Crescent City Christmas

The other day (ten days ago to be precise!) my friend Mary called me from "Celebration in the Oaks." The event is a New Orleans City Park tradition that Mary and I strolled through two years ago during it's less than fully realized return after the Katrina floods had turned City Park into a lake. The other day she called to share the amusement at "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," as her niece and nephew danced along, but her call reminded me of my introduction that year to "A Cajun Night Before Christmas."

There is just something about Christmas in New Orleans that goes beyond my favorite line from one of my favorite films, "Anglo Saxons go better in the tropics!" It is indeed interesting to go through this particular season of the year in the lovely temperate climate of New Orleans, but more importantly there is just something about the spirit of the whole place that I am missing right now. It could be the playing of "Peace Stories" in St. Louis Cathedral, or walking along the river on a still balmy evening, or the lights along the street, or the bonfires on the river... or just the sense that, like everything else, Christmas is just different in New Orleans and I miss it.

My life right now is an interesting juxtaposition of crazy and peaceful (there is a sense in which that is the nature of the holidays in general, but that's probably for another post). I was recently informed that I need to find a new place to live by the end of the year. The person from whom I've been subleasing my latest residence has decided to make changes in his travel plans and the way he works with this house and his life in London, so in the middle of holiday madness I am also finding myself house hunting. This leads me to a rather keen awareness of how Joseph might have felt while he frantically scanned the buildings of Beautiful Downtown Bethlehem, holding onto the slim hope of a Vacancy sign. It makes for an interesting experience, this scrambling for housing while scrambling for presents. Not that it has dampened my spirits. The fact is, I find this year's holiday to be the most joyful Christmas I have experienced in quite a long time and I am excited about the possibilities and challenges of the coming year.

But I still miss my Crescent City Christmas... So, Merry Christmas New Orleans! Y'all are in my heart!

Not Just Another Day...

Okay... I've been worse than usual about posting (or rather NOT POSTING) to the blog for the last two weeks.

It's been a busy two weeks... and I've been sick.

But one thing has been running around in my brain ever since a couple of days after Thanksgiving.

That weekend was pretty busy, what with a Turkey to BBQ and a parade to watch, yams, beans, brussel sprouts, green beans, and dressing all to make in a juggling balance while imbibing in all of the lovely libations of the season... It's a tough job, but as they say...

So after the big debauchery it was recuperation day (did I mention that I've been sick?), music to hear at the local pub on Friday and Saturday night and Santa to wait for at the local dock, as he came on up the Petaluma River to meet and greet (making like he was running for election) all his adoring fans.

Somewhere along the way, I think it was outside Finbars on Friday, I overheard someone say that Thanksgiving has "turned out to be just another day." Well... I know it's all very popular to be oh so reserved and cynical about the holidays (someone else I know was recently complaining about all the "false cheer") but to me it's just the opposite, and it's extremely important to remember... especially when things are not all sweetness and light... that the reason we celebrate holidays (whether they be Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Mardi Gras) is in order to break ourselves out of the ordinary.. to move us to a new place, to show us - by giving us a reason to relax, revel, and recuperate - that we are not simply here on this planet to take up space and spread our greed.

We are here to see each other for what we are, celebrate the joy of who we are, and know each other for the miracles we hope we can be.

For me Thanksgiving (my FAVORITE of holidays) cannot and will not EVER just be "another day."

Thanksgiving (and the whole end of year holiday season of celebration that it ushers in) is a day for remembering that we live as spirit inside these meat sacks and our lives are better for the times we stop and smell the food, kiss our loved ones, and have a drink of wine.

Buy Jen's Stuff!!!

On Sunday, my daughter launched her budding entrepreneurial career with the opening of her online craft shop, JenniferShmennifer. It's a great store filled with an array of hand crafted items that I'm sure that you and yours would love for the holidays... and THAT is a completely unbiased and unsolicited opinion!

Sitting over chili for lunch the other day and talking about her work and her store I was struck by the fact that I was also 25 (assuming that you don't count my selling Grit newspapers at 13 or doing neighborhood gardening work at 15) when I started my first business, a custom photography company. That was followed three years later with the co-founding of BrierPatch Music, the record company I ran for nearly ten years; an adventure that took me through many changes and all around the world. Basically, I haven't had a "real job" since.

The thing is, watching Jennifer do this now I am struck by the way kids take elements from both parents (and other influences) to create the gumbo that becomes their own life. The engagement with the idea, the combination of playfulness and serious are recognizable to me as a kind of business attitude I possesed in spades back then and which I am to this day trying to hold on to as I begin some new ventures of my own. The orderliness and structure she is already building into her business is much more like her mother; it's a trait I would have done well to have a better handle on and I think it will stand her in good stead.

