She writes!

After a year and a half, I return to Cattown. It's hackneyed to say what a long, strange trip it's been, so I'll just say it's been quite a journey, down a dark night's road into the graying light of a new day.

Retirement. It's just not something "we do" in my family. We don't retire. We evolve.

I rebel against the very idea of retirement being "the end," the period at the end of the sentence. I've had two careers -- journalist and minister -- and now I'm embarking on the third: novelist. I thought I knew all about writing. I've been doing it all my life, since the age of six, when I penciled a primitive form of a graphic novel about my kitten, "Little Runt May and Her Mother Molly in Adventuretime." I went on to write horse novels, heavily influenced by Walter Farley, in study hall from the ages of ten to thirteen.

In high school I decided I wanted to be a magazine editor, and that decision led me to Syracuse University's program in magazine journalism and a summer internship at Advertising Age in New York City through the Magazine Publishers Association/American Society of Magazine Editors. (It was not long after Don Draper's era in "Mad Men": from things I learned at the magazine, I understood the in-jokes of the industry in that show.) Originally I thought I'd work for one of the hip magazines for young women in New York after graduation, but when I learned that pretty much everyone started as a secretary, making coffee and running the copy machine, and the pay was minimal, I decided I wanted to be a business journalist. (This was the heyday of the feminist era. Serious journalists, in my opinion, did not make the office coffee.)

After college, I moved to Atlanta and worked for several business and technical magazines. Along the way I got an MBA, which never brought me the big bucks I'd hoped to make when I spent those long semesters struggling through cost accounting, finance, and macroeconomics. (I still have nightmares about a final exam in macro, when I haven't been to class all semester and don't even know when or where the exam is.)

But the MBA did help me understand the ins and outs of institutional investing when I became the editor of a magazine about pension funds. Sounds boring, but it wasn't. I liked to say the pension industry never had a conference in Cleveland. No, we went to Hilton Head, the Cloister at Sea Island, or Hawaii.

Midlife brought changes. After struggling with the decision for fourteen years, I left the world of journalism and went to seminary. My friends in the publishing industry were stunned. My friends in the church said, "Oh, yeah. Of course." I spent four arduous years going through the process to be ordained in my denomination. A number of my classmates managed to finish seminary but never got through the tortuous (not tortuRous, although it was that too -- tortuous means "twisted") process.

As an ordained minister, I served three churches, each one somewhat larger than the last. It was hard work, with long hours, but I had the joy of knowing I had made a difference in some people's lives. Oh, yeah, I served for six years as a director of the denomination's pension plan. We met at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia. It was fun.

And I got to write sermons every week! Terrifying at first. There were many dark nights at four a.m. when I'd be struggling to get through those sermons, my writing path just as dark as the night outside. Over time, it got less frightening. Sometimes I was blessed with a sermon that seemed to write itself. Sometimes I stared at the blinking cursor until I fell asleep at the keyboard, then woke up in a panic.

It took a few years, but I developed a system for writing a sermon, just as I had learned a system for writing news stories and feature articles years ago. It worked.

And then the last ministry ended and I came home to New Orleans. I knew I didn't want to relocate again to take a position. I wanted to be home. So I officially retired from ministry and started getting a pension.

What happens to one's identity when one decides to "retire"? Poof? Or not? That has been the struggle of the last two and a half years. Who am I now? I decided I wanted to be a New Orleans Novelist.

I thought I could write a novel in three months, no sweat. I knew how to write. Wasn't I writing novels in study hall back when I was ten years old? Hadn't I been writing all my life, as a journalist and as a minister? Hadn't I written short stories over the years?

I discovered I had a lot to learn. There is a huge difference between writing a five-hundred-word article, a two-thousand-word sermon, a five-thousand-word short story, and a seventy-five-thousand-word (or more) novel. It's the difference between a hundred-yard dash and a marathon.

It's been a learning experience. I'm grateful for the workshop leaders and participants at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference for their help, as well as an online class in story structure I took through Stanford.

The novel's not done yet. But I know where I'm going, and that's half the battle. I'm awed when I scroll through the manuscript and see how much I've written so far.

The novel is a story of life in New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina, told through the eyes of two women, one white and one black. The white woman, Maggie McBride, is the narrator, and the black woman is her housekeeper, Eloise Jackson. Both are widowed in the aftermath of the storm.

I've started another blog, fictional Maggie's blog of life after Katrina. The title for now (subject to change) is I'm Still Here.

And, oh yeah, I'm preaching again. And writing new sermons, because the old ones don't always fit the state of the world today. What did I say about retirement? In my family, we don't retire. We evolve.

What I read in 2014

In my first year of retirement, I read thirty books! I kept a list! Looks like at this point in my life, my favorite choice is mysteries.

In order:

Monday Mornings by Sanjay Gupta
Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink
The Famous DAR Murder Mystery (Borderville) by Graham Landrum
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Classified as Murder by Miranda James (Dean James)
The Night of the Comet by George Bishop
Baptism by Max Kinnings
Kinsey and Me: Stories by Sue Grafton
My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
Creole Belle by James Lee Burke
The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood
Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlan
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke
Light of the World by James Lee Burke
Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin
Dollbaby by Laura Lane McNeal
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor
How the Light Gets In: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny
Soil and Sacrament by Fred Bahnson
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Beautiful Mystery: A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery by Louise Penny
The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills
The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith
Misdiagnosed: One Woman’s Tour of – and Escape from – Healthcareland by Jody Berger

Which one was the best read of 2014? Five Days at Memorial. For me, it was personal. The hospital is located a mile from my home, and if it had been built on my block, it would never have flooded -- and I say "never would have" because it's been flooded time and again since it was built in 1927. It was personal because most of my immediate family spent their last days there -- it was, after all, the local neighborhood hospital. And I was hospitalized there just months before Katrina. Two of the doctors who treated me are mentioned in the book.

