I woke up in the 5 AM hour this morning. Quite normal, actually progress. I discovered I was out of half & half. A requirement for me – mostly my stomach. I went to the couch, and this wasn’t going to work. I can’t recall the last time I didn’t have a caffeine “fix” within 20 minutes of waking. I tried to listen to my body – it was not buying into this new phenomenon. We have a 24/7 “corner market” – Verte Marte (I’m really hoping JDT will blog on them as she has a wonderful story to tell). I recall getting half & half there the Sunday late afternoon we arrived. It was one of the two requirements to supplement our bringings – the other being ice. Threw on my gym shorts and sneakers and after 20 minutes more was enjoying my fix.

The above threw off my routine. Normally, I would use this “reason” to sink into the couch and “sink” into my day. NO! I was 100% prepared (at least other than mentally) to have my third straight day of my morning wandering. I was calling them walks. I like the wandering term better. And following my current strive to break tendencies, I headed left this time. You see, the first two were to the right. And while right was new for the first, it was now becoming a tendency with the third. Blah, blah, blah!

I really fought the urge to return to the couch. I pushed “out”. The conversation in my head (yes, at least two protagonists) debated and agreed I’d wander out for ten minutes, then wander back. Fighting the good fight (need for the familiar v. the desire for the new) along the way I found myself on the corner of Dauphine & Frenchman. Yes, that Frenchman of the famous music street in NOLA (We are located some 6 or 7 blocks away). I enjoy seeing construction in my wanderings. I think they mostly represent positive change for me – especially commercial construction. I’m drawn to it. At the corner of Dauphine & Frenchman is a remodel (everything here is a remodel – a special kind of progress). I stopped and read the signs on the front door and gazed inside. It’s going to be a new coffee shop. The signs told of what to do with deliveries, the employment opportunities, etc. It communicated to me a welcomingness. I noted a door open a bit further up the building. Me being me, I stuck my head inside and gave a hearty “morning y’all”. A young woman appeared with the most welcoming smile. I asked a few questions and I was back on my way.

Yesterday I made a short post with a simple title and image. When I look at the image, at best it raises in me a sadness about lost opportunity and at worst rage. THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE, YET IT IS WHAT WE HAVE BECOME!

Very shortly after the new business discovery I came upon the location where I took the above photo. RE-SET GLEN! And the thing I really love most about this? It is not “completely” welcoming. It is nuanced. It is complicated. AND it represents to me NOLA’s version of welcoming.

I would have 0% of these last few days experiences (borderline adventures) without JDT’s influence. Good? Bad? Yes to both, and fully emotive. JDT has written quite beautifully (she’s a liberal arts “person” while I am but a simple accountant after all) about our vast differences. While I work very hard at being direct or intentional, JDT’s personality is different. I struggle with simple leading by example. JDT excels. I fully believe my body listened to JDT before it spoke to me. So, are the differences good? Bad? Neither really for me. Magic. Yes! One only knows how much “stuff” the vast differences create. Yet, when I get out of my own head, magic occurs.

18 more glorious days!

PROGRESS!

I promised to share photos of the rest of my morning yesterday. I don’t usually add lots of captions, but here the captions tell the story. Here you go…

And I’m still pondering if I’m going to tell that embarrassing story…

So I left the café and took another right turn toward the river. I find that being around water always comforts and calms me and there’s this cool place nearby. You go over the railroad tracks on a bridge and drop into a long walking trail along the Mississippi River. At the bottom of the stairs is a huge covered space (4 basketball courts?) where people gather to play music, skateboard, roller blade, do yoga, hang out…From this covered space you walk on to catch the trail. Today, as I was heading to the stairs, I saw this message on the sidewalk. I stopped to take a picture of it because I love a good message.

A few steps further, I came upon this beautiful woman who stopped as I came up to a second message. She told me that she was the artist behind the messages. (I should have known based on her t-shirt, the paint-stained gloves, and the spray paint in her basket.) I chatted with her for a minute and asked if I could take her picture. She happily obliged and told me her IG tag. She said to keep looking – that I’d find more messages.

