Twelve Hundred Miles Back
One thing I can’t get over is at the library in the New Orleans Lakeview area where I was hoping to check my email by borrowed computer the librarian asked me a question and when I was in the middle of answering her she shushed me and reminded me of my location, which as I have already mentioned, was at a library. Or in a library, I don’t know, I was, and am now, thinking about it, a little nonplussed. I mean most of the time I mumble like that guy on the King of the Hill cartoon, Boomhauer? So I’m really used to people saying--what? Or, I’m sorry, could you repeat that? But, shushing me for talking too loud, well, it’s just unheard of.
Then I’m sitting there, at the express computer, because after being shushed I really did not want to take a full hour, “no, I’ll only need fifteen minutes,” I said, and so I’m getting right to it, annoyed some by the library’s homepage, and the other librarians, standing right next to the librarian who shushed me, are yakking up a storm, and the man librarian, acting like the chief, keeps walking right behind me while I try to type very important stuff, just aimlessly wandering back and forth this guy is, until he collars another computer user who had gotten up to ask “my” librarian a question at full volume, and he, the seeming chief librarian, he says to this guy, at full volume, do you know much about football?
I’m having my first ever conference call that evening and I forgot the phone number and the ID/password numbers so I am accessing that information through my email inbox via the world wide web of the internets on a borrowed public library computer. I didn’t have my library card in my wallet, it was in the truck, my name is…was what I was explaining when I got shushed. The reason I come to Lakeview is because it is a rich neighborhood and I reason that rich people will have their own computers at home so that will free up the six computers for loan, for me. I have never, in the past, when living in New Orleans, and being temporarily without internet access, had a problem getting on a computer here, and needless to say, had never up until this day, been shushed. I don’t like noisy people myself, but I don’t shush them. Of course, in fairness, I’m not paid to do that, and I might feel differently if I were.
Anyhow, the guy says he knows a little and the librarian says how he can’t remember the name of the former quarterback for Dallas and no one could accurately guess who he might mean so the guy does what any half-assed football aficionado would do, he just starts throwing out names. Vinny Testeverde? Quincy Carter? Troy Aikman? The librarian says, that’s it, Troy Aikman.
Later, in some other town between Virginia and Texas, Lorina is finishing up what was turning out to be a rather complicated drive-thru order at a burger joint. The person taking the order could not hear Lorina properly and I, who wasn’t having anything and generally can’t be heard at all, mumbled something under my breath at the precise moment the complicated order was completed, and the drive-thru voice, apparently hearing me perfectly from the greater distance, said—what? Lorina looked at me with a look that screamed if you wanted something why didn’t you say so sooner and I just stared back blankly. Lorina was asking me what I wanted while the drive-thru person said will that complete your order. Lorina had the expression of someone who is having a run of bad luck. I told Lorina I didn’t want anything, hoping she would have better luck conveying that message than the she did the original order. That the world was conspiring to make things unnecessarily difficult for Lorina was a thing I could be sympathetic of because this was for me just like being shushed at the library. Clearly, whoever’s mixing my sound is falling down. I thought I had let that shushing incident go but I hadn’t. Reclining my seat as Lorina accelerated up the on-ramp I began humming, out loud or to myself (I was at this point unsure of volume levels in general), the Steppenwolf classic, Born to Be Wild.
Irrationally juxtaposing time schemes has me approaching New Orleans after 19 hours driving straight and Lorina is behind the wheel again so I have the luxury to contemplate executive decisions. “Let’s stop here in Slidell and go Walmart shopping at 11 p.m.” Lorina almost got sidetracked on a search for toilet paper but I, on the verge of a Walmart panic attack, assured her that not only can one get liquor and beer twenty-four hours in New Orleans, but also toilet paper. We could get the little stuff at the 24 hour quickie mart on Broad, near the house. At Walmart we got one of those queen-sized air mattresses with built in pump.
When we got to my house on Rocheblave we were met by two young men, one near college graduate and one near high school graduate/hopeful college graduate, who were preparing the house for our arrival by turning on the heat and laying out essentials, including toilet paper. When you haven’t been around for six months and are asking after people there is an obligatory recitation of who has been shot and who is in jail. The one bullet riddled young man from that Dumaine/Dorgenois area where I once lived was said to be upset because one of the bullets fired at him, one of the ones not entering his chest, hit him in the finger and sort of tore it off. The near college graduate, a former sixth man on a team that won the 5A state high school basketball championship, had in fact been on the very same steps where the shooting occurred when we arrived after 19 hours driving to pick up a key for my house, around the corner. I had slowed down and said hey E, and he had said he’d be right over, which I didn’t fully understand, until after getting the key, and stopping for toilet paper and water, and then proceeding to my house, where there he was, with J, being the upstanding citizen that he is. They had not executed this bit of kindness on their own, but with a little guidance had provided us with drinking water, toilet paper, and a frozen pizza.