What happened at Memorial never should have happened. The disaster that happened there over five days before, during, and after Katrina happened as a result of a lot of bad decisions by a lot of people, but if I had to point a finger in one direction, it would be at the corporate level of the hospital's owner. It's significant that Tenet ended up selling all its holdings in Louisiana and getting the hell out of there. Their reputation for care and compassion was, well, it wasn't. Not after what happened at Memorial. That particular hospital is now owned by Ochsner and has had its original name restored -- Baptist. And it's slowly coming back to life.

Easter lilies!

Back when I was in my first parish, I took pity on the Easter lilies that didn't get picked up after Easter. I brought them home and planted them in the yard. I quickly learned that if I kept adopting orphaned Easter lilies, it wouldn't be long before I had a yard full of them. So I gritted my teeth and let them go...some of them, anyway.


The year we had a heat wave just after Easter, I went into the sanctuary at the end of the week after Easter (like most sane pastors, I took the week off after Easter) and found the abandoned lilies dead from the heat and lack of water. That was sad, tossing out all those dead lilies. But I learned to steel myself and not take responsibility for lilies other people had failed to take home with them.


Anyway...ten years later, I'm retired from ministry and gardening like crazy. And I now have three patches of Easter lilies in my yard. Guess what? They multiply over time.


And this week they came into bloom, two weeks after Easter, dozens and dozens of lilies. If we hadn't had such a long cold winter in New Orleans, they might have bloomed for Easter, since it was almost as late as it can get this year (April 20).


Do see the post in my blog New Life in the North Country, July 23, 2013. In the North Country, climate zone 5b, they bloom in July. At least in New Orleans, climate zone 9b, they bloom during the Easter season!


Oh by the way...for all my New Orleans friends...everything else may be running two weeks behind schedule, but tonight, May 10, the termites are swarming around the outdoor floodlights. They must have calendars. Right on schedule!

What I'm reading

This is my first attempt at writing a blog post with my iPad. I've been having difficulty working in Blogger with IE10, so I thought I'd try working in Safari. Seems a lot more compatible, but I can't say     I'm not crazy about writing on an iPad keyboard. Yes, I do have a "real" keyboard for this thing, but I've forgotten how to use it. But that is another blog post.

     The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival was terrific. This was my first time attending, and I was duly impressed with the professionalism of the presenters. There were several tracks to choose from. I attended the Master Classes and literary panels. I purchased books by two of the presenters (some of the titles sold out, which is a Good Thing if you are a writer!) -- Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan, P.I. Novel What the Dead Know and Knitting Yarns, a collection of essays by writers on knitting, edited by Ann Hood. Today I picked up her novel The Obituary Writer at the library. I've added a couple of other writers' books to my Amazon wish list. I think I am set for reading for the next few months.

    And yes, I'm working on my own novel right now. The classes and panels gave me a much-needed boost in that department. When I read what I've been working on and think it's dreck (now there's a word I haven't seen or heard in a long time!), I remember that these authors' novels that I hold in my hand are the result of multiple revisions and didn't start life as brilliant works of writing. It takes time. It takes multiple revisions. It takes patience. And, as one author told us, it takes a thick skin. Words to live by.

A tourist in my own home town

This week/weekend I'm attending the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in the French Quarter. Just finished two days of Master Classes for writers at The Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street. Great classes, spot-on topics (for me, anyway). Two writer-lecturers were particularly helpful: Laura Lippman, author of the Tess Monaghan P.I. novels, spoke on point of view, and I learned some ideas about it have changed since I studied it in high school and college. And Ann Hood talked about the "art" of revision -- it's far more than fixing commas or spelling errors! I bought her new book, Knitting Yarns, and she autographed it (actually she's the editor). Knitting Yarns is a collection of 27 essays by writers about knitting. I've been knitting now for a little less than two years. As a pastor, I knew it was a spiritual practice, but who knew that writers knit too? Seems to me the connection between writing novels and knitting projects is that both take a long time to finish and a lot of patience! And sometimes you have to rip out a bunch of stuff you did because there's a mistake back there...


Anyway, when I took the streetcar to the French Quarter on the first day, I tried to remember the last time I'd been down there and I couldn't. My last memory is more than ten years ago, which is something I probably shouldn't confess. I'm like a New Yorker who has never been inside the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. In my youth, I used to go down to the Quarter just about every weekend, albeit to buy underground newspapers from hippies who sold them on street corners to pick up a little money. As an adult, sadly enough, I never go to the Quarter unless I have a reason to be there, like to meet friends from out of town for a meal. I've missed a lot.


In some cases, being down there felt like a bad case of "Ain't Dere No More." The buildings are still there, but the businesses have changed. With a shock I remembered how I used to drool over the display windows of Hurwitz-Mintz, the furniture store on Royal Street, when I was in my teens. Now the Royal Street windows are used by an antique shop (still displaying beautiful furniture), and Hurwitz-Mintz has a huge store out in the 'burbs. And a number of their beautiful pieces now grace my home. Sometimes it is good to grow up and be able to afford those things you could only dream about when you were young.


But the Quarter is humming with new shops (new to me, anyway) and lots of tourists, even on a weekday in March, which, by the way, is a good time to visit New Orleans, before the hot weather sets in. Street musicians can be found on each block of Royal, playing a variety of music from jazz to blues to bluegrass. And the city really is cleaning the streets early every morning. When I'd walk down Royal early in the morning, I could still see the suds at the curbs.