And sure enough…I did…

And then I walked on

So…just when I needed the message to “turn that frown upside down”…it happened. Isn’t it weird how that happens? Or maybe there’s a bigger plan…

Give @ceedamessenger a follow if you’re on Instagram!

Tomorrow I’ll post some pics of the rest of my walk and maybe tell you an embarrassing story…if I’m brave.

I work hard at being an optimist in a world that does not, at least outwardly, reward such naïveté.

While walking this morning I came upon the situation represented by the image above. My heart sank. While here was this very bright red recently opened watermelon, it lay on the sidewalk having been “discarded” and left to waste. No, not from what it represents as part of the WONDERFUL urban grunge I find energy giving. That would be “noise” to me. And remember, I love NOISE!

I was disturbed by the wasteful act. My mind tried to reconcile this. It created a scene where a loving family of four had visited the park in the background (quite lovely, more below), dropped it and had left it. BUT! Why would they leave it? OK, they must not have noticed it “dropping”. BUT! How could they not notice? ? ? My mind went on creating increasingly less likely scenarios to try to reconcile what I believe REALLY is a symbol of wanton waste.

The more I think, the more I live in a place, the better I am at getting out into “it”, the better I am able to connect dots. At least MY dots. At the top of the image is a fence. Mostly decorative, yet also quite sturdy. The more JDT and I (mostly JDT) walk around the city, the more we notice the parks. NOLA has a reputation as a city high on the grunge factor. Some might even call it filth. Good? Bad? That is just a values based assessment that I find a bit trite. Frankly each of us as citizens or visitors to the city contribute. AND its presence isn’t much debated. In striking contrast to this are the parks. It is almost universal. Why? Hmmmm?

Homelessness is a thing here in NOLA like it is in much of the country. It can not be escaped. Much like filth, the conversations about solutions have evolved very little in my life. Yes, we have evolved past simply buying them bus tickets to send a problem from one city to another (yes SF I am shaming you for years of “shipping” the problem to Sacramento). But, real solutions seem to always be beyond our grasp.

You know I like to connect dots? AND, what is the line connecting all of the above. Here is what it is for me. The fact that the parks are very nice and clean, while certainly mostly pleasing to see and absolutely wonderful to be in, they are a representation of waste. We Not due to what they are, but due to them being so much less than they could be.

Another, earlier part of my walk this morning was adjacent to Louis Armstrong Park (LAP). It is but a few blocks from us and lies nearly on the border of the French Quarter and Treme. Treme (if you are as big an HBO fan as me, you’ll recall) is a lower socio-economic neighborhood than “The Quarter”. And it contains a fair amount of homelessness. As I walked adjacent to LAP I came upon three homeless men that were just rousing and beginning their day. I wished I’d the courage or insensitivity to take a photo. The image will not leave my brain soon. In the foreground, them on the benches AND in the background, this beautiful park that they were locked out of, at least for the evening.

DOES IT HAVE TO BE THUS?

PS

This is Joyce, tagging on to Glen’s post with a flipside. After Glen came home and told me about the watermelon, I walked by the park that is literally along our back fence and came up this lampshade and container of Tide. Someone no longer needed these items so they left them out for someone to use. I’ve also seen “soccer” chairs left by trash cans for others to pick up. So there is waste…lots of it and then there are examples of people thinking about how others could use their leftovers. And the unhoused…I have been thinking how I could address that topic in a blog. It’s so complicated and so prevalent here.

First, a bit of context –

I think I have mentioned, I rarely post when I am defending into struggle or at its depths. My evolution has been to “move the needle” a bit “backward”.

In the depths of my struggle with cancer, I was forced to listen to my body. When your journey tangles with your own existence, it becomes a requirement. Either one embraces (including a form of submission to complete vulnerability) or one perishes. At least, it felt such to me. My evolution has been to incorporate this “listening” to my body as part of my healthy routine. Mind you, I tend to not go half way with things (think a pendulum swinging wildly to the extreme opposite) and I am so grateful that I have JDT and a specific friend (hi Mike) to call bullshit on me.

