First Beads... First Groceries...

Yeah yeah yeah... I haven't posted anything in nearly a week, and believe me, I've heard about it, so here ya go.

I went to my first post-Katrina Mardi Gras parade last Saturday, danced in the street with a woman who had blue hair, got a whole new collection of beads, laughed, joked and even cried a little as the craziness of Krewe du Vieux worked to soothe a little bit of the hurt that stilll runs just barely under the surface.

Afterwards I got into trouble with my companion of the evening (NOT the blue woman) when I announced around 11:30 that I really wanted to go home and go to sleep. The first few days back in town were definitely wearing me down. As is so often my reality in New Orleans, I am once again running into my personal reality of not being as young and spry as I used to be. Trying to balance that with the pace of celebration in New Orleans is tough... but one must remember that in the present moment each of us carries a RESPONSIBILITY to PARTY.

This week at home also brought the return of my favorite grocery store, Whole Foods. The Whole Foods Market on Magazine Street was where I went the Saturday before Katrina to buy a few supplies in order to make it through what I expected to be a three day hurricane bivouac. The three days turned 6 months and in that time I have cooked for myself a total of four meals (three of which were Boudin supplied by my friend Mary... thanks Mary).

I seem to perpetually wind up in locations (like my place in San Francisco) where there are groceries, but no way to cook them, or (like New Orleans since August) places where I can cook things but where there are no decent supplies of things I want to cook. Six months is a long time to go without preparing your own meals, especially when you are a person who really LOVES to cook. Heading out to Whole Foods, wandering through the rows of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats (even Dungenous Crab from San Francisco) was like suddenly falling into the hidden cache of some weird band of metrosexual pirates!

With the reopening of Whole Foods I feel like I can take care of myself again, and it's really an amazing feeling. Simple things count for a lot right now.