I stopped in at 520 Royal, the former home of WDSU-TV. A gas-light maker now occupies that space. I walked through the main corridor out to a courtyard in the back. I had never seen it before "for real." But I have a painting over the fireplace in my dining room of this courtyard, described as "Brulatour Court," done in the 1930s by the well-known New Orleans artist H. Alvin Sharpe early in his career. My grandfather must have been impressed with his work, because there are several of his pieces in the house. Wow. I had never seen the real deal before, because it was part of the TV station's headquarters. It was neat to see it at last.


If you live elsewhere and are still wondering if the city has come back after Katrina, let me remind you that the Quarter didn't flood -- it's the original city and was built on high ground -- and damage from the storm was relatively minor. That said, things are booming and there are more restaurants than you can ever dream of eating in, even if you live here. Come on down.


On another note, for months now Blogger has been whining that it doesn't support my Internet browser. It's Internet Explorer 10, people. Upgrade your software. I don't know of any other websites that are having problems with it.

About that pony...

We were downtown on Valentine's Day, meeting friends for dinner. There was an NBA All-Star Jam going on at the Morial Convention Center, which was probably a mile from where we were, but the streets were where the jam was. A police escort was taking some of the celebrities down Poydras Street in the direction of the convention center (maybe coming from the Superdome?) and traffic was a mess.


However! I am the eternal optimist! I am the child who finds the pile of manure at the front door on Christmas morning and starts jumping up and down, because I know there's got to be a pony around somewhere!


Four years ago, when we left New Orleans for upstate New York, downtown New Orleans was a ghost town. The Central Business District was darn scary even in the daytime. One day I suggested to a friend that we meet at a certain (fairly new) restaurant in the building that was once Sears' downtown store. When we got there, the place was locked up and the chairs were piled upside down on the tables. It had closed. And darned if we could even find another restaurant in the neighborhood. It was one dusty glass storefront window after another, covered with brown butcher paper.


So, four years later, we're home, and stuck in traffic in downtown New Orleans at night! Welcome back, downtown! And welcome back, us!

An epiphany at the manger

Shortly before we left northern New York, a friend took us to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. It has a museum with a collection of eight hundred nativity scenes from countries all over the world. There is one huge one, more than life size, that takes up an entire room.

I spent a long time examining that nativity scene, moving from one figure to another: the shepherds, the Magi, the animals, and, finally, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. I had never seen a nativity where the people and animals were so large and so life-like. I was fascinated.

After a few minutes, I realized that the appearance of the figures reminded me of a nativity scene my parents gave me when I was two years old. It contained a wooden stable and manger. The people and animals were made of plaster and hand painted: Mary, Joseph, Jesus, a donkey, a cow, a shepherd, four sheep, three wise men, a camel, and an angel.

I still have it. Setting up that nativity scene every year has become a sacred ritual for me. It’s traveled with me to all the places I’ve lived. Some years it’s been set up under the Christmas tree, some years on a desk or table, some years in my office at whatever church I was serving at the time. It dates from the same era as the one at St. Joseph’s Oratory, which may be why the room-sized one reminded me so much of the little one I’ve had almost all my life.

And then, as I stood pondering the bigger-than-life nativity scene before me, I had an epiphany. At the manger. How appropriate, our friend noted.

The epiphany: my childhood nativity scene was my first experience of faith, at the age of two. By the time I was in second grade, I wrote out the whole account of the story of the birth of Jesus in pencil on the double-lined paper we used in school to help us learn good penmanship. Years later, after my mother’s death, I found the pages in her desk. By the age of seven, I had that story down cold. I could recite every detail, without hesitation.

Our friend commented that the nativity story was probably the first experience of faith for many children, not just me. I think he’s right. And what a wonderful teaching tool a nativity scene can be! As I look at mine, I realize that today the manufacturer would have had to recall it because some of the pieces are small enough for a young child to swallow. My parents must have supervised me carefully and taught me to treat it with care, because I didn’t swallow any of the pieces.

However, when I was four, one of my little friends picked up one of the sheep and, to my horror, threw it on the floor and broke it. I screamed and cried inconsolably. Fortunately, only one piece broke off the base. My mother carefully glued it back together, and to this day I can still see the tiny seam when I turn the sheep upside down.

So maybe a child’s nativity scene should not be made of plaster, glass, or some other breakable material. Wood, perhaps. Non-toxic paint. And big pieces, too big to swallow. It’s important for a child to be able to pick up each piece and feel the shape of it, admire the color of a robe or the hump of a camel, turn it over, and listen to someone tell the story behind each piece.
...
When I was growing up, my church put on a "living nativity scene" on the lawn each Advent. For several evenings in December, church members – adults and older children – would dress in costume and stand perfectly still for thirty-minute shifts as cars passed and people came to stand and watch. When I was in junior high, I started to take part: first as a shepherd, then as a wise man, and when I was sixteen, as the angel, perched on a ladder at the back of the stable. It was freezing cold that night – for New Orleans, that is, which means it was probably in the forties. Still, that’s pretty darn cold when you can’t move for thirty minutes.

Years later, as an adult, I was Mary. I got to sit in the stable for those thirty-minute shifts, which in my opinion made it the best role to have. That year it was so warm that I was discreetly slapping mosquitoes around my ankles as I sat beside the manger.

Time passes. Much of the nativity scene was stored under the raised choir loft and was destroyed in the flooding caused by the levee breaches after Katrina. The costumes were on the second floor of the education building and survived.

The congregation is much younger today than it was when I was growing up. This year, some of the men built a new stable and set it up on the side lawn of the church. Last Friday night we had a "reimagined" living nativity scene: a reboot, if you will. The children of the church right now are much too young to stand still for thirty-minute shifts. In fact, five minutes would probably be too long. So, led by Pastor Fred, we all streamed onto the church lawn at twilight, children and adults in costume, and had a combination living nativity - impromptu Christmas pageant right there, with the cars going by and people stopping to see what was going on and taking pictures and videos with their smartphones (something else we didn’t have back when I was growing up).

