NOLA Notes

We spent the weekend at our friends’ fishing camp.  Just the three of us.  We woke early and dropped the crab nets in the water.  The tide was out and the expectation of crabs was slim. Sun and I also tossed fishing lines into the water.  Then we headed to Rip Van Winkle Gardens, having seen a sign for it driving in the day before and noting the good reviews of it online. It was divine. Really. It was lush and breezy; there were peacocks and cats. We three roamed around and thought not of whatever worries we each have back home.

We returned to the camp and crabbed and fished some more. We didn’t catch a thing. But that wasn’t the point to begin with. Heck, Sun’s fishing pole is a Dora one that has a plastic fish at the end of the line. Sun just likes casting her line and reeling it in. Over and over. And me? I’m happy when I don’t snag a tree or an underwater log.

And then there were the gators. Three this time. One teeny baby and two bigger ones. They bobbed around, keeping their chocolate eyes on us the entire time. And when I released the one good-sized crab we caught, Sun learned a lesson when the biggest alligator slyly made her way over to the crab and ate him: Sun doesn’t want a gator as a pet because they eat too much.

We are different at the camp. Sure, there’s still whining and correcting; there’s still ways to annoy each other. But that bar is certainly raised. We are permitted to do nothing; spend all day crabbing with nothing in the way of dinner to show for it; run in circles around trees for no reason other than the sheer enjoyment of it; have staring contests with alligators of all sizes. The expectations are gone — all the home projects waiting for us that we get caught up about living in the said home? Benched. The day-to-day annoyances that come with cohabitation? Iced. At the camp, it’s freestyle. Do as you please. There is no judging.

Back home, Sun is adamant about wearing shoes. And socks. She wakes up and wants both on here feet first thing. And she keeps them on until bath time and then bed. On sandals, she says: I don’t want my toes to get full of leaves. So all year round, even NOLA summers, that kid has shoes and socks on. All. The. Time.

Except yesterday. She ran around outside, where there are burrs in the grass and gravel strips near the piers, in her bare feet. It’s unthinkable. If we’d have even suggested sandals, she’d have said no. But she decided for herself that it was a bare-foot kind of day.

And, oh, was she right.

We’ll return to the city and to that house that has an endless list of needed updates. We’ll return to the day-to-day annoyances, I am sure, and to having to wear shoes and socks ’round the clock. Except we are changed. We are rejuvenated, relaxed, and recharged. We are ready again to open our hearts just a little bit more and allow more love to flow in and out.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fiztgerald.

When I started with my firm 13 years ago, I was aware that my department consisted of five men all over the age of 55. I knew going in I’d face a chasm in my career if I stayed with this firm when these guys began to retire. But what I did not expect was for three of the five to die within two years of each other and for a fourth to retire in that same span of time.

Lately, with the most recent death weighing heavily on my being, I’ve struggled to make sense of my future — one that feels as though it has no net nor tether any longer.  While I wonder what the hell I was thinking all these years to leave me at this spot.

The thing is, my mentor that retired, he shaped the attorney I am today. I am 100% a better attorney than I would have been without him in my life for 12 years. And when he retired and I spent the next year under the tutelage of his mentor, I was pushed harder to be even better. Although I still feel I have lots to learn, as I know I was still drinking from the fount a mere two weeks ago, I know that if I had to do it all again, I’d chose the same path.

As I now work with some of the families of my mentors, I feel a gentle push from these great men one last time. Like this is their final test for me: Do your job as an attorney to help my own family. Do right by me. Apply what you’ve learned, what you know. I know you can and trust you will.

If I could remember what a religious moment felt like, I might say I was having one. But what I do feel is that my 13 years have been leading, purposefully, to this moment: To the day I have no mentors left and have to rely on my own best instincts. I still have colleagues and even a department within my firm. But I am the acolyte no longer. And it is my purpose now to do legal work for the loved ones of the very men who’ve so shaped me as an attorney.

In fact, I don’t know where my career will be in a year or five. But I know without question I am right where I am supposed to be right now, doing this very work for these very people. Giving thanks every step of the way.

