections.  Genealogy.

I took my trusty Moleskine notebook and went looking for information on an uncle my great-grandmother came to live with after the Galveston storm in 1900.  I hit lots of dead ends.  I did manage to copy a marriage certificate I hadn’t yet had, but otherwise it was a bust.

Then I attended the funeral wherein I met new relatives and swapped NOLA genealogy search tips.

And the urge that is always there, that idea of turning just one more stone, finding one more link, that urge grew.  And before I knew it I was signed up with Ancestry.com again searching names.  And talking to my grandfather (”Are you looking into that stuff again?”) and scouring my notes.

And then I got a lead.  I haven’t had a workable lead in such a long time!  Tuesday, Sun and I went to a cemetery.  I truly love cemeteries, and New Orleans’ above-ground ones are even more alluring.

The cemetery Sun and I went to is the cemetery where my grandmother and great-grandmother are buried.  We visited that grave, the grave that is likely to one day read my name.  And we found the other grave we were looking for.  In this rather large cemetery, I was truly amazed that the two graves were merely one row and five graves apart.  Uncanny.

Then Sun and I drove to an address at which this uncle (and presumably my great-grandmother) once lived.  I could imagine the streets not being paved, folks sitting on their porches with no air conditioning that now seals people in their homes.  I could imagine my family living in much closer quarters than to which we are now accustomed.  I drove past two shotgun doubles one door away from each other where this uncle and his wife lived (and then my great-grandmother, too) in one side of one double and his cousin and an aunt lived in one side of the other.

I long to go back in time to walk the city streets where my family lived, to hear how New Orleans sounded without cars and air conditioner units.  To smell the salt air close to the river but also surrounded by butchers.

Then we turned the corner to visit another address and passed a truck creeping down the narrow street.  It was pulling a trailer.  And on the trailer was a papier-mâchéd woman’s over-sized head wearing a Trojan helmet.  Normally, such sights in New Orleans don’t even get a second look.  But this day, I couldn’t help but smile.

This city is a much a part of our family history as any person on our tree.  All four of my grandparents’ families have been here for over 100 years.  This humid city, so lush with vegetation, wrapped its veins around us and rooted us here.  I couldn’t love her more.

My uncle died Friday, I found out today.  Well, technically, he’s the husband of my first cousin once removed, but what do you call such a relation that is more than twice your age?  In the South, we call him “Uncle.”

My 80+ year old “aunt” and I share the love of genealogy.  I visited with her a few years ago to share our notes.  I pass my uncle’s office regularly and think about them all the time.  I wish I had called again before he died.

I finagled my tight schedule today and hustled to the viewing.  I even knelt and prayed for the respite of his dear soul.  He was a good man, a devoted husband, a respected attorney.

My aunt excused herself from talking to my cousin and I, “I need to say hello to my cousin from Houston.  Well, he’s your cousin, too…,” her voice trailed.  My cousin and I followed her to new relatives: we were introduced to Louis and Millie (also 80+).  I was delighted to finally meet the distant relative that had started me on my path in genealogy.

We gushed.  We talked about our love of cemeteries, libraries, archives, successions.  We talked about the NOLA books we are reading, have read, must read.  Then Millie stole my heart.  Louis said, “Millie woke up this morning and asked, ‘Can we have oyster po’ boys for breakfast?’”

So then we talked about restaurants.  And sweet Millie!  Louis explained that Millie compares every oyster po’ boy to Mandina’s.  Fair enough, eh?  But Millie!  “They ruined that place!” she exclaimed.  And I knew just what she meant.  Katrina dumped some 6+ feet of water in Mandina’s and they rebuilt.  But the rebuild is so, well, clean and shiny.  It’s distracting, all that shiny glare.  “And Mother’s!” Millie continued, “Have you seen their bathrooms?” She sneered, “They’re spotless!”  “How dare they!” I responded, all of us laughing respectfully.  These were icons.  You don’t chip away the grime from icons.

I said my goodbyes, made Louis and Millie vow to look me up next time they are in town so I can take them to another neighborhood joint, and returned to my office in time for my next appointment.

I also dug up some gravestone pictures I’d taken way back when.  I’ll be sending them to my new family soon.

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 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.