We brought Gabby the dog with us, not realizing we would be invited to take part. So we stuffed a sheepskin under her harness and made her a sheep. We grabbed a couple of shepherd’s robes and joined the children in being terrified by the angel and then running to Bethlehem to see this child the angel told us we would find there. One of the fathers was wearing a donkey costume (at least I think that’s what it was) and got down on his hands and knees in front of the stable. We went through the story twice, and a good time was had by all.

It was definitely not the living nativity of my childhood. But that’s okay. Back then, all of us in our different roles were characters frozen in a moment of time long ago (which never really happened in the Biblical account; the wise men didn’t show up at the same time as the shepherds). This year, we told a story. We were moving around, experiencing the events for ourselves, in our own lives and in our own time. And there’s something theologically appropriate about that.

Jesus is not frozen in time, way back when. Jesus is alive and active in our world, even today.

Our friend is right: The story of the birth of Jesus is the first experience of faith for many children. They learn it by picking up and examining the pieces of a nativity scene. They learn it by acting out the roles in the story. They learn it through the costumes, and the words of the story, and the songs they learn to sing about the birth of Jesus. Sure, some of them are hokey – at least that’s what it may seem like to some of us adults. But maybe not so hokey to the children, not yet.

In time, if their families make faith a priority, they’ll learn more about Jesus. And maybe one day they’ll decide for themselves that they want to follow him.

And here’s my nativity scene, set up for Christmas 2013, back in New Orleans again.

First Sunday in Advent, 2013

We worshiped on the first Sunday in Advent at the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, where I grew up. In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) it is common practice to have communion on the first Sunday of the month. What an appropriate way to begin Advent, with the Lord's Supper.

At FPCNO, things are done much more simply now in a post-Katrina world, and communion is by intinction rather than with trays and little cups. Both wine and grape juice are offered. We were sitting fairly close to the front, so we were near the beginning of the line when we came up to receive the elements.

After we sat down again, I watched the people coming forward. I saw a father come up holding his young daughter's hand. I knew this man when he was in high school in the youth group and I was on the session -- thirty years ago. Now he is a church leader and bringing his own daughter to worship as his parents had brought him and his brother years ago. (His brother is a leader in a church across the lake.)

And I was reminded of coming to worship in that sanctuary with my own father, so many years ago, when I was this young daughter's age. Whenever I come to worship there, I think of him. Whenever I open the front door of the church, in my mind's eye I see him standing there greeting people before worship.

Faith comes down through the generations. It is passed from parents to children and grandchildren. I give thanks for my father, who brought me to church and showed me by his example what it means to follow Jesus Christ and to serve him through his church.

There are other ways people come to faith, of course. Some are invited by friends. Some have unexpected and powerful experiences of faith -- Damascus road experiences. Each person who came forward to receive the sacrament that morning has a different faith story to tell. And each person's faith experience is equally valid.

But it was powerful for me to see that father and daughter yesterday. Thanks be to God for parents who teach faith to their children by their own example.

From north to south...

My writing colleague Judy Howard, whom I met at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and who blogs at http://judyhowardandsportster.blogspot.com, has written a book called Coast to Coast with a Cat and a Ghost. With apologies to Judy, I've just done North to South with Three Cats in a Tahoe. Four days and three nights, 1,676 miles, from Plattsburgh, New York, to New Orleans, about a thousand of it on Interstate 81, paralleling U.S. 11 all the way from Binghamton, New York to Slidell, Louisiana. The directional indicator on my mirror read "SW"-- Southwest -- pretty much the whole way. We drove through New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and finally Louisiana. Stayed overnight in Binghamton, Roanoke/Salem VA, and Birmingham. A big "Thank you!" to LaQuinta and Candlewood Suites for their pet-friendly policies.

I left a few days ahead of Papacat, who stayed with the dog to see the moving van off and to shampoo the carpets of the house that was about to go on the market. The weather was mostly good all four days of our trip, but he hit heavy snow going over the Adirondacks in his first hour out of Plattsburgh, a little goodbye present from the Frozen North.

As I journeyed southwest, traveling four to five hundred miles a day, I noticed that each day the temperatures rose about ten degrees and the price of gas dropped. The temperatures went from the forties to the fifties to the sixties to the seventies, and the price of gas went from $3.60 in Plattsburgh to under $3.00 by the time I got to Mississippi. Good deal.

On the second day of our trip, we went through five states, all on I-81: New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia. When you cross into Maryland, you cross the Mason-Dixon Line. Even the geography looks different. And suddenly you start seeing signs for Waffle House.

The mountains are beautiful. In central New York, there are hills running north to south, and it's clear they were left behind by the glaciers. In central Pennsylvania, maybe they were glacial mountains also, but they're much steeper; I'm not sure. But the broad valleys of Pennsylvania with lovely towns and cities spread out over them are awesome.

In Virginia it's the Shenandoahs. More incredible beauty. The autumn leaves in New York were finished by the time I drove through, the first full week of November. In Pennsylvania they were rust-colored. But by the time I got to Virginia, they were peaking, all shades of red and gold and brown.

In Tennessee, it's the Blue Ridge Mountains. Again, gorgeous colors in the leaves, and sunny warm daytime temperatures when I'd stop for gas, food, or to clean cat carriers (the less said about that the better).

The longest leg of the trip was Roanoke to Birmingham, 515 miles. That last stretch from Chattanooga to Birmingham took about two hours, and night fell as I drove. In the west, just after sunset, bright Venus was in conjunction with a sliver of crescent moon, a little like this *  ). Lovely.