I easily could have spent yesterday under the covers, having had daylight and my thoughts blocked out. But I had plans to visit family. So Sun and I spent the day in the country. Sun dipped her toes, and her hiney, in an icy pool and spent hours literally running around naked, humming, as I did my best to keep from falling apart.

These types of blues will not be rushed. They move from one item to the next, sizing up my entire life, past, current and future.  What IS the point of life?  The priest at the funeral said it’s about the people with whom we spend our time. But I feel that’s a bit lame. I mean, isn’t HOW I spent my time at least equally important, if not more, as WHO I spend it with?

I feel that the meaning of life is different for different people. And that’s why it’s such a tricky question. What’s the meaning of my life isn’t necessarily the meaning of your life or of the life of those we respect.

So then how do we know the meaning of our own lives? What is it for which I want to be remembered or respected? My legal work? My parenting? This silly blog? No one thing rises to the top as THE central focus of my life.  And instead, I find myself measuring up short on any category taken alone. And on all taken together.

I am inspired to work harder, to love more, to be more alive–write, garden, cook, appreciate friends, visit family, LIVE. But it’s hard to do any of that when all I want to do is pull the covers over my head and delay one more day.

Another death in my professional life. You’d think by now, six being the number, I’d be used to this routine. And although I deal with death every day of my professional life, it isn’t the same as dealing with A Death. A Death is personal; A Death is impacting; A Death is life-changing.

And this death is no different from the others of the Capital Letter-variety. And my life is thus changed again. Somehow, in time, I will see the positive of the change; the lessening of the sting of death; the strengthening of my own mettle.  But for now, and the near future, it will be a forced and feared change, a resisted change, a change only of reluctance and necessity.

And so, again, I am living just day to day. Until this death is one I can muster as well.

We headed to the St. Joseph altars today. My mother-in-law, exiled in Arizona, had asked that I get her a new St. Joseph’s medal since she lost hers in her move out of Ohio. That was excuse enough for us.

We visited three: St. Louis Cathedral (and joined the crowd for the meal prepared for the masses); St. Francis X. Seelos Church in the Bywater (hearing the name of St. Francis X. Seelos always makes me think of St. Mary’s Assumption which in turn makes me sad about its closing), and St. Joseph Church on Tulane Avenue (those pics of the heads at the base of the columns really drew me to them today).

My fave of the day? Easy–the Louis Prima memory cake at the Cathedral.

Enjoy the pics!

[Show as slideshow]

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I learned about the existence of the book “Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans” by seeing it on a side table in a co-worker’s office. Then, before I could register it in the frontal lobe of my brain, I attended the Jefferson Parish Library’s king cake party whereby several local authors were there signing books. And there was David Lummis promoting his book. New Orleans really is too small.

I am always leery of fiction set in New Orleans, especially the French Quarter. It is such a fine line to write about the inhabitants of the Quarter without getting clichéd.

My fears were unwarranted. As soon as I started it, I loved it. And as each page turned, I loved it more. And when I got to the end, I wanted more.

I love that Lummis describes B. Sammy Singleton’s cat as I would describe mine, thusly: “Even my cat Rowan had decided she’d rather take her chances as a scavenging outdoor orphan than reside under the same roof with me.” I gotta repeat that: a scavenging outdoor orphan. That is SO my cat.

I love this partial description of one of the coffee shops chronicled in the book:

Next: A host of plastic dolls indiscriminately integrated into the décor. Because while I suppose there’s something “New Orleans” about dolls, in this case we’re not talking about anything as interesting as the Anne Rice collection or Mardi Gras king cake babies (the latter of which are additionally thought-provoking in that people occasionally choke to death on them). Nor is there anything even remotely attractive about the dolls now under consideration. No, these are nothing more than poor-quality cast-offs that never should have been mass-produced in the first place, with missing limbs and crayoned faces and torn-out hair, the kind passed over by desperately poor children in thrift stores. Apparently somebody dropped a tab of acid, made a run on Thrift City, raided the kindergarten supplies aisle at Wal-Mart, and went to work on these babes in a way that would do Timothy Leary proud, nailing them to the walls in a final manic burst of adrenalin before lapsing into unconsciousness.