That said... the store, the goods, and the attitude about the whole thing are 100% Jennifer and it makes me happy and proud to watch from the sidelines as she begins this new project.

Check it out! Buy some stuff! Happy Holidays!

Go JenniferShmennifer!

I'm Walkin' Here!

There are undeniably a whole wide range of issues that need to be dealt with right now in the world. They include everything from the obvious problem (and thank goodness relatively short lived residency) of the current occupant of the White House, his adventuresome debacle in Iraq, the complete lack of affordable health care in the U.S., hunger, homelessness, the ongoing and seemingly never-ending struggle of New Orleans to return from disaster, worldwide abuse of human rights... and more and more and more.

It's a damned depressing scenario and it colors almost every aspect of contemporary living whether your a big time mover and shaker or a small town nobody.

Three weeks ago (and I've been meaning to write about it ever since) I had the delightful opportunity to participate with a whole collection of people, some of whom I knew and most of whom were new to my acquaintance, in a three mile walk around the east side of Petaluma, led by our mayor, Pam Torliatt. There was no overtly political agenda in this, though it was possible (and people were encouraged)to chat with the mayor about their personal civic concerns as we padded along the walking and bike paths of this little town.

Over many years of my life, I've been in a lot of places with a lot of the basic problems of contemporary urban society, and the reality is that not only do I feel a responsibility to personally deal (as best I can) with those issues, but I actually thrive on the process involved in dealing with issues that demand our attention. I have regularly lived in a sort of confrontational mode with regard to such things, and that goes all the way back to my attendance at Viet Nam protests in Tucson from the time I was 16, to my joining the first Witness For Peace trip to Nicaragua in 1983, less than two years after my daughter was born (when every kid in Nicaragua seemed to be her age), spending many years in tax resistance against US war policy, going to jail in Livermore California to protest American nuclear policy, and serving as one of the founding board members of Dolores Street Community Services, an extension of our little liberal Baptist Church (no... that's NOT an oxymoron!) at the edge of San Francisco's Mission District... and, of course, well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly, working in New Orleans with Churches Supporting Churches and others to hopefully see the city come back to life sometime within the foreseeable future.

The thing is... this little three mile walk three weeks ago was a moving experience that I will not soon get over. There was no big agenda, there were no major speeches, no angry protests, and no substantial agenda. In fact, the only real agenda at all was the mayor's desire to get people out and moving through space with the idea that such activity would make them feel better, think better, most likely act better, and undeniably live longer; a pretty damn good agenda, it seems to me.

I still believe in the big important causes, and I still want to work, really work, for a change in the way we humans exist on this planet, but on that Saturday three weeks ago all those issues seemed to come down to the simple reality of walking. And walking can do a lot (last weekend, ECKS's daughter, Lia, raised $2200 and walked 60 miles for breast cancer concerns in the Breast Cancer Three Day) and maybe, in the sense of Gandhi's remark that "you must become the change you want to see in the world," the simple act of walking can, indeed, actually change the world.

It's a good start wherever it takes us and I'm quite grateful to Petalulma's mayor, and all the folks that walked, for introducing me to the idea. Someday soon... maybe tomorrow... maybe even today... I'll be active, political, intense, and challenging once again, but...

In the meantime... I'm walkin' here!

If you read one book...

In the front window of the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans there is a quote from Truman Capote that expresses the sentiment that the real beauty of writing is not in the stories themselves but in the sound and feel of the words. There are times when I have that feeling, but they tend to be very few and far between. This morning, however, I finished reading one of those kind of books; a book so rich in language, so bathed in linguistic beauty, that the near horror of the storyline is completely eclipsed by the exquisite luxury of words pouring over you like a summer waterfall in a mountain stream.

The plot line of Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a man and a boy on a never ending cross-country trek through a post-apocalyptic world of hunger, danger, and pain. There are no chapters to break the flow of the inexorable journey as the reader is taken along as a third companion through this world that seems at once too familiar and terribly strange.

Along the way, there are moral questions that are raised and sometimes answered. We are never told the source of the devastation, it just is. It is a story that you want to turn away from, but find that you can't. The reader must wrestle with the difficulties of this world, and these lives, like Jacob with the angel. On some level, by the end of The Road there is no turning back. The reader is forced, by taking the journey, to in some sense take a stand. This may be to seek a way to secure the future from such devastation, or it may be to hold the ones you love especially close.

Above all... the gift of The Road is the gift of language. The story is hard, but the language, and the spell it weaves, is lovely.

Read this book.