Traveling with three cats (and a lot of worldly possessions) in a Tahoe: oh my. The cats are the Ponchatoula boys, all rescued from various situations in my first parish. Each cat has his unique challenges: Sweetie has diabetes and needs insulin every 12 hours. 'Teebie has liver disease and is in failing health. And Little Bit can find the darndest places to hide in a hotel room. No cat left behind, Little Bit. But his "I ain't going!" routine in the mornings delayed our departures and did not-so-good things for my blood pressure. 

The first night's hotel had open area under the beds, so of course he went to the middle of "under the full-size bed" and wouldn't budge. I  managed to crawl under and drag him out, mother-cat style, and of course he was not pleased. The next two nights had real pet-friendly platform beds with no way to get under them. (Thank you, hotels!) Yet I was using wastebaskets, pillows, cat carriers, etc. to try to block Little Bit from getting behind the head of the bed, but of course he found a way. Again, I did a mother-cat "drag him out" in the morning.

That third morning was the worst. All three of them disappeared. I finally found Sweetie, all twenty pounds of him, on top of the kitchen cabinets in the suite. He had jumped from chair to table to countertop to top of refrigerator to top of cabinet. Sweetie's diabetic neuropathy must be doing a lot better since we upped his insulin!

It took awhile, but I finally found a black tail ('Teebie) sticking out under the bedskirt. And Little Bit was there, too. I was terrified they had managed either to crawl up into the mechanism of the reclining chair or jump behind and under the refrigerator, but apparently even Little Bit was not that suicidal. And so I put them into their cat carriers, loaded them onto the luggage cart, and wheeled them to the Tahoe.

Among the gazillion things in the back of the Tahoe was the huge spider plant from my office in Plattsburgh. That first night in Binghamton, the predicted low was below freezing, so I brought it into the hotel room. Did I mention that Sweetie loves to eat spider plants? So it hung from the shower rod that night and the bathroom door stayed closed. Fortunately, as we traveled south, the nighttime temperatures rose and I could leave it in the car overnight. It arrived in New Orleans with some leaves slightly bent, but it has a happy new home in the conservatory off the dining room and seems to be recovering just fine.

We arrived in New Orleans at rush hour on a Thursday afternoon, and of course there were accidents that had the interstate tied up, and don't you just love having to pull over for emergency vehicles when there is no place to pull over? Back to life in the big city. We made it home safely, just before sunset. As I unloaded the car, I saw Venus and the crescent moon appear in the west. A good sign. Welcome home.

The big four-oh

I thought hitting the big four-oh was traumatic. Now I have hit the big four-oh of my graduation from Syracuse University in 1973. It was great to go back to campus for reunion last weekend. Didn’t see anyone I knew, but I had my main man with me, and that made it all worthwhile.

The homecoming game, Syracuse vs. Clemson...well, we knew going in it wasn’t going to be pretty. We won’t discuss the score, except to say we were not shut out. We had seats near the end zone where SU scored its two touchdown runs, which was pretty exciting. And the stadium was almost at capacity, nearly 49,000 -- and everybody in orange! I have never seen so much orange in my life! The tailgate party at the Sheraton (one of many going on before the game) was fun, too. The alumni were all friendly and a lot of them were older than we were – so maybe there’s hope that I’ll make it back for the big five-oh in ten years. Although going up those hills and stairs is going to be a real challenge.

The Dean's Breakfast for alums of the Newhouse School of Public Communications – Newhouse was the reason I went to Syracuse – was great. Lobster quiche, anyone? There were three presentations by faculty from the magazine department (my major), the television, radio and film department, and the broadcast and digital journalism department, the successor to the television-radio department, or TVR – I think. A lot of high-tech, really cool stuff going on. Magazine students can now take a course on developing smartphone and tablet apps that add content and whiz-bang graphics and video to the magazine experience. (Afterward, I checked the curriculum on the website and found that magazine students still take many of the same classes I did 40 years ago in an introduction to the industry, writing, and editing – although the graphic design class would be dramatically different in the digital age.)

We all were invited back next year for the dedication of the Dick Clark Studios. (More about that on the website, http://newhouse.syr.edu.) They have knocked out an imposing back wall of concrete/stone of Newhouse II on the Waverly Ave. side (described as "fortress-like") and are putting in a beautiful glass-walled addition for the studios. I think there will be five small studios that can be used for all sorts of projects.

A lot of new buildings have gone up on campus in the last 40 years. The old Victorian houses on University Ave. are gone, replaced with modern brick structures from the 1980s. In retrospect, Newhouse I and II and Bird Library seem really ugly to me, products of the 1960s and 1970s, and out of place on a campus with grand old buildings dating from the 1870s. The newer buildings try to bridge the gap between the Victorian elegance of the Hall of Languages (pictured above) and Crouse College and the utilitarian style of the present day. There’s lots of glass and a very open feel to Newhouse III.

News flash: You can now buy Clinique products in the Bookstore! And there is a cafe in Bird Library! Back in the day, the very idea of having food and beverages under the same roof as a library was heretical. Thank you, Barnes and Noble, for the cafes in your bookstores that prompted university libraries to create spaces to hang out during those long study and research sessions.

The alumni association ran free shuttle buses from the hotels to campus, so we didn't have to hassle with trying to find a legal place to park on campus. Thank you, alumni association. I owe you a big donation for that one.

Our hotel was in East Syracuse, actually northeast Syracuse, not too far from the airport, in a cluster of hotel chains and extended-stay places. But the rest of East Syracuse was shocking. It looks like New Orleans East post-Katrina. Abandoned manufacturing plants, employee parking lots with crumbling concrete and grass growing in the cracks, boarded-up gas stations, vacant lots overgrown with weeds. I asked a waitress at Denny's what happened. She told me Carrier pulled out two years ago (their world headquarters was right there), Chrysler shut down its plant, and GE shut down its plant. It's pretty grim. I guess a lot of these manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.

