The Siren Song of Night Skies and Campfires (Blog #16)

12:40 am

I'm out here, listening to all the manmade noises, at 12:40 a.m, on the second Friday in a row.  Why does the city of Pittsburgh think it is okay to get started on roadwork at this hour?  The roommate tells me they start it up at 10 pm every weekend, at which time they shut down the tunnel and wreak general havoc on Swissvale traffic through Sunday night. My ideal, quiet little neighborhood is taking on some new qualities I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with, as the approach of the summer months and good weather becomes a reality at last. 

"There are two seasons in Pittsburgh," she tells me, "winter and construction."  Damn.

Still, I don't mind the dark, even with all the noise.  The half-moon above the houses off to the right has an otherwordly sheen all around it.  The air smells cool, fresh, the grass has sprouted up everywhere in my backyard, apparent in the slivers and flashes of light that stream outward from our dining room window.  Even with all the traffic noises, there is more a sense of peace out here at night than even on the quietest sun-drenched day (not that we have many of those in perpetually overcast Pittsburgh).  There is a stillness out here in the nighttime hours that is near-impossible to locate during summer afternoons.

The still-broken backyard light does its thing, flickering on and off on a whim, each time I turn my head or move my pen too much.  It is still a bother, but even that indecisive lantern cannot ruin my good mood.  I am out here for the first time in several weeks, and I have missed this stillness in my life. 

Today, a friend wrote an email to me, complaining of a camping trip with friends that had gone sour for her once she realized that said friends weren't really there to experience any kind of nature or stillness, but just to tell stories around the fire and drink.  These activities have their place in our world, too--but when a gal needs a good dose of silence, some thinking time (or mind-wandering time, as the case may be), no amount of chatter and fun is going to fill that gap.

I think of my own recently-busy life, busy enough that I've been prevented from entering the backyard for any length of time.  Long hours of data entry in a hot room and the whining of children who are not getting their way, though separately manageable and representative of an off-day rather than the reality of the everyday grind, may nevertheless compound themselves into one very long workday.  These things, taken together, have a way of lessening one's will to work hard in the off-hours on various life projects,. backyard blogs included. 

It is true that something has felt vaguely amiss to me these days, a bit askew, despite the happiness I feel toward my living space and the things I have been devoting my life to this past year.  Most recently, it has felt as though no amount of throwing myself into my work has been able to fix the proverbial leak.  Could it be that the thing I've been putting off because I "don't have time"--time to sit and contemplate things--is the very thing that will mend me, that will give my days more meaning, and bring a sense of rightness to my world?  That the pieces will fall into place, once I do this one solitary thing?  I can't confirm or deny the answer just yet, but I have my suspicions that I have been missing more than just my "backyard time."

I am convinced that brain and body know when one is neglecting things, and make their displeasure known in all the little ways--the lack of concentration and drive to work; the tiredness that steeps itself in the muscles and in the bones; the frustration of feeling for no particular reason and contrary to all logic, that the work one has done in the day has not made a bit of difference, that it is not one's "real work" (never mind that whatever "real work" might mean still remains a mystery); the restlessness one feels before bed, as though there were some cosmic task that needed doing, but that the real logistical specificities of this task, whetever it may be, are beyond her reach.  Even when one knows that the real solution lies in becoming more aware of one's surorundings, of becoming more present in every waking moment, it would seem to her that this reality cannot be felt, just yet, until some decisive action has been taken.

To make things more confusing, though no less powerful over one's life, these symptoms do not come all at once as they might with some kind of diagnosable illness, nor is the person affected by them always aware of their effects.  They are temporary, and sporadic, and situational, but even so, they require something to be done by the person residing in this headspace.  They are the marks, I am often convinced, of living one's days with too much quickness, and too little awareness--the certain signs of of inhabiting a world that is moving too quickly to encourage a person to slow down and sit out a few laps.

My newly long days at work and my decision to take on a lot of extra projects in the past few months (three, to be exact) has left some part of me numb and fighting for balance.  And so I reach for it, in the stillness of the night sky, with no distractions to lure my attention away.  Maybe it's the age of the internet, or maybe it's just a quirk of my own personality, that compels me to seek this thing out when most seem content to talk their way through a campfire night these days.

But whatever the reason, I need a time-out, like a child who has been surrounded by too many stimuli and becomes craky and manic in the process.  I am no longer afraid or ashamed to take it.  And what wonders twenty minutes under the cover of darkness can do for a restless soul, perched as she may be beneath the half-moon and its halo, the silhouettes of branches, the secrets and mysteries of the night sky.