Randy (JDT’s youngest cousin) and wife Allison (R&A) visited and stayed with us for a couple of days earlier this week. I LOVE THEM. We do not spend enough time with them. I truly appreciate their perspective on things and the way it challenges my perspective. I hope this is ok (I am after all a “beg for forgiveness” guy). In a specific way, I am Randy’s ying to his yang. Randy is quite noise sensitive. This typically makes cities, or highly urban areas, highly challenging for him. AND both of his wonderful daughters live in NYC. I can only imagine the struggle this created internally for Randy. Yet . . . R&A are great as parents, you can tell by the young women their daughters have become.

I love noise. It gives me energy. My first real remembrance of this was when Joyce and I were on our honeymoon in Paris. We slept with the window wide open and the 24/7 nature of the street noise was soothing for me. While the evidence of this has been around me all along, it is just recently I’ve connected the dots.

The last context? Well, I struggle with breaking tendencies. I love sports and how they are a metaphor for life AND how life and sports inter-connect to teach me so much. You know I am, at my core, a Raider and A’s fan. This emanates from the early to mid 70s. At that time both were almost always favorites in every game they played. As such, it was mostly about creating an environment where those tendencies would prevail. Not complicated. The fun was watching the struggle. Later, the A’s were rarely the favorite. AND in that case, the desire is to create an environment to disrupt those tendencies. This is really what Money Ball was all about. I am a tendency machine! Prop me up in the corner and I am incredibly reliable to exhibit specific tendencies.

Lately, oh I don’t know, a week, a month, maybe a few years? I’ve had this lack of “ease”. Jim Kelley always called it “the ease band”. I’m still not 100% certain I know exactly what this means. Perhaps it correlates with harmony? Perhaps . . .

Listening to my body. It was telling me to get up and move. My tendency was 100% opposite. Struggle. Here is my morning – wake up (hopefully there is at least a 5 in the hour), make myself coffee, get caught up on my sporting interests through the BR app, drink my Citricell (this is an insert encouraged by the same Mike as above, and you are correct Mike, it has helped tremendously), prep my water for the day (hydration has become fundamental for me) and finally log onto this device. All without moving more than 50 feet . . total. Listening to my body! Finally this morning, I got up and moved. I headed (mostly aimlessly) out on a stroll. 7:00 AM. NOLA is mostly asleep at that hour. And my tendency was to go left, so I went right. My tendency was travel familiar streets, I veered to the unknown. I departed at 7:05 and returned at 7:25.

AND MY BODY SMILED!

Restlessness is not foreign to me. It’s connected to anxiety. And the feeling certainly doesn’t feel “easy”.

And with that thought I’m going to head out the door for a meander. Do I take my headphones and listen to a podcast? To upbeat music? To calming music? To the news? Do I head to Tremé? To Marigny? Into the French Quarter? To the Mississippi River? Left? Right?

So I went left then right and I find myself at a cafe I’ve been to a few times, but I always grab and go. Today there was an open table by the open door and Dug could sit with me so I decided to stay. I’ve been here at times when there is a large group of unhoused people on the corner and sitting to relax in that environment isn’t really a possibility for me. Today is quiet, though I do hear a man shouting unintelligible words nearby.