At one time Syracuse University was the largest employer in the area. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still is. The university and the adjoining medical complex are booming.

All in all, I'm glad we went to my big four-oh. I have a deep and abiding love for the place, even after all these years, and I was sad to leave at the end of the weekend. Syracuse University was a young girl’s ambitious dream for preparing for a future in the magazine business. It didn’t let me down. I treasure the years I spent there, and I treasure the memories of wonderful friendships made. Today I see other young people coming to campus with dreams just as ambitious as mine were all those years ago. They are being challenged to think, to create, to imagine new possibilities. I am proud of them. I am glad to call myself one of them.

And here I am with SU mascot Otto the Orange at the alumni barbecue. Why yes, it was raining, and yes, my hair is plastered to my head.

Back to the future?

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a new college graduate working in my first job as a magazine editor in a place called Norcross, Georgia, in what was then a rural area northeast of Atlanta. I was a "junior" editor on a magazine called Industrial Engineering, published by an engineering trade association. I worked there four years, with a wonderful editorial staff led by a man named Bob Rice, who invited me to his church, which started a long chain of events that led to my changing careers twenty years later to go to seminary. But I digress.

Industrial Engineering was printed at a company called The Lane Press in Burlington, Vermont. Some time ago it dawned on me that I was living just across Lake Champlain from Burlington, and I wondered if The Lane Press was still in business. It is. It has moved to larger quarters since the days when my magazine was printed there, but the company is now more than a hundred years old and still turning out small to medium press run magazines, many for trade associations and college alumni groups. It has been printing an incredibly beautiful magazine called Vermont Life at least since 1947. In the early 1970s, when Lane was publishing Industrial Engineering, our customer service rep used to send us copies, and we would ooh and ahh over the gorgeous photos of the famous Vermont fall foliage.

And this is what Vermont really looks like. At least it does from South Burlington, at the offices of The Lane Press. Imagine seeing this every morning when you drive to work.

Today we visited The Lane Press and got a tour from a very helpful and friendly lady named Erin, who took us through the plant. Much has changed in publishing from the days when we used to send them typewritten copy and they would typeset it and send us galleys. We would paste up "dummies" on 11 x 17 layout sheets, from which they would make camera-ready copy. After several rounds of proofreading, they would print the magazine.

By the time I left the publishing world in the mid-1990s, magazine staffs were preparing digital layouts on computers using a program called Quark XPress. Today it's even more complex. Back in the day, the one thing that got us home at night was that the last FedEx pickup in Atlanta was around 9:00 p.m., so whatever we were trying to get to the printer the next morning had to go out by then. Now, with the ability to send files back and forth over the Internet, who knows how late we would be at the office. Or maybe we could do this stuff on a computer at home.

Here I am at the headquarters of The Lane Press. It only took me 40 years to do a plant visit.

Next week, we go to my 40th class reunion at Syracuse. I am so excited! I look forward to the Dean's Breakfast at the Newhouse School to hear the latest in the world of public communications. I remember an afternoon I struggled in the graphic arts lab to get the type perfectly straight on a mechanical I was doing for a class project and just couldn't get it straight enough for the professor's standards. By the time I attended my 20th reunion, the graphic arts lab was full of Macs, and not a single drawing board (a slanted graphic artist's work table) was left. (So much for the phrase, "back to the drawing board." A what?)

Time marches on. I can't say I miss the old ways of doing things. Forty years ago, we didn't have blogs, either. But if they had been around, I would have had one.

Memories of Santa Barbara, 2013

The 2013 Santa Barbara Writers Conference ended three weeks ago, but I still have a photo of the hotel up on my laptop background to keep a little bit of the conference with me. What a great time I had! I so look forward every year to my week of a writing retreat and the great workshops and speakers and panel discussions.

I enjoyed going to some workshops taught by favorite leaders. I enjoy Wylie Wisby Dunbar's fiction workshop, and also Lisa Lenard-Cook's (got her new book on memoir; I have her book on The Mind of Your Story, highly recommended). Someone recommended to me Jerry Camarillo Dunn's workshop on travel writing, which turned out to be a great workshop for anyone writing articles; the latter part of the week he focused on interviewing. I was quite surprised to discover he uses the same tape recording method for phone interviews that I was using 20 years ago when I was writing some very complicated technical pieces for specialized publications. (I was also surprised to discover how well my iPhone records an interview, even from a distance away from the speaker).

Learned that literary agents are still alive and well, although some of them are a little bit behind the times (that would be the agent who sniffed, "When did the vanity press become entrepreneurship?" Five to ten years ago, actually, with the advent of e-publishing.) Agents can still do a lot for a writer in this day and age if they are willing to change with the times and offer clients services they can't get elsewhere.

The discussion on social media (i.e., promoting yourself and your writing) was interesting. Some panelists said they spent as much as 3 hours a day on social media. The older members of the audience (like me) muttered that social media was a "time suck." Marla Miller, who is my go-to person for such things, advised us to spend at least an hour a day on social media. I went up to her afterward and said, "Marla, for those of us who have fulltime jobs, we're lucky to get in an hour a day to write!" She quickly backtracked and agreed that writing was always priority number one. Thank you, Marla!

I haven't tried Twitter yet but I guess I should. And I guess I should get myself a domain name, website to come. O brave new world... I considered myself pretty au courant just starting this blog. NINE years ago. Eeek. Much has happened in technology-land since that time!