In New Orleans Lorina and I attended a tourist site or two and leaving the French Quarter, walking through Armstrong Park, where alongside of you know I park on St. Philip, we saw right before exiting the park these two guys taking cuttings from the rose bushes. I’d never really paid much attention to the rose bushes in Armstrong Park. Lorina cupped a bloom in her hand, in December mind you, and sniffed. I will do whatever Lorina does, if it doesn’t seem harmful. I veered from Lorina at one point and on or near the seventh bush one of the guys, attending to a bush across the lagoon from us, said, that one there is my favorite. I carefully chose a bloom and sniffed. It was, as advertised, kickass. What are you gonna say? I said, nice. The guy said the bush was from 1830. From a cutting I would guess because the park hasn’t been around but since the mid 20th century.
I saved all my business for the last day. Made a run with Charles from across the street to the dump on Elysian Fields to get rid of all that stuff I had paid him to get rid of before leaving back in May. I paid him again. Got a brake tag/inspection sticker for the truck; went to the library and got shushed; went to the vintage record store on Magazine; visited my nephew so I could have a comfortable safe place from which to participate in a conference call; made a promise which is bringing me a little pain; called the person I was supposed to meet and said I couldn’t; went to a fancy ice cream shop to meet with Lorina’s college chum and chum’s husband; then had dinner at Liuzza’s on Bienville.
In Austin we stayed with Jose, who is projecting retirement to Puerto Escondido within the next year or two. And who am I kidding if I don’t admit to at least the consideration of being his chief bottle washer, or flower gardener. We ate Mexican food pretty much breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for three days. First place goes to El Azteca, on E. Seventh. We had spent the bulk of that day at Pedernales state park, which is near where Willie Nelson used to have a spread before the IRS kicked his ass. We weren’t on drugs but if we had known the sky was going to look like that, we would have been. We did the Continental Club on S. Congress one night, heard this bluesy, charismatic rocker, Jon Dee Graham, and thought him pretty good. Though the second hand smoke was enough to make me want to quit smoking, again.
In Dallas my mom remembered my name but recited a story about the ignominious forgetting of who my brother was and forgetting she had just told us, told the story a pretty good number of times, over just one dinner. One brother and his whole family and another brother with abbreviated family came over for Christmas Eve. Everyone seemed a little uncomfortable and ready to leave from the get go and I don’t know if it was because we are recently all plotting to help dear old mom, against her will (is it an intervention?) or if they all just had better things to be doing on Christmas Eve. I do know one thing though. They brought all these mom’s recipe cookies with them and then took them with them when they left. Yeah, I know you made a lemon cream pie especially for me but you could have left a few of those cookies, dudes, dudettes. How I expressed that last idea without cussing I’ll never know. Perhaps this will help—I’m a selfish bastard.
At that first ever for me conference call in New Orleans with my five siblings to discuss the ongoing realities of old age dementia as they pertain to our mother, I was feeling a little like the youngest son who has skated by on baby charm for most of his life and feeling that I had little to offer in this conversation that was all about bank accounts and powers of attorney and doctors visits I just spoke up and offered to come stay with mom for the month of January, to help execute this plan we are doing our bests to lay out perfectly in an imperfect world, and to say again, against mom’s will.
Lorina and I got back to Virginia a few days ago and she just came by to express no hard feelings that I’m not attending her New Years gig tonite, she being the trumpet player in a punk band (and me being the, cough, slightly older, curmudgeonly, non-pogo-dancing boyfriend). Tomorrow, if she doesn’t win the highway patrol lottery and end up DUI in jail, we’ll have collards, and black eyed peas, and cornbread. The next day I’ll drive the twelve hundred miles back to Dallas.
It was raining along my route so I called ahead to Austin to see if it was raining there and since it was decided to bypass Dallas and go out to my 12 acres in Bastrop, 40 miles east of Austin, and burn all the collapsed wood of the shed I built 25 years ago with a hammer and nails and chainsaw. It's wooded property so it is safer to have large fires after and/or during rain. A little gasoline gets even the most soaked wood going. Various squatters left quite a collection of non-burnable shit so I have for future trips here (180 miles from Dallas) a couple of runs to the dump and the soliciting of someone who can remove a fairly well stripped truck.
and hopefully gave up a ghost too.
