Play it again, Grandma

My Grandma, Maxine Weeks, passed away last week, at the age of 93, living with Alzheimer's during her final years. She was married to my Grandpa, Richard, who died 3 years ago. They were married some 70 years having met each other as neighbors living on the same block as teenagers in Rochester, Minnesota.

Maxie was an accomplished musician traveling around the Midwest for most of her life playing piano and organ in a variety of venues. She had perfect pitch and became known as "the lady with a thousand songs" (or something like that) because she could play just about anything you requested, at the lounges where she headlined. She was based in Minneapolis-St.Paul, had her own radio program and was the first female member of the Rotary Club.

Though this lifestyle meant being away from her family quite a bit, she was certainly unique for her time as a woman with a musical career. She also taught piano and organ, designed and sewed her own clothes, and cooked and baked obsessively for people. I always remember her having a beautiful, long-haired cat around when I would visit her; Fuzzy was my favorite and my brother adopted her last cat, Dali, before she went into the nursing home. Dali was so named because she thought it was a female originally (Dolly), but upon learning of the blundered gender changed the spelling to Dali, after the artist, Salvador.

She always tried to hide this publicity photo of hers from back in the day because she didn't think it was appropriate for her grandchildren to see her cleavage. Though my Mom certainly has a different story to tell about her, this is the one I like for me, as her grandaughter - she was a beautiful, talented diva who wrote her own script.

"I'm sorry, there's nothing that can be done"

"I'm sorry, there's nothing that can be done." These final, definitive words spoken by a tired-looking Indian man in a dusty old computer repair shop in Metairie, the second one I had been to yesterday. His words expressed the tragic poignancy of the wisdom that comes from realizing that something is lost and can never be regained. A bad travel drive; they only have a little chip in them, so if they quit working, you will never be able to get to a couple of days worth of seriously good writing.

So here is a zen koan - a young professor wrote her book every day and saved it on her travel drive. One day the travel drive quit working. Where did her writing go? AARRGHH!!! As the computer repair sage said, there is in fact nothing to be done. Nothing, except to take a deep breath, buy a portable external hard drive, and try to re-create what was. Move forward. Try to pay better attention to how you take care of what you have (like constantly back up your files).

This mysterious human lesson. This cycle of appearing and disappearing is fairly subtle and the meaning is generally lost on us most days. Sometimes it's less subtle; like a 2 by 4 upside the head. Like my friend who woke up one day last year to find her life partner had died in his sleep. We, along with tens of thousands of our closest neighbors, learned it with our house and personal belongings (books, pictures, more writings, and socks and shoes and dog toys) - lost to the Gulf of Mexico, returned to the swamp land. The first yoga book bought by my husband in the 1960s became a perfect place for a fungus to grow, a make-shift lilly pad for a resourceful frog.

But the new now becomes completely sacred. And so here is a shot of the same corner of our house a couple of years later. Nice, eh?

This is what failed democracy looks like

Here is a picture of my living room on approximately September 30, 2005 about a month after the federal levee system failure, an event which is sometimes more conveniently referred to as Hurricane Katrina. This failure of such vital public infrastructure resulted in about 6 feet of water in my neighborhood and much more in some other New Orleans neighborhoods.



This is what happens when a group of people have more or less fallen asleep at the wheel. By this I am not necessarily referring to the government, for they seem to be quite awake as to what has been happening, at least in some sense of the word 'awake.' The retrenchment of public services (both physical infrastructure and social welfare) has been a proactive political agenda in the U.S. for many years beginning in the 1970s. Some people hoped for a moment that the Katrina levee failure might be a tipping point in American history, swinging the pendulum back to a time where public support of constituent needs would be valued. Instead, barely a word about the levee failure has been mentioned in the current presidential election rhetoric. The democratic candidates rejected New Orleans as the site of a political debate.

I show a film to my students called "This is What Democracy Looks Like." It is a documentary of the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. This historic event occurred due to the efforts of a broad based coalition of environmental activists, labor organizers, and other global justice advocates from around the world who came together to protest the neo-liberal globalization policies of the World Trade Organization. The WTO gives loans and subsidies to the governments of developing countries that essentially support global corporations and are contingent on the retrenchment of public infrastructure and social welfare supports to the people of the country. The results are often the loss of indigenous land, weakened worker protections and environmental devastation. These are the same policies that the U.S. uses against its own people.