But the big lesson from Santa Barbara was, as always, write well. Practice your craft. Be the best you can be. And come back next year with that manuscript finished!

Hello, I'm still here

For all intents and purposes, I brought this blog to an end when I moved from New Orleans to northern New York State two years ago and started a blog titled New Life in the North Country. But now I am hearing of blog managers (whatever the correct term is) that are removing blogs that have been inactive for a certain length of time on the grounds that they have been abandoned, or perhaps their creators have died. I'm not dead yet, folks. And Cattown really is a state of mind. So I may continue to post here from time to time.

Five years

This Sunday, August 29, is the five-year anniversary of Katrina. For those who have survived the last five years, any of us can tell you exactly what we did during those days before, during, and after. The memory is burned into our brains forever, and I doubt that even dementia can take it away.

By some strange quirk, perhaps a gift of God, I was out of town when it happened. I was on my way to a conference in North Carolina when the little nothing storm that was supposed to turn and go in around Appalachicola, Florida, decided not to turn, swelled up to blanket most of the Gulf of Mexico, and set out on a collision course for New Orleans.

It was a nightmare for those who scrambled to get out, and a worse nightmare for those who stayed. It was a nightmare of its own kind for me and others like me, who for days didn't know what had happened to our homes and loved ones, with all communication out.

Earlier this month I was back at that conference center in North Carolina, my second visit since "it" happened. I was still more than a little bit uncomfortable to be in the conference room where I had spent that nightmare week, to walk outdoors to see people in the driveway trying to get a signal on their cell phones -- in the same spot where I had frantically done the same thing, five years ago. The memories were like faint ghosts, just real enough to be disturbing.

Five years later, for a whole region, the memories are still with us. For the last five years, wherever I have traveled, people have asked me how New Orleans is doing. It's such a complex question to try to answer in a few sentences. I say now, as I have said for the last few years, "Some areas have come back, and some haven't, and some probably never will."

I was fortunate to live in a neighborhood that didn't flood. It was up and running again in a matter of months: the fallen trees cut up and carted off, the roofs replaced, the interior water damage from the ruined roofs repaired, the stores and restaurants reopened. For the areas that flooded, it's been much harder.

A neighborhood called Broadmoor had six feet of water. It had roughly as much water as Lakeview, but Broadmoor came back more quickly, largely through the efforts of a strong neighborhood association -- and people like my friend Cliff and his wife Nieta, who lived in a trailer on the property of First Presbyterian Church and encouraged the people of the area to return and rebuild.

But there are other neighborhoods where you still see abandoned houses and high weeds, where homeowners have died or moved out of the area and there is no one left to take care of the properties. I hear so many stories of people who say they "want" to return, but after five years, the truth is, they have settled elsewhere and made lives for themselves in different places.

I read about young entrepreneurs who have moved into the city since the storm and are starting new businesses. This is good news. The bad news is that most of the national corporations that had offices in New Orleans have moved out. They can't take the risk of again having their businesses shut down by government order for a month as happened after Katrina, when no one was allowed back into the city for weeks. Young entrepreneurs and startup businesses are good, but they can't replace the jobs lost when big companies moved out.

As for me, after the Saints won the Super Bowl, I did indeed get married -- a wonderful celebration in the spring, attended by friends and family from near and far.

And then we moved away.

This year, we will remember the five-year anniversary of Katrina from a far distance. God has called me to a new ministry in a new place. I am happy to be here. It is a very different land from the one we left. We live in a beautiful valley nestled between lake and mountains.

This August 29 I will remember friends in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast: friends who have gone home to be with the Lord, and friends who remain. I will never forget what happened on that day five years ago. It is a part of me forever.

This blog, for the last five years, has been a story of life in New Orleans post-Katrina. And now it is time for a new blog. I think I will call it "New Life in the North Country."

See you soon.

Only in New Orleans

It was just above freezing this morning and raining. Nasty Friday morning. I would not have been going into Wal-Mart had I not been in desperate need of kitty litter. (My slogan, coined back in the day when Busch had a similar one -- "When you're out of Busch, you're out of beer,"
is "When you're out of kitty litter, you're out of kitty litter.")

So I push my cart in out of the near-freezing rain, throw back the hood of my coat, and blink. Right in front of me, a band is parading down the main aisle of Wal-Mart to a familiar Mardi Gras tune. Drums, brass, the whole nine yards. Behind the band is the school mascot, dressed as a Revolutionary War patriot. And then the girls in their dance outfits, and then the cheerleaders. And following them, several Wal-Mart associates with strings of Mardi Gras beads looped over their arms, tossing beads to the customers.

I have to wait for the parade to pass to enter the store. The band circles the main aisles of the store twice. Did I mention the weather? It wasn't very crowded in Wal-Mart this morning. But everyone who was there was smiling. And, like me, calling someone on their cell phones so they could hear the band too.

It's not just any Friday. It's the Friday before Mardi Gras. In an ordinary year, this is the day when work in the city slams to a halt and the partying begins. But, as you know, this is no ordinary year. The partying in New Orleans started last Friday, and it hasn't stopped since. The Saints have won the Super Bowl!

Only in New Orleans. A Mardi Gras parade in Wal-Mart.

P.S. The mid-South and the mid-Atlantic have been slammed with snow for the last week. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta, even Mobile have seen snow -- and some cities have set records for overall snowfall. Why are you surprised? When hell freezes over, there's going to be a little overlap!

Boudreaux goes to heaven!

The Saints have won the Super Bowl! 31 to 17! People are screaming in the normally sedate streets of Uptown New Orleans, fireworks are going off everywhere, and car horns are blaring!

Hell froze over when the Saints went to the Super Bowl. Now the devil has been vanquished, hell is destroyed, and Boudreaux has been promoted to the Church Triumphant!