Sure, one can hope.
|
One thing I can’t get over is at the library in the New Orleans Lakeview area where I was hoping to check my email by borrowed computer the librarian asked me a question and when I was in the middle of answering her she shushed me and reminded me of my location, which as I have already mentioned, was at a library. Or in a library, I don’t know, I was, and am now, thinking about it, a little nonplussed. I mean most of the time I mumble like that guy on the King of the Hill cartoon, Boomhauer? So I’m really used to people saying--what? Or, I’m sorry, could you repeat that? But, shushing me for talking too loud, well, it’s just unheard of.
Then I’m sitting there, at the express computer, because after being shushed I really did not want to take a full hour, “no, I’ll only need fifteen minutes,” I said, and so I’m getting right to it, annoyed some by the library’s homepage, and the other librarians, standing right next to the librarian who shushed me, are yakking up a storm, and the man librarian, acting like the chief, keeps walking right behind me while I try to type very important stuff, just aimlessly wandering back and forth this guy is, until he collars another computer user who had gotten up to ask “my” librarian a question at full volume, and he, the seeming chief librarian, he says to this guy, at full volume, do you know much about football?
I’m having my first ever conference call that evening and I forgot the phone number and the ID/password numbers so I am accessing that information through my email inbox via the world wide web of the internets on a borrowed public library computer. I didn’t have my library card in my wallet, it was in the truck, my name is…was what I was explaining when I got shushed. The reason I come to Lakeview is because it is a rich neighborhood and I reason that rich people will have their own computers at home so that will free up the six computers for loan, for me. I have never, in the past, when living in New Orleans, and being temporarily without internet access, had a problem getting on a computer here, and needless to say, had never up until this day, been shushed. I don’t like noisy people myself, but I don’t shush them. Of course, in fairness, I’m not paid to do that, and I might feel differently if I were.
Anyhow, the guy says he knows a little and the librarian says how he can’t remember the name of the former quarterback for Dallas and no one could accurately guess who he might mean so the guy does what any half-assed football aficionado would do, he just starts throwing out names. Vinny Testeverde? Quincy Carter? Troy Aikman? The librarian says, that’s it, Troy Aikman.
Later, in some other town between Virginia and Texas, Lorina is finishing up what was turning out to be a rather complicated drive-thru order at a burger joint. The person taking the order could not hear Lorina properly and I, who wasn’t having anything and generally can’t be heard at all, mumbled something under my breath at the precise moment the complicated order was completed, and the drive-thru voice, apparently hearing me perfectly from the greater distance, said—what? Lorina looked at me with a look that screamed if you wanted something why didn’t you say so sooner and I just stared back blankly. Lorina was asking me what I wanted while the drive-thru person said will that complete your order. Lorina had the expression of someone who is having a run of bad luck. I told Lorina I didn’t want anything, hoping she would have better luck conveying that message than the she did the original order. That the world was conspiring to make things unnecessarily difficult for Lorina was a thing I could be sympathetic of because this was for me just like being shushed at the library. Clearly, whoever’s mixing my sound is falling down. I thought I had let that shushing incident go but I hadn’t. Reclining my seat as Lorina accelerated up the on-ramp I began humming, out loud or to myself (I was at this point unsure of volume levels in general), the Steppenwolf classic, Born to Be Wild.
Irrationally juxtaposing time schemes has me approaching New Orleans after 19 hours driving straight and Lorina is behind the wheel again so I have the luxury to contemplate executive decisions. “Let’s stop here in Slidell and go Walmart shopping at 11 p.m.” Lorina almost got sidetracked on a search for toilet paper but I, on the verge of a Walmart panic attack, assured her that not only can one get liquor and beer twenty-four hours in New Orleans, but also toilet paper. We could get the little stuff at the 24 hour quickie mart on Broad, near the house. At Walmart we got one of those queen-sized air mattresses with built in pump.
When we got to my house on Rocheblave we were met by two young men, one near college graduate and one near high school graduate/hopeful college graduate, who were preparing the house for our arrival by turning on the heat and laying out essentials, including toilet paper. When you haven’t been around for six months and are asking after people there is an obligatory recitation of who has been shot and who is in jail. The one bullet riddled young man from that Dumaine/Dorgenois area where I once lived was said to be upset because one of the bullets fired at him, one of the ones not entering his chest, hit him in the finger and sort of tore it off. The near college graduate, a former sixth man on a team that won the 5A state high school basketball championship, had in fact been on the very same steps where the shooting occurred when we arrived after 19 hours driving to pick up a key for my house, around the corner. I had slowed down and said hey E, and he had said he’d be right over, which I didn’t fully understand, until after getting the key, and stopping for toilet paper and water, and then proceeding to my house, where there he was, with J, being the upstanding citizen that he is. They had not executed this bit of kindness on their own, but with a little guidance had provided us with drinking water, toilet paper, and a frozen pizza.
