Angel in Flight

Today I'm all nerves and excitement, spinning around getting nothing done, looking at the clock. I leave in the morning for New Orleans, a city that knows plenty about storms, even as Hurricane Sandy heads for the northeast and I wring my hands, especially for the most vulnerable ones, the homeless people living underground, the stray cats and birds battered by wind and water and falling debris. But I'm going to New Orleans, and New Orleans is expecting abundant sunshine.

This trip is two-fold in importance to me. I spent twelve years of my life in New Orleans, longer than I ever lived anywhere else in my migratory life. I was divorced there when I was 23. My first son was kidnapped there (by his father). I gave birth there to a second son (different father) when I was 28. I was a hippie girl with long hair, falling in and out of love under those live oak trees, marching in civil rights and peace demonstrations. I came out there: more demonstrations for the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and resistance to violence against women. I performed on stages and in lofts and community centers there. Many a street, balcony, and levee is redolent of memory. There, when I was 27, I found again my best friend from childhood, Leif Anderson.

We had met in a ditch in the woods of Mississippi when I was six and she was seven, and when we found each other again, she was a dancer and I was an actress. Our alter egos were Isadora Duncan and Eleonora Duse, who were also dear to each other. In our twenties, we dreamed we might support ourselves and our children doing what we loved, and we planned and practiced and rehearsed and held each other's babies. Now, in our late sixties, we still dream and make what we make, hoping it's good, true, and beautiful.

She is a dancer, and you can get a thirty-second glimpse of her here. She's a blogger, a writer, a painter, and a sculptor of wire creations like the one here, which she made for me, a Buddhist angel holding a baby in her arms. It was the subject of my first blip.We talk on the phone just about every week, still en-couraging each other, still reminding each other of where we have always been headed, reminding each other that we have made and accomplished more than we ever remember, reminding each other of what we both forget or fear to hope. Mirroring.

After many migrations, Leif is living in Mississippi again, and she will drive to New Orleans while I'm flying to Oakland, Houston, and finally New Orleans (if I'm lucky and the planes keep running). Here comes a short-term but very important adventure.

If you'd like to hear it, here's Lenny Kravitz singing Calling All Angels.