I Am a Writer

Wearing Ramona’s highlighter, eyeliner, and mascara and Philip’s coat, I went to a writing conference in DC for five days. I can't get my head around putting highlighter, it really just seems like eyeshadow, under my eyes and I was self conscious the whole time about a button missing on the coat. I smiled at everyone, hoping to distract them from my sparkling under-eyes and shabby coat.

#AWP. A conference for writers and poets. This was my effort to join the club, scope out literary journals, and see how I might fit into this world in a DIY sort of way. I have no time or inclination to buy my way in through an MFA, so I just went for it, hoping to figure out how to be a real writer.

“I’m pivoting from teaching to writing,” I repeated to everyone I met. “I want to be, I mean, I am a writer.”

Writing is unlike teaching. As I teacher I was center stage, telling my stories to a captive, if not always rapt, audience. I write alone, even when I am at the coffee shop surrounded by people. I work and rework my stories, shaping the narrative of my life. #AWP taught me to label my writing as CNF, Creative Non-Fiction. As I met writers further along the road I kept worrying I would say CFN instead of CNF in the same way I mix up SVU and SUV.

Writing is like teaching in one way: half of the time I know I am onto something brilliant and half of the time I am sure this is a fruitless endeavor.

But, like the guy starting paleo or the friend preparing for a marathon, I need to publicly announce my intentions. This post reminds me of what my father-in-law told Philip and I about a wedding, “It’s important. It’s important to stand in front of your friends and family and God and commit.” So here I am publicly declaring myself a writer. In fact, after I post this, I will change my Facebook occupation from nothing to writer, making it officially official.

#AWP was worthwhile, but I was searching for a secret handshake and I already knew what I needed to do to be a writer.

How to be a writer:

1. Write as much as possible.

2. Read too.

3. Take really good care of yourself so that you can write. And read too.

4. Live frugally so you can write. Saving money is the same as making money.

5. Set up several writing related gigs to generate income and community, but make sure these gigs don’t capture or crush your soul.

6. Submit your stuff all over the place all of the time. Pick one day per week (or every other) to do this.

7. Write across genres. Work on several projects at once, including your manuscript.

8. Build a community of writers to support you.

Now, I just have to (keep) doing it.

Confessions of a Gentrifier: Retracing My Roots

Let me dispense with subtlety: I am a gentrifier.

I hope I’m not the gentrifier who I met today. She is annoyed with “the men” who “get drinks” and sit and smoke at the park near her house.

“I might write a letter to the city council. Maybe I was in New York too long,” she droned, “but I think parks should be for children and families. No smoking and drinking.”

“The thing is,” I tried to start casually, like one of those guys in the park would, “sitting outside with friends and drinking and hanging out in public spaces, that’s New Orleans.” She changed the topic to her post-natal all-fruit-and-vegetable diet plan.

I've lived in gentrifying neighborhoods my entire adult life. I struggle to make sense of it. When friends recommend the yoga studio next to Company Burger on Freret, I hesitate to try it because I wonder what happened to the affordable childcare that used to be there. But I have no trouble noshing on fries from Company Burger. They're way better than Frostop and the mayo bar has so many tasty options.

People like me see the damage of gentrification, primarily the displacement of people and loss of culture, and comment in vagaries. Then we scoop up houses in neighborhoods with prices on the climb. I benefit from gentrification and take little action to mitigate or reverse it. My gentrification costs others. It may make the Google street view prettier and my life more luxurious, but it displaces people from their homes and shunts poverty down the road to a more distant neighborhood. It creates conditions in which poverty persists. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? How did I become part of this problem? I went back to the beginning to make sense of it all.

When my parents moved to Salem, Oregon in 1974, my dad was determined to live close to work. He took a map and a compass and "put the sharp point on Eaton Hall," his office located in downtown Salem, and drew a circle with a radius of two miles. He insisted we live within that circle. The two houses I grew up in where both a mile and a half from his work. My father usually rode the bus or biked to work, out of economic necessity and concern for the environment. I was ten when we finally became a two-car family. This impacted me, I value living close to work and school and restaurants and businesses--every home I have rented or purchased was selected based on this criteria. I hate commuting.

My parents raised me on stories of American injustice--my dad's college classmate birth in a Japanese Internment Camp, easy reader biographies of Malcolm X, and movies like “Stand and Deliver.” While we didn’t use the term “white privilege,” I understood that I was born into lucky circumstances. My father was a college administrator and a huge proponent for affirmative action. His hope was education and upward mobility could reverse our country’s history of racism. Still, growing up in our historic neighborhood on a hill, I was insulated and wanted to get out and do something, anything, to right wrongs.

In 1992, I moved to Manhattan for college. Worried his daughter might up in a city plagued by litter and personal anonymity, my father pointed me toward suburban and rural colleges under the guise of his college admission expertise. I added city schools on my potential college list. I loved the grittiness of New York and its mix of people. I landed at Columbia University.  

During college, I gravitated to conversations about social justice, a breaking down of social structures so that equal opportunity was possible. I asked: What are the answers to the problems of urban poverty? We termed pockets of concentrated poverty "the inner city." This term brought to my mind a segregated, hidden world, a world that's future was an unsolved mystery.

The polite phrase “inner city,” more politically correct than ghetto or hood, reminded me of the scene in National Lampoon's Vacation when the Griswold family gets lost in an African American, big-city neighborhood. When the father, Clark, rolls down his window to get directions from a stoic African American man, Clark announces with a saccharine smile that they aren't "from around here." Unbothered, the guy he's speaking to just says, "No shit." That no-shit moment stood out to me as an emblem of white American chosing to ignore or feign ignorance of place and it's relationship to privilege and poverty, while people of color shook their heads, thinking: it is so obvious.