She sits on her front porch regularly.  She thinks she knows her neighbors well:  The couple next door that are having health problems, the woman across the street whose brother is living with her until his home is finally repaired from Katrina, and the neighbor catty-corner from her, Mike, who lives upstairs as he works on an addition to the back of his home.  Mike also owns the house three doors down from her.  Mike’s son, Jared, used to live in the second home; he is in his forties and rumored to have a slight mental disability.  Jared now lives in the front of Mike’s home because the second home is in disrepair.

Jared drives up to his father’s home and walks inside without waving to her.  Moments later, he returns outside with a green ceramic plate in his hands and walks to his far neighbor’s house.  She wonders what Jared is doing.  Do her neighbors share dinner every night and she not know it?  Is he going to get dinner and bring it back to eat alone?  If he’s eating at his neigbor’s, does he have some weird phobia about using others’ plates?

She hears voices and looks to see her neighbors talking.  Jared’s hands are empty; the far neighbor is holding the green plate.  There was nothing psychotic about the mystery; it was nothing habitual.  It was just a guy returning a plate to his neighbor.

Jared then hopped back in his car and drove away from his father’s home.  He did not look across the street to her.

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.

Last night my Republican brother and Democratic husband and I watched the Vice President debate.  My husband truly thought Palin would be reduced to tears, poor fool that he is.  My brother and I both felt Palin would do better than she’d shown in her Couric interviews but that Biden would win the day.

It took us three hours to watch the 90 minute debate.  We kept pausing (I love you, TiVo) and commenting.  And rewinding (oh, yeah, she called him Obiden).

In the end, the three of us agreed on virtually every issue, the causes and even the solutions.  My brother and I simply disagree about which ticket is likely to accomplish those solutions.  My brother is concerned Obama will infuse too much government into our already money-strapped, incompetently-run government.  I feel McCain will keep his focus on Iraq and not the home front.

But the debate.

There’s one theme that is arising as a result of the crashing economy, and frankly, the positions of both sides piss me off.

Here’s what Palin said last night:

We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this.

At this point, I was silently applauding her.  Good! Place blame squarely where it deserves to be.  Let’s admit that we Americans bit off more than we can chew.  But then Palin continued:

It’s not the American peoples’ fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.

What? Yes, to a not small degree, it IS the American peoples’ fault the economy is hurting.  It’s their fault to the extent they got into houses they could ill afford.  Yes, the banks are at fault too.  But if we are going to start taking “personal responsibility” and stop “living outside our means,” then we need to accept that we, in part, put ourselves in this boat of economic crisis by living beyond our means.

My ire isn’t just with Palin.  On a similar topic, here’s what Biden said:

What we should be doing now — and Barack Obama and I support it — we should be allowing bankruptcy courts to be able to re-adjust not just the interest rate you’re paying on your mortgage to be able to stay in your home, but be able to adjust the principal that you owe, the principal that you owe.  That would keep people in their homes, actually help banks by keeping it from going under.

What? Bankruptcy courts should be reducing the principal owed on a home to keep the debtor in the home?  And to help the bank/creditor from suffering?  Um, not so fast, Joe.  Ain’t nobody offering ME—a person who IS living within my means and NOT making bad financial decisions—a reduction on the principal owed on my home.  Why would or should we (at our expense) award these debtors and creditors who are SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for the mess they are in?

Now, maybe Biden meant tack on another 10 years to the debtor’s mortgage to reduce the principal payment.  But I suspect that is NOT what he meant.

My point is, it seems both tickets are clamoring to help these shaky homeowners and the banks that got them into these homes.  I don’t mean to sound elitist or harsh, but I have no problem, NONE, with these debtors losing homes they bought at arms-length fair market values.  People lose homes all the time.  They don’t become homeless; they become renters.  I rented for years because I couldn’t afford to buy a house.  My parents didn’t help me get into my home; the government didn’t help; my neighbors didn’t help.  I bought a home only after I could afford to do so.

Owning a home in America isn’t a right.  It’s a privilege.  A privilege that comes as a result of saving money and paying a note.  I resent that our government—again, both sides are for this Bailout and mainly they state their reason for supporting it is because it keeps families in their homes and banks from failing—is stepping in to help mainly the Americans that are not fiscally responsible stay in homes at the cost of those of us who are fiscally responsible.