So restlessness As I look around the cafe I feel a restless energy. There is a long-haired gentleman (think Neil Young), I would guess around my age, sitting near the front window. He seems to just be enjoying his coffee and observing the action. I noticed he had a camera and he not-so-surreptitiously took a picture of Dug and me while we were waiting in line. There is a couple and their pink-haired maltipoo eating breakfast at a table near me. A woman just set up her laptop at a table and is beginning her work? Or maybe she’s writing a blog about her mood of the day 😉 ? The loud shouting man just came by shouting in the café. People at the counter – an older, nicely dressed tourist couple just came in. She’s wearing jeans? In this climate? Two women at two different tables writing in journals. Me typing on my phone with Dug at my feet. Three men in a business meeting, but definitely not in business attire? “Neil Young” is still here. He’s not eating or drinking. Just looking. Some sort of a cop just came in. Plain clothes with a gun on one hip and a walkie-talkie on the other. Or is it an open carry state? Nope he has a badge on his belt. Two firemen ordering breakfast. Neil Young is now reading a banged up old paperback. Fireman just commented on Dug’s good behavior. (Proud mom moment.) Woman/writer over my right shoulder…very close to me actually, has not acknowledged me. Seems like a little “good morning” might have been appropriate when she sat down. There were other seating options with more space. Just had a little chat with the NOFD about the virtues of male dogs over female dogs. Morning caffeine seems to be the theme here…be it coffee, tea or Coke. Someone’s phone keeps ringing. Trash truck outside banging trash cans causing Dug to get nervous. Another reader enjoying his breakfast. Another writer. Another dog. Tourists. Locals. Young. Old. Human. Canine. Always changing. Always moving.

The cafe itself is a nice-looking old bar. It’s on a corner so on the long side the doors are all open for indoor-outdoor seating. Seems like a good thing, but have you ever smelled all the smells of NOLA? Trash, urine, smoke, weed, fresh paint, mold, sweat and some other smells I can’t identify. Have you heard all the hears? Trucks, shouting, ranting, music of all sorts, car horns, birds, ferry horns, train whistles, seagulls squawking, barking…(On cue as I typed “barking”, a woman walked by barking like a dog. Which is another topic for another day.)

So as I sit here thinking about my own restlessness, borderline anxiety, I think about this complicated city – itself an highly restless place. So “Big Easy”? Not so much. And yet. As all things are and as a recent post said…it’s complicated because as I’m writing this paragraph, enjoying the gentle breeze, I look up at the blue sky with puffy clouds and notice a pigeon nesting in the edge of the brick building. Nothing more natural and right than a mom nesting for her young.

I thought I was done with this post and then I decided to continue our walk to the river…

#NOLA #FrenchQuarter #MississippiRiver

Last Thursday (I know, as this is part of what I do) marked our halfway point here in NOLA. Interestingly, to me, I felt much differently at the halfway point in NOLA and NYC. In NYC, there was a real flow of sadness. A real sense of impending loss. Her in NOLA a sense of calm, or as my life coach Jim Kelley would say, EASE. As with many emotions, I reach inward to inquire.

Yesterday, JDT and I “started” our day by making the short walk to the edge of Jackson Square and Cafe Du Monde (BTW, in many ways my relationship with the “institution” is a microcosm for my relationship with the broader NOLA). On the way, early for NOLA (it is a late city), we passed any number of people out on the street. One way JDT and I are quite similar is our need for human interaction. Or as I like to say, inter-connectedness. This usually presents itself quite different, yet it is true. In this case, very similarly. We both like to make eye contact with people as we pass and put out a warm “morning y’all”. Yes, the phrasing is region specific, put the sentiment the same. AND it occurred to me, I think I “found” something.

NYC is not much for politeness. It certainly doesn’t value its importance and it resides clearly way down on the scale of priorities. The South? OMG, if not everything, it would reside very near the top. Yet!

Contrary to most held beliefs NYC is an incredibly friendly place. Once you get inside that often times gruff exterior, it is incredibly friendly. The South, a bit less so. While we have found nearly everyone exceedingly polite and have found many people that bring helpfulness, truly friendly is a different matter. We’ve both posted about Mike in Brooklyn. He was but one example. By the 3rd conversation with Mike, I had a sense of the essence of Mike. And, by the 6th or 7th, I knew things about him and his history that really revealed parts of who he is. Yes, the nature of the neighborhoods contribute; without a doubt.

As we were walking back from Cafe Du Monde we agreed it was undoubtable we will return to NYC for another bite of the Apple. AND quite likely we’ll feel satiated with our experience here in NOLA.

And YET!?!