I love Lummis’ description of New Orleans as Sammy sits in Jackson Square reconsidering his decision to have moved from New York City:

Sure, the place has its share of problems (you know a city’s corrupt when top school officials embezzle millions from their own pitifully impoverished districts). But just as there’s something to be said for living in the City that Never Sleeps, there’s something downright sublime about residing in a town that peddles itself as the City That Care Forgot, where Time does business in pajamas and takes frequent catnaps. And undeniably, New Orleans has made the concept of laissez-faire into an art form dating back at least to the Civil War, when it became the first major city of the Deep South to be occupied by Union forces, which remained throughout the last three years of the war. The alternative, I suppose, would have been for the citizens of the Paris of the South to fight back. But as the ships of General Farragut came up the Mississippi in 1862, the closest the people of New Orleans came to taking up arms was to stand alongside the levee brandishing their parasols and shaking their fists.

My hands-down favorite part was the description of Sammy’s first visit to St. Louis Cathedral. When I was reading this section, I was putting Sun down for a nap and she asked me to read to her. So I read her what I was reading. And maybe that act of reading that particular passage aloud is what made it so powerful. But when I finished the last words of that chapter, I had to stop. I had a frog in my throat and tears in my eyes.

The mistake that could be made about this book is that it’s merely fluff: A non-native gay man’s exploits in coffee shops. It starts out highly-caffeinated and colorful. But Lummis is a researcher. You know that Sammy’s trips to the Historic New Orleans Collection were also Lummis’. Not being a local, Lummis earns his right to write about the city not just by having lived here for several years but also by learning her history.

And although this book is in parts dark, and some of the history difficult to read, the honesty with which Lummis writes carries you through. He is a gifted writer, and this gem is a gift to New Orleans. Now do yourself a favor and buy it as a gift for yourself. You can buy it at various locations on the website, or at Octavia Books if you are uptown or Faubourg Marigny Art & Books if you are downtown.

The good news is that this is just the first of three installments to this one novel. So there’s more coming!

Today was a day of horse shit.  Aggravating non-lawyer back-of-the-house horse shit.

This afternoon, I spent with friends that unfortunately needed my legal services.  We spent hours going through papers, making calls, developing options.

When my friends left, the Missus hugged me.  After a moment, I pulled away and she stayed hugging.  I resumed my end of the hug and then after another moment pulled away again.  I resumed the hug for a third time and then pulled away yet again after just another moment.  I knew if I stayed in that hug, it’d break my heart in two.  And that isn’t part of the job.  Especially when the Mister is watching feeling vulnerable as all get-out.

This evening, the Missus sent me a message thanking me for today.  I responded that I was sorry about shorting her on the hug; that I knew I’d have cried had I stayed hugging and that just wasn’t what either of them needed.

She wrote back to me the following:

I got choked up when I hugged you so there was no shortness on your end.  It just made me realize what life has brought us through and I just felt overwhelmed.  I kept thinking today of all the work you did in law school and living away and how great you are doing.  It’s awesome that you have a wonderful profession and can spent time with Sun. It is a really extraordinary thing, what you have done with your life and not to sound  like a “mom” but I am proud of you.  And you were so great today! I could never repay you for all you did today with being kind and aware of us and our feelings.  I just want to make sure that you know how thankful I am.  It’s been really tough and I can only get through this with support like you gave today.  It means everything!

And THAT is why I am an attorney.

Thank you, Missus, for reminding me on an otherwise most awful of days.

I picked up George Washington Cable’s “Old Creole Days” at the last book sale of the Friends of Jefferson Parish Library.  I paid $12 for a hardcover-missing-its-dust-jacket 1943 printing by the Limited Editions Club, Inc. of Cable’s late-1800s stories.  This is quite the gem.  It was worth the $12 just for the two introductions, one by Edward Larocque Tinker and the other by Lafcadio Hearn, and the fabulous illustrations.

Cable lived among, and wrote about, the Creoles in Louisiana.  He was one of the first authors to write fiction set in New Orleans and about her peoples.  He even captures the dialect of the Creoles.