And we're getting married in seven weeks. Don't pinch me -- if this is a dream, I don't want to wake up!

It's really happening!

I was so excited Sunday night, and it was so late, that once more I got the name of a Saints player wrong! (Don't ask about the last time. It was 40 years ago.) It was Garrett Hartley, not Hartman, who kicked that 40-yard field goal and changed history.

Long, long ago, long before I was a minister, I was in a study group that was pondering the kingdom of heaven. As we considered different metaphors for the kingdom, I blurted out, "The kingdom of heaven is like the Saints going to the Super Bowl, and having the game played in New Orleans!"

My pastor and mentor, Ed Gouedy, grinned and began a parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who had a football team..."

Ed didn't live to see this day, but he would have loved it. So would the late sportswriter and broadcaster, Buddy Diliberto, who once declared he would wear a dress if the Saints ever went to the Super Bowl. With his family's permission, on Monday the Times-Picayune ran a full-page photo, courtesy of Photoshop, no doubt, of a man with Buddy D's head, prancing around in a beautiful gown. They added a little halo on top of his head.

For all those who didn't live to see this moment, this one's for you. For all those who have lived to see it, savor every moment!

The other thing that's really happening is what I am calling My Big Fat Presbyterian Wedding. I bought The Dress yesterday. The Saints, the wedding...it's the fullness of time. Wow!

Dateline:Hell. With Boudreaux.

A favorite joke I first posted to this blog on Jan. 19, 2007:

Boudreaux the Cajun lived down the bayou (Bayou St. John, maybe?) and he led a less than holy life. When he died, alas, he didn't get into heaven. He ended up in the other place. The devil made sure he kept hell good and hot, but when Boudreaux arrived, it didn't bother him a bit. He settled into a hammock and said, "Ah, just like the old days before we had air conditioning, back home on the bayou." The devil was more than a little annoyed, so he cranked the heat higher. Boudreaux poured himself a glass of lemonade and said, "Oh, jes' like the old days when we used to go crabbing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast." The devil cranked the heat all the way to the limit, so that hell started to melt, but Boudreaux just smiled and said, "This is just like back home when my mama used to fix a big pot of gumbo in the kitchen."

Finally the devil couldn't take it any more. "All right, Boudreaux," he said. "If you like it hot, then I'm going to fix you." And the devil turned on the air conditioning, and it got reaaally, reaaally cold, way beyond cold, colder than you can possibly imagine. With a big grin on his face, the devil went to check on Boudreaux.

He found Boudreaux dancing a second line and laughing and shouting and leaping for joy. The devil was astounded, outraged. "Boudreaux! I thought you liked the heat, so I made it so cold down here that you wouldn't be able to stand it! What is with you, anyway? Why are you dancing around like that?"

Boudreaux could hardly contain himself for joy. "Hell's freezing over!" he cried. "The Saints must be in the Super Bowl!"

Hell-o, hell! Darn, it's cold down here!

Boudreaux, you did it! Hell is really freezing over!

When Hartman kicked that field goal through the goal posts, I started screaming and couldn't stop, even though I already had a sore throat. When I finally paused to catch my breath and hit the mute button on the television, I could hear my neighbor on his back porch, screaming something unintelligible. I went out on my own porch, and I could hear it: people screaming in the streets all over Uptown New Orleans, and more fireworks going off than on New Year's Eve. It was a little like the Sunday before Mardi Gras, when I can hear the crowds at the Bacchus parade from my porch, only much louder. And after a little while the car horns started, as people headed home from all the parties at friends' houses. Later I could hear sirens, lots of sirens. Either the city was burning down or Saints owner Tom Benson and perhaps some of the players were getting police escorts home. I'd like to think it was the latter.

Forty-two years! I was here in 1967, and I remember that first season and how excited we were to have an NFL franchise in New Orleans. We had named the team the Saints even before we HAD a team.

Also in that fall of 1967, I started dating a boy who was my lab partner in chemistry class. This spring, forty-two plus years later, we are getting married.

And the Saints are in the Super Bowl! There has to be a connection!

I hope they have cable in hell. Boudreaux needs to see the Saints in the Super Bowl!

I bet a LOT of people in New Orleans are going to call in sick on Monday...

Eeeeeeee!

Epiphany, 2010

You know, just a few years ago, I was shocked – shocked, I say! – to find king cakes in the grocery store before New Year’s Eve. When I was growing up, you had king cake on January 6, the day known as the Epiphany of the Lord in the church year, more commonly called the Twelfth Night of Christmas – easier to pronounce and easier to spell. But that was then, and this is now. I’ve been seeing king cakes in the grocery for the last several months, only they aren’t decorated in the traditional purple, green, and gold. There are purple and gold LSU cakes, gold and black Saints cakes, red and green Christmas cakes, you name it. If I were dead, I’d be rolling over in my grave! What happened to the tradition of having king cakes only between January 6 and Mardi Gras?

And for those who are counting, Mardi Gras comes on February 16 this year, and as far as I am concerned, six weeks is quite long enough to eat king cake, especially if you work in an office where whoever gets the baby has to bring another one the next day. But some savvy marketer must have decided that there are people out there who really like king cake, so I guess we’ll be having king cake all year long now. I suppose there is some theological merit to celebrating the Epiphany all year long, but something tells me that’s not what the marketers had in mind. Or the people who like to eat king cakes.


And just for the record, when I was in my neighborhood Rouse’s yesterday, I checked out the stack of king cakes at the front of the store, and they were purple, green, and gold, as God intended. My soul is at peace.

Christmas 2009

Happy 100th birthday to my mother this Christmas! She was born December 25, 1909. Noella, you may be gone from this earth, but long may you wave!