And we, the hyper-consumers, continually distracted by our desires, seeminlgy forever weakened by new desires created by corporations, are indeed failing in our job to build our communities and hold our government accountable for their part. Many, like the Seattle activists, are resisting, but it certainly isn't enough. Our sham of a democracy, like the black mold that thrived in my house, can make a person gag on its foulness. When you open the door for the first time, and get a real look at it, and feel it in your bones, it can make you call up your partner on the phone and say, "It's far worse than we could ever have imagined."

On going to the French Quarter and buying a hat

I have a thick, curly head of hair and while this can mean some stunningly beautiful hair days (if I dare say so myself), it also means an unfortunate pattern of really bad hair days. It's just the way it is; these extreme hair states depend on each other for their existence. And so I've found that having a good hat for such sad occassions can be very helpful for my self-esteem as well as my sense of aesthetic expression in the world. I've been needing to buy a hat so I went to the French Quarter where there are most obviously good hats to be had.

I had the perfect hat that came up missing after Mardi Gras this year. I've learned that it is quite common for people to lose hats during Mardi Gras. Now, I don't understand what happens exactly, but somehow, you go to Mardi Gras with a hat on and when you come home you don't have it anymore. I don't know where the hat goes. But mine was clearly gone and I've been wanting a new one and so I drove to the French Quarter to get one. And it's a crisp, spring day and there are lots of people there - groups of church volunteers in matching t-shirts, newly minted drinking age couples who carry their open containers of alcohol around giddily and a 5-piece band on the sidewalk with a fiddle player taking the lead on a Tracy Chapman song. And a person painted solid gold and an alcoholic from Charleston, South Carolina who came to New Orleans 30 years ago and fell in love and can never, ever leave and a tarot card reader named Velvet. (Velvet read my cards, said everything was going to be okay and gave me a red stone and told me to burn a red or pink candle tonight.)

So, I go to the place I bought my last hat and within about 10 minutes I've found a pretty good hat. You see, a good hat is not hard to find in the French Quarter. Buying a hat did remind me of a few things I know but had forgotten:

1) My head is much larger than the average head
2) Hats are made in China
3) Hat = itchy, scratchy head

It's the end of the world...and I have writer's block

For about 2 months now, I have been saying that I am 90% finished with my first book which will be published late this year. That is, it will be published if I can friggin' finish it already! I have been working on this book for just under 2 years now. I am endlessly distracted. At first, it was the weight of post-Katrina community life. The words of social activist and Catholic worker Dorothy Day captured some of my internal conflicts during this time: “The sustained effort of writing, of putting pen to paper so many hours a day when there are human beings around who need me, when there is sickness, and hunger, and sorrow, is a harrowingly painful job. I feel that I have done nothing well. But I have done what I could." This certainly has a romantic nobility to it.

Other more mundane distractions also appear, mainly in the form of sensual pleasure (food, drink, sex), mindless and not-so-mindless entertainment (internet, tv, reading, ubiquitous New Orleans festivals), but mostly just spacing out (daydreaming of a non-existent future, worrying about deadlines long passed, wondering about the suffering of friends and family). None of these distractions is inherently bad. I like a lot of them. And even the ones I don't like (e.g. the worrying) are kind of gratifying in a twisted sort of way. All of this is just part of human life. While incessantly de-railed, one somehow keeps trying in spite of it. We humans seem to excel at this trying. It's a mysterious ability and it's one of the things that makes us beautiful.

Another poetic-like offering:

Suspended.
In the no (wo)man's land that is neither
ecstasy nor devastation
I shuffle along,
Always at home in my own dream world

It's balmy in New Orleans

I'm back in New Orleans after trips to New York and Kansas City. It was snowy and 9 degrees when I left Albany, crazy winds a brewin' in Kansas City with 60's yesterday and about 25 degrees this morning and 70s and humid here in New Orleans. What a tour with visits that ran a gamut as wide as the weather - meetings with deans and administration in Albany, a real estate agent in New York who's going to help us find our dream house, sitting in the hospital with a family member in Kansas City who is very ill, and some quality time with friends and family...

I offer something like a poem-

As I step out into a brave new world
Love surrounds me
Gently, like a Gulf breeze