Scenes from New Orleans, Part I (Blog #15)

10:10 a.m.

For the first time, I’ve brought my computer outside with me for blogging purposes.  It occurs to me what a loud instrument this is, as the beeps and dings go off that signify my computer booting up, and then an episode of New Girl starts up immediately—the one I was in the middle of watching last night on Hulu before passing out from the exhaustion of the week.  I get hooked into that drama for a minute or two before returning to the task at hand.  This is why I don’t bring my laptop outside with me, I think.  Of course, there is also a car alarm going off somewhere behind me. 

All this noise seems inordinately loud for a Saturday morning, but maybe I’m just used to blogging at night and not at 10 a.m…

Our deck was powerwashed yesterday, and so the only thing covering it now is pollen.  The chairs and grill sit on the lawn, forsaken for the time being, and only the table and some planting pots sit at the edge of the wooden slats.  The air around me is cool and crisp, as befits the new spring days.  The nights have been hot, and it has been hard to wake up in the mornings due to the stuffiness of my bedroom and my poor allergy-prone nose, which is why I have slept 11 or 12 hours a night this week.  So in being out here I am simultaneously trying to wake up and to write out a much-overdue blog post.

It is overdue only in my mind, of course, as classes are done and blogging is no longer a required part of my week. Yet, when I was in New Orleans last week, all I could think about was committing to paper all of the crazy adventures I was having.  Most of them were not “crazy” in the way you would expect a trip to New Orleans to bring forth; but there were surprises, big and small, nonetheless.

There was the restaurant I went to, an old haunt I used to love called La Madeleine, which served up a mean tomato soup.  It had been remade into a fifties-style soda shop called Stanley’s.  This place advertised, appropriately, a sandwich called “The Stella” on the back of the servers’ t-shirts, though I didn’t try it—I was there for the cherry limeade and chicken and gator gumbo, with a lump of potato salad dropped in the middle of it. 

There was the palm reader in Jackson Square who told me I am going to have three children (three!) and that I wanted to be a doctor when growing up (I wanted to be a bus driver, actually).  I silently scoffed at these tidbits of information.  But she also told me I'd live til at least 96, outlasting my grandfather.  She told me I've had my heart broken twice.  She told me I worry too much about my body, that I think I can't have kids but I really can.  "You've lost one man, one woman," she told me, when I've been writing about my grandparents all semester long.  "The woman was like you," she said.   

She looked around the square, at the mix of tourists and other fortune tellers and said, "You are one of us, not like everyone else.  She was this way, too."  She told me this, and I wanted to believe it. 

"Are you sure about the kids?" I asked her.

"The girl is like you, too," she said.  "Fighting with her is like fighting with yourself.  You can't win."  This feels true, somehow, though the reality of it doesn't exist yet.  I think of my mother  in New York and how we fight, the way we each fought with my grandmother, the way all the women in our family fight.  Dirty, lowdown fighting.  It fits.

She drew a few tarot cards, including the Devil Card, and told me, "Don't blame me. This is your card."  I laughed, knowing she was probably right.  "You have three sides," she said.  "There is the very sweet side and the bitch."  Anyone who knows me at all would already be nodding in agreement; I've always held it as a strength to be able to show either side, as needed. To not let myself be trodden upon at some moments, then to come back with a fierce generosity in others.  It is a personality quirk, I guess.

"But  at your heart, you are a family woman,"  she concluded.  "You give a lot to them, though you don't get back as much in return as you give."  She looked at my left palm and saw heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in my family line (all true, of course) but that in 3-5 years--no more illnesses.  I prayed she was right about that one.  

                                                                              *

The beignets in Jackson Square were the same as ever, and the jazz at Preservation Hall, too, though I gave away my last beignet to a homeless man on the street begging for scraps.  As for the jazz, it fired me up, as usual.  Half the fun was witnessing the man from Provincetown, Cape Cod—who I chatted with in line for a half an hour beforehand—at his first Pres Hall show, whooping and hollering and exclaiming to his wife, “That tuba player in the back is far underappreciated. Far underappreciated.”   The woman standing in front of me, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, swayed with drunkenness during “When the Saints Go Marching In,” splashing her drink everywhere and narrowly missing my feet and purse.  (Drinks are not served there, but one is allowed to bring them in from Pat O’Brien’s pub, next door.)  While I was hardly nostalgic for this kind of behavior in a grown-ass adult, it felt strangely familiar to me, after enduring three years of such things here as a student over a decade ago.  