Where Cable really, really shines are his descriptions.  His attention to detail in describing buildings in the French Quarter, many of which are still standing today, is magnificent.  (For a double treat, get your hands on Stanley Clisby Arthur’s “Old New Orleans: Walking Tours of the French Quarter”–Arthur takes your hand and walks you down Royal and Bourbon stopping at all the many notable buildings, including the very real inspirations of Cable.)

It was very picturesque, the Rue Royale. The rich and poor met together. The locksmith’s swinging key creaked next door to the bank; across the way, crouching mendicant-like in the shadow of a great importing house, was the mud laboratory of the mender of broken combs. Light balconies overhung the rows of showy shops and stores open for trade this Sunday morning, and pretty Latin faces of the higher class glanced over their savagely pronged railings upon the passers below.  At some windows hung lace curtains, flannel duds at some, and at others only the scraping and sighing one-hinged shutter groaning toward Paris after its neglectful master.

~”Posson Jone’.”

A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city, and to that corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant merchandise.  The crowd — and if it is near the time of the carnival it will be great — will follow Canal Street.

But you turn instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to call the Rue Royale. You will pass a few restaurants, a few auction-rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that you have left behind you the activity and clatter of a  city of merchants before you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories, overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon every thing has settled down a long sabbath of decay. . . .

~”Madame Delphine.”

Cables’ description of NOLA characters are equally as satisfying.

All New Orleans, at least all Creole New Orleans, knew, and yet did not know, the dear little Doctor.  So gentle, so kind, so skilful, so patient, so lenient; so careless of the rich and so attentive to the poor; a man, all in all, such as, should you once love him, you would love him forever. So very learned, too, but with apparently no idea of how to show himself to his social profit — two features much more smiled at than respected, not to say admired, by a people remote from the seats of learning, and spending most of their esteem upon animal heroisms and exterior display.

~”Madame Délicieuse.”

Kristian Koppig was a rosy-faced, beardless young Dutchman. He was one of that army of gentlemen who, after the purchase of Louisiana, swarmed from all parts of the commercial world, over the mountains of Franco-Spanish exclusiveness, like the Goths over the Pyrenees, and settled down in New Orleans to pick up their fortunes, with the diligence of hungry pigeons.  He may have been a German; the distinction was too fine for Creole haste and disrelish.

~”‘Tite Poulette.”

Cable writes of mysteries afoot and tales of unrequited love; Cathedral priests and mulattoes; immigrants and landlords. He spins yarns of ghost-sightings and decades-old secrets; trickery and tom-foolery. And all the while, he writes with love — love of New Orleans and her then-not-unlike-today melting-pot denizens.

Anyone attempting to amass a NOLA library must have this collection on his shelf.  And its many locations mentally noted in his head for when a trip downtown ensues.

I sit on the floor
Near a drafty door
Wondering why I haven’t
sat here before.

When I dated CS, I sat on his sofa in the den we now share listening to Cowboy Junkies as I read the titles to the books on his shelves and he prepared dinner for us. My heart expanded right-then-and-there knowing it’d found its place in this crazy world.

Now, these many years later, I sit on the sofa in that very room and I don’t think anything at all.  I Twitter and I knit; we talk and play with our daughter.  The luxury of quiet alone time is as foreign to us as a carnival parade to a Nebraskan.

Except sometimes, when the television is off and the light hits just right, and I sit someplace other than the sofa, like, say, the floor by the door, it all comes back, breaking like a wave on the beach, drenching me in its fullness.

I’ve just finished reading “New Orleans Noir.” It’s a collection of short stories set in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, post-Katrina and even in between. I tend not to like short stories; I prefer long, epic tales with lots of character development. Notwithstanding, I am addicted to all books NOLA-related and had to give this one a fair shake.

As the name states, this book is dark. Many of the contributing authors write mystery or crime novels; many of the stories involve crimes and the NOPD.