It really makes me want to miss a payment on my house note.

Most people in my little world are voting for Obama.  And those voting for McCain tend to have very different opinions about how our country should be run.

My brother has very similar ideologies as me.  Neither of us are necessarily voting over abortion rights, labor rights, immigration, or health care.  We both are primarily concerned about the Iraq war and the economy.

To hear him and I speak, you’d realize quickly we agree on what the problems are.  We tend even to agree as to what needs to be done to fix them.  Yet, he’s voting McCain and I’m voting Obama.  He calls me Obama Mamma.  I just call him and laugh.

He thinks Obama is a great orator and showman.  He thinks, though, that Obama is all words and no action.

I think McCain is sincere and patriotic.  But I think McCain will follow the path of Bush: All attention on foreign policy while things here in the country deteriorate.

My brother makes one very strong point.  He tells me that our family has never been as well off as we are now.  We’ve been in America for 100 years, and it is just our generation that has graduated from college and may have substantial estates of worth to pass to our children.  It drives him crazy to hear people complain about how misdirected Americans are.  He says we need to travel the world to realize how great America is.  Strong point, indeed.

But I do disagree.  Yes, overall my family is in better financial shoes than it’s ever been.  But at what cost?  Our unhealthy dependence on oil is now costing us billions of dollars a month in Iraq.  We wouldn’t be in the Middle East if there wasn’t oil there.  And there’s also the issue of the oil’s effect on the environment.  I personally would like to take care of the world I live in so that my child and her children have a world to live in.  And Obama’s position is more in line with my philosophies than McCain’s.

Me? I want a safe world.  A safe America.  One that allows you to pursue your dreams and not be persecuted because of your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), your sexual orientation, or your country of origin.  My ancestors were born in Germany.  And Spain.  And Canada.  Then Louisiana.

And my brother will tell you he wants the same thing, a safe America.  And, he’d say, to have that safety, we need to press on in Iraq.  I disagree. Well, I agree that we NOW need to press on.  But we had no business going there in the first place.  No business other than finishing Pappa Bush’s unfinished business.  And now we are at risk if we leave prematurely.  Again, Obama’s position is more in line with my own philosophy than McCain’s.

My brother admits he is unsure of why the economy is faultering.  Partly due to government, partly due to a free market.  He’d say don’t have Congress do the Bailout as it was voted on Monday.

But I say that the economy is a result of the loosening of regulations over the financial institutions.  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act went a long way in hurting our economy.  And now we are in a crisis of epic proportions.  A crisis that is DEMANDING government action.  Government action that is being rushed.  Rushed like the Iraq war was rushed. Ah! But the people are balking!  Fool us once, shame on you.  Fool us twice, not so much.  Now we fear our government and are suspicious when Bush says, “We must act now.  Trust us.  It’s for your own good.  We will take care of you.”  And THAT is a problem McCain is inheriting from Bush, whether fair or not.  Because at the end of the day, all signs indicate that McCain would do what Bush has done.  One needs only look at how McCain’s voted and not by what he says now to see that.

Both McCain and Obama are for a Bailout.  I am against it.  I may be wrong, but so far no one has been able to fully explain to me just how the markets will fail without the Bailout.  No one has been able to tell me how that will impact my job, my home, my life.  And no one can explain the $700 Billion figure that was apparently pulled from a hat.  McCain, I fear, just doesn’t understand the economic situation, and Obama is generally for more government involvement.  I don’t want more government in my life, I just want the government that is in my life to be competent.  But at least Obama is following the line I’d expect him to follow. McCain? Why isn’t he saying let the market take care of itself?  That’s the GOP line.  I like knowing where I can expect my President to fall on an issue; I like some level of certainty.

And that’s the difference to me about our two candidates.  Obama has a Big Picture of both America’s foreign affairs but also the very real and threatening  problems afoot in our country.  McCain has a precise and very clear view of the foreign policy and feels that issue is second to none in his role as President (and is probably the better man for that part of the job), but his grasp of the local issues just isn’t as crisp as it needs to be.  And seeing his selection of Palin makes me seriously question his judgment in selecting advisers if he were President.

What’s your opinion?  Am I missing something?  If you post about this, please leave a link in the comments so that we can read it.  Is anyone still undecided?