In the three days I spent here this month, I saw more adults teetering of the edge of sobriety than I would have liked and yet, as one hardly sees this kind of permissive go-ahead elsewhere in the States, at least as far as grown adults are concerned, there is something kind of intriguing about a place that in its very nature invites this sort of freedom to do what you please and damn the consequences. 

What is it about New Orleans?

Though I’m a two-drink maximum kind of girl, most days, this city captured me, too, in other ways.  Yes, I finally ordered a Hurricane on my last night there, about an hour before my bus was scheduled to depart, and yet it was another kind of hurricane entirely that caught me on this trip. 

It was my first time visiting since Katrina.

Imagine me in the darkened theater, at a larger-than-life IMAX feature called “Hurricane on the Bayou,” struggling to keep my sobs in for thirty whole minutes.  (It didn’t work.)  The film was a tasteful documentary, set just before Katrina, and it was about a girl who was doing a project for school about hurricanes and interviewing local people who’d been through the last big rager that had hit New Orleans.  But during the course of the film, the real thing hits, and the city is evacuated.

I saw real scenes, in enormous pixillated detail, of people fleeing their homes or refusing to flee their homes, waiting for rescue, being rescued.  I saw the little girl who was narrating part of the film waiting for days to hear from her grandparents, to know if they were alive.  It hit home, after losing my own grandfather so recently.  But it also hit home, to be sitting there in my old city, albeit among other tourists, and watching the devastation it had faced all those years ago, knowing that some things still remain to be fixed—people’s lives included.  In some ways, Katrina wasn’t real for me until this moment in the theater, surrounded by other tourists who were politely taking it all in like the detached history lesson it was, for them—in this moment, when the home I had seen destroyed on the TV screen all those summers ago synched up with the real thing, rooted in this place in all its gigantic IMAX terror.

Yeah, I pretty much lost it.

                                                                                *

Now this is me we’re talking about—I’d even written an essay for my thesis four or so years ago about watching this tragedy unfold in my former home, about the scenes posted all over CNN, and how it made me feel numb, confused, resentful.  How the media—though it did focus our attention there and help us to know the real atrocities that were going on in the city during that storm—sometimes seemed to be exploiting a terrible situation for the sake of its own viewership stats.  It was hard to watch.  It was hard to know what I was feeling.  I wanted to help my city, but I was a broke grad student and did not know how else to help other than donating money I didn’t have.  The best I could do was tell people when they asked what an amazing place it was, one-of-a-kind.  Tell them why it should definitely be rebuilt.  No questions asked.  The best I could do was write about it, so that other people might see in New Orleans what I saw, not a wreck of a town but all the joy it had always brought people. 

That's what Ernest Gaines did, what a host of local writers and lovers of this place did, too, I guess.  That's the only power we have as writers, sometimes.

In the April 2013 Jazz Fest guide, I read about Aaron Neville, whose wife was lost in the years after the storm, and of others who fought bravely through these tragedies in ‘05, but who were unable to fend off the devastation done to their hearts and their minds, to their culture and their way of life, in the years following.  These past few years have been the darkest years for the people of New Orleans, indeed.  But when I am there, in person, in the parts of town I used to frequent as a student, I realize that this IMAX film is the only sadness I see all week.  How does this city do it?

I hear the strains of jazz music everywhere—in the background of this film, along the river’s edge where the riverboats gather to bring the tourists out on dinnertime tours, in the park where the lone trumpeter plays the riffs of “Little Liza Jane,”  in my own mind for four or five days after this trip.  Four or five days of jazz music going solely in one’s head is a long time, when one is surrounded in actuality by the strains of rap and pop.  But the jazz refused to leave me for a little while.

What is it about New Orleans?  I know it is, at least in part, their music that has brought them back.  The musicians’ village that was created after Katrina, and the many programs created by Harry Connick Jr. and Trombone Shorty, among others, to being musicians back, to help them find their livelihood again, to teach high schoolers the roots and techniques of jazz so that the lifeblood of this city is not lost, can never be lost.

It is their music—that and the knowledge that seems to be written on every person’s face, even those who have had hard times and have hard times still—that has kept them going.  This knowledge is a kind of secret to living a good life, the joy that comes in living well and knowing how to make other people smile—strangers, even, who are merely passing through, traveling from lands as foreign to the concept of joy for its own sake as New York City.