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It's Always Also
You might as well call it a crisis situation when you get a call from Dave just checking up. Just admit whatever errors have been committed, reconsider whatever messages have been relayed, and move on. Don't be blue, there's no reward in it. What are you dwelling on and why? Be cheerful, here we go.
I remember writing about stepping in dog shit and admonishing City Park area residents to pick up after their animals, even though poop scooping is not really mandated here in New Orleans. What I didn't write about was shortly after that, a day or two, I was parked in semi-rumination along City Park Avenue and I watched a dude, a hipster-looking thirty-something, walking his dog back through the neighborhood across from the park and his dog shat on an avenue yard. There was nobody watching but me and I was invisible. The dude looked around him, taking more than a little time about it, and found some trash on the street, a paper cup, and then went back to the pile of shit and rather ungraciously on several tries scooped up his animal's discard and then walked out of his way to place it in a trash can.
I also wrote about these dog walkers who were making a daily habit of using the unused Pentecostal lot next door to me to train their pit bulls and how it drove my neighbor's dogs crazy every day at precisely the hour I had chosen to begin chilling. One of the guys had sat on my side porch and I told him not to mainly because I was pissed about this appropriation of the Pentecostal lot which caused the everyday wildly barking dogs, not because I resented his mild trespass. I only said to the guy that the barking dogs caused me to be aggravated; I did not imply that the lot was mine, or that I had any authority, other than the implied authority of the uptight honkie. But still, they never came back, those pit bull walkers.
I haven't mentioned anything about good deeds going on but there are some.
And there are honest, if plodding, efforts to reform the New Orleans public school system, a school system that the word travesty barely even touches as description.
G, the only boy left from the original core Dumaine group who hasn't dropped out of school, is on the John Mac high school baseball team, and starts at an infield position. He has made preliminary efforts, with M's assistance, if not insistence, for college entrance.
And the weather here from December to now mid April has been close to idyllic, so much so that occasional reports from the east assuring me that it is indeed warming up there cause me to wonder just what the hell is meant, oh, you mean it's not sixty-five (or eighty) and sunny elsewhere, everyday(?).
I heard this local professor on the radio yesterday morning and it turned out to be my nephew, and I just keep saying, to the truck radio, wow man, you talk good. I liked the way you slid up to that crucial issue regarding the history of local school integration, and then how you diplomatically slid back away from it, and then slipped it in, white flight, without impregnating it with all that related fuzzy disgrace that we sometimes feel during our drunken conversations. I'm glad you got here and are tuned into the bittersweet essence of the city. And that you and J are raising your three kids here, when, uh, everyone else (including myself) is escaping. Orleans Parish population numbers are dipping again. Of course you realize that just means more beer for you, although let me suggest that the annual nine a.m. Tad Gormley all-u-can drink for five bucks beer party is hard on a body as it gets older.
The new streetcar line is up and running, I can look out the Rocheblave windows and see the pretty red cars moving up and down the neutral ground of the newly re-paved Canal Blvd. a few hundred yards away. And the Mid-City Bayou St. John, and City Park lagoons, have been stocked with more fish so kids and others can have easy access to the calming exhilaration of fishing. And those birds, those small green parrots, or large parakeets, I forget what they are actually, are everywhere now, so some populations are up and healthy. The wild dogs, ironically or not, remain some of the healthiest creatures roaming the city streets and outmatch the rather hapless occasional efforts of the local dog-catchers.
I was down to the French Quarter Festival Friday, which is still the best festival in town, even though it is very close to outgrowing itself and doesn't really so much feel like a festival for locals, as it was once advertized, and I saw Ingrid Lucia and her Flying Neutrinos, and the Ellis Marsalis trio, with son Jason on drums, and the Irvin Mayfield Quintet (who may represent the best Jazz coming out of New Orleans today), and I drank more than a few Bloody Marys and feasted on crawfish with lobster sauce and then later, barbecued chicken livers with greens and rice, before staggering back through the length of the Quarter to my regular parking space along side Armstrong Park.
The first day of the streetcar running was yesterday, Sunday, the last day of the Quarter Festival, and I thought about taking the streetcar downtown, but this idea seemed like a good one to a lot of other people, and the streetcars, by the time they got to my lower mid-city neighborhood were full of upper mid-city residents, and one car after another passed through this neighborhood too full up to fit anyone waiting on the neutral ground. Not that I was waiting, I just observed this while going out for my Sunday (Robert's Grocery) plate of pork loin with cream gravy and three cheese macaroni and boiled cabbage and beer six pack. Saturday's plate is baby back ribs and one or two of these, cleanly stripped of meat, I have tossed over the fence to my good friend, Killer.
Now I don't imagine that anything I have said up to now really falls into the category of cheering up but more just a walking in that direction.
Also, in New Orleans (pop. 470,000), yesterday, Sunday, April 18, in three separate incidents around town, five people were shot, two, to death. One of the three wounded was a 14-year-old girl.