In New Orleans Lorina and I attended a tourist site or two and leaving the French Quarter, walking through Armstrong Park, where alongside of you know I park on St. Philip, we saw right before exiting the park these two guys taking cuttings from the rose bushes. I’d never really paid much attention to the rose bushes in Armstrong Park. Lorina cupped a bloom in her hand, in December mind you, and sniffed. I will do whatever Lorina does, if it doesn’t seem harmful. I veered from Lorina at one point and on or near the seventh bush one of the guys, attending to a bush across the lagoon from us, said, that one there is my favorite. I carefully chose a bloom and sniffed. It was, as advertised, kickass. What are you gonna say? I said, nice. The guy said the bush was from 1830. From a cutting I would guess because the park hasn’t been around but since the mid 20th century.
I saved all my business for the last day. Made a run with Charles from across the street to the dump on Elysian Fields to get rid of all that stuff I had paid him to get rid of before leaving back in May. I paid him again. Got a brake tag/inspection sticker for the truck; went to the library and got shushed; went to the vintage record store on Magazine; visited my nephew so I could have a comfortable safe place from which to participate in a conference call; made a promise which is bringing me a little pain; called the person I was supposed to meet and said I couldn’t; went to a fancy ice cream shop to meet with Lorina’s college chum and chum’s husband; then had dinner at Liuzza’s on Bienville.
In Austin we stayed with Jose, who is projecting retirement to Puerto Escondido within the next year or two. And who am I kidding if I don’t admit to at least the consideration of being his chief bottle washer, or flower gardener. We ate Mexican food pretty much breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for three days. First place goes to El Azteca, on E. Seventh. We had spent the bulk of that day at Pedernales state park, which is near where Willie Nelson used to have a spread before the IRS kicked his ass. We weren’t on drugs but if we had known the sky was going to look like that, we would have been. We did the Continental Club on S. Congress one night, heard this bluesy, charismatic rocker, Jon Dee Graham, and thought him pretty good. Though the second hand smoke was enough to make me want to quit smoking, again.
In Dallas my mom remembered my name but recited a story about the ignominious forgetting of who my brother was and forgetting she had just told us, told the story a pretty good number of times, over just one dinner. One brother and his whole family and another brother with abbreviated family came over for Christmas Eve. Everyone seemed a little uncomfortable and ready to leave from the get go and I don’t know if it was because we are recently all plotting to help dear old mom, against her will (is it an intervention?) or if they all just had better things to be doing on Christmas Eve. I do know one thing though. They brought all these mom’s recipe cookies with them and then took them with them when they left. Yeah, I know you made a lemon cream pie especially for me but you could have left a few of those cookies, dudes, dudettes. How I expressed that last idea without cussing I’ll never know. Perhaps this will help—I’m a selfish bastard.
At that first ever for me conference call in New Orleans with my five siblings to discuss the ongoing realities of old age dementia as they pertain to our mother, I was feeling a little like the youngest son who has skated by on baby charm for most of his life and feeling that I had little to offer in this conversation that was all about bank accounts and powers of attorney and doctors visits I just spoke up and offered to come stay with mom for the month of January, to help execute this plan we are doing our bests to lay out perfectly in an imperfect world, and to say again, against mom’s will.
Lorina and I got back to Virginia a few days ago and she just came by to express no hard feelings that I’m not attending her New Years gig tonite, she being the trumpet player in a punk band (and me being the, cough, slightly older, curmudgeonly, non-pogo-dancing boyfriend). Tomorrow, if she doesn’t win the highway patrol lottery and end up DUI in jail, we’ll have collards, and black eyed peas, and cornbread. The next day I’ll drive the twelve hundred miles back to Dallas.
- jimlouis 1-01-2005 6:29 am
It was raining along my route so I called ahead to Austin to see if it was raining there and since it was decided to bypass Dallas and go out to my 12 acres in Bastrop, 40 miles east of Austin, and burn all the collapsed wood of the shed I built 25 years ago with a hammer and nails and chainsaw. It's wooded property so it is safer to have large fires after and/or during rain. A little gasoline gets even the most soaked wood going. Various squatters left quite a collection of non-burnable shit so I have for future trips here (180 miles from Dallas) a couple of runs to the dump and the soliciting of someone who can remove a fairly well stripped truck.
- jimlouis 1-05-2005 9:32 pm [2 comments]
and hopefully gave up a ghost too.
- bill 1-06-2005 1:24 am [add a comment]
Sure, one can hope.
- jimlouis 1-06-2005 7:57 pm [add a comment]