It is a beautiful night. Despite this shit here. Sweet and soft, balmy. Dark. I know that sounds odd to say. The night is dark. But it is. Here in New Orleans, it is really dark. One or two things I know about New Orleans. The nights are darker here. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’m not talking about human darkness. About evil, or shit.  I’m talking about the quality of the night. The feel. I been everywhere, all over this country. The Gulf of Mexico. Jamaica. I’m telling you. I seen a lot of darkness, stayed up a lot of nights. It’s just a fact. The nights are darker here.  Palpably darker. And thicker. You can reach out and stroke the darkness. Touch it. Run your hand over it, like somebody’s skin, or a piece of soft cloth. Got a soft feel to it, New Orleans nights. The nights are always softer here. No matter what else has happened. No matter what kind of horror show. The nights are always soft. I can’t tell you how many times, how many blood-soaked crime scenes I been privy to, how many murders. I just stepped away, stepped outside, into the night, and been struck by how thick and soft and sweet and downright dark the nights are here. Struck dumb. It’s a mystery.

Eric Overmyer’s Marigny Triangle.

There were stories that did nothing for me. I read them, and I immediately forgot them. And I am grateful that such stories were, in fact, short.

There were stories I devoured and wished wouldn’t have ended so quickly. One that sucked me in and left me wanting more was Laura Lippman’s Pony Girl.

Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne-colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so . . . disturbing. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white-and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and — this was what made me fear for her — a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced.  Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed here, dancing into the night.

Another that charmed me was James Nolan’s Open Mike, appealing to the Raymond Chandler fan in me:

I made it to the Dragon’s Den on a sticky Tuesday evening, with a woolly sky trapping humidity inside the city like a soggy blanket. It had been trying to rain for two weeks. The air was always just about to clear up but never did, as if old Mother Nature were working on her orgasm. I carried an umbrella, expecting a downpour. The place was right next to the river, and hadn’t seen a drop of paint since I last walked in the door thirty years ago, with all my hair and a young man’s cocky swagger. A whistle was moaning as a freight train clacked along the nearby tracks, and the huge live oak out front shrouded the crumbling façade in a tangle of shadows. An old rickshaw was parked outside, where an elfin creature with orange hair sat scribbling in a notebook. He shot me a look through thick black plastic glasses, and then went back to writing.

There were many that spoke of revenge and redemption; that defined loss and sorrow:

Here it was, two weeks after the funeral, and only now had Rita finally been able to summon the strength to clean out Sammy’s closet.

When she pulled the closet door open, Sammy’s scent assaulted her. She buckled at the knees and had to grab the door frame with one hand and push hard against the knob with the other just to keep from falling. It was like Sammy was hiding in the closet and had come charging out when she opened it.

Kalumu Ya Salaam’s All I Could Do Was Cry.

And others that addressed the resiliency of New Orleanians, such as Maureen Tan’s Muddy Pond:

Another helicopter flew overhead, its clatter magnified as the sound bounced off the swamped houses below. It was on its way, Sonny was certain, to pluck unfortunates from their rooftops. To rescue people whose lives were endangered. But because that did not describe Sonny’s situation, it didn’t occur to him to signal for help. He didn’t need rescuing. As others had evacuated, he’d prepared. He had food and water, the company of his cats, a battery-powered radio, and a dry attic. No matter if it took a week or two or even three, Sonny knew that eventually the water would recede. Then his neighbors would return.

Then there were others that glared the light on all too true facts about the city:

Chad worked as a waiter in a Quarter restaurant, and from all appearances, never seemed to have any friends. Who would miss him? He wouldn’t show up for work, they’d write him off — people tend to come and go quickly in New Orleans, especially now — and that would be the end of it. Unless a family member missed him, filed a missing-persons report, and really pressed the cops — which wouldn’t do much good, unless his family was wealthy and powerful.

You have to hate New Orleans sometimes.

Greg Herren’s Annunciation Shotgun.

In all, there are eighteen short stories; ten set pre-Katrina and the others touching on the storm in one way or another.  In each story, New Orleans is as much a character as any of her denizens created in these stories. All of the stories are dark. But, like it or not, they all have components of truth in them of what New Orleans is about and who her people are. The truth isn’t always pretty. But this group of collaborators sure makes it worthwhile to learn just a little bit more about the dark underbelly that can be New Orleans.