The the plight of the city became obvious to me. It pissed me off that everyone didn’t see it. I tried to educate everyone, preaching to anyone I could trap--at the end of a night out or in the ads during an episode of Seinfeld. Bootstrap ideals were a lie. Something must be done. Why didn't everyone see this American mess of inequity?

Now I wonder, am I the gentrifier, smiling, ignoring, and playing dumb while I try to be from around here? Why is it so hard to see it?

During college, things I read pointed to places like Capitol Hill in D.C. and the South End in Boston as positive examples of inner cities getting good attention from middle class, predominately white people. These folks moved into the cities, got good deals on crumbling houses, and fixed them up. These first-wave gentrifying neighborhoods looked better and were safer than before. The narrative: Rotting properties reborn through the sweat and tears of liberally-minded, brave transplants. Parks cleaned up. Individual public schools transformed by parents with agency opting in and pouring resources into them. I did not see these gentrifiers as displacers. They were preservationists, proudly revitalizing the city. An urban renaissance was fixing cities.

Of course, as a reader of The Little House, this appealed to me. In the urban revitalization narrative, the neglected city gets attention. People like me could comfortably live in the city, soak in it's buzz, and be a part of the solution.

Where I lived at that time, New York's Washington Heights, there was a dive called Cosmos where my roommate and I could get 2 eggs, hash browns, toast, weak coffee, and a shot of OJ for $2.10. During my senior year of college it was replaced with a coffee bar. The coffee was better, way better than the lukewarm stuff Cosmos served, but a cup started at about $2.10. Being from the Northwest, I liked being able to get an Americano, and there were still other dingy diners in the neighborhood. I was pleased to see the neighborhood getting a little fancier. I didn't really see a connection between my better coffee and the puzzle of poverty. Besides, the Popeye's on 125th Street, just a mile away, still had bulletproof partition separating the customers and the cashiers. My chicken was passed to me through a lazy susan build out of 3-inch plexiglass. There seemed to be no danger in a strong cup of coffee. Giuliani had just been elected; I was living the first ripples of New York's gentrification tsunami.

The same year of the coffee bar invasion, Phil and I took Kenneth Jackson's The History of the City of New York, one of the most popular classes at Columbia. Jackson was an authority on New York City and made his name writing about suburbanization in the Crabgrass Frontier. This was the only class Phil and I took together in college. Before nearly every class, we got lunch to go at Taco Bell and arrived at the lecture hall early to secure one of the few left-handed foldout desks in the front rows for Phil. The lectures were memorable and the class featured many walking tours and an overnight bike ride from Washington Heights to Brooklyn where Jackson stopped and lectured every few miles. It was a captivating class.

This week, I reviewed the reading list. I wondered if I'd missed some readings or forgot what he highlighted. I hadn't. While Jackson’s class took me through Brooklyn’s housing projects and on a visit to a hasidic community, gentrification went unexamined in this course.

We read Jane Jacobs's classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was the foil to the class's villains, Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Never elected to office, Moses changed the face of New York City by master-minding the construction of major interstates and bridges, moving the city's poor to mammoth housing projects, and neglecting the public transit. Moses's so-called urban renewal programs increased the concentration of poverty, created neighborhoods with little commercial space, and few community spaces. People suffered as a result; poverty was further isolated, and therefore persisted and flourished.

Jane Jacobs' classic rejects modern urban planning of the 1950s. Planners like Moses valued order and separation of uses--homes, businesses, and industry in tidy, distinct spaces. Jacobs' book embraces the disorder of the city and its complexity. Recently, I pulled her book off my shelf. The cornerstones of her theory are that the best neighborhoods are dense, mix homes and businesses, have short blocks to encourage foot traffic, and include a variety of buildings in all stages of repair. Before I picked up the book, I could not have recalled these ideas, yet I internalized them somewhere in the winter and spring of 1996 over hard tacos and bean burritos.

While in my courses I learned history and theory, outside the classroom I spent much of my time on spiritual development. One summer I lived in New York in an intentionally multi-racial, Christian community. During the day, we worked as service volunteers throughout the city. In our free time we studied, discussed, and tried to practice racial reconciliation and social justice through the lens of our faith. This stirred something in me. I was a cliche: I wanted to be a changemaker, move America toward social justice. This was my calling.

Leaving college, I knew public high-rises created more problems than they solved. I knew I didn't want to live in a manicured suburban neighborhood where everyone looked like me and a car was required to get to work. I liked the idea of living in a city with a diversity of people and businesses. This felt like pioneering, a new frontier.

Right after college I moved to one of America's great sprawl cities: Phoenix. It was the un-New York; a car was required. An optimistic Teach for America Corps Member, I lived as close as I could to my job and drove straight down Central Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez School in poorer South Phoenix. In between my apartment and my school was a newish coffee shop, just like in New York, a sign of good things to come in the largely quiet downtown Phoenix. For those two years I spent 90% of my energy on teaching, but when I had a minute on the weekends I would try to act like I was still in New York. I joined an African Methodist Episcopal church and sang in their choir. I walked across 6-lanes of traffic a mile or so to a bar that fashioned itself as a London Pub. I tried rollerblading in downtown Phoenix, just like I had in Central Park. When I was on foot (or wheels), it felt strange to wait for the automatic gate on my apartment complex to open and let me out. I reasoned that I was there to teach, not walk around a gritty or hip neighborhood. I believed all of TFA’s hype. I hoped my efforts might make it so "one day, all children in this nation will have an opportunity to attain an excellent education."

In 1998, Phil I got hitched and moved to Oakland. I taught at a small Episcopal school where Maya Angelou and Alice Walker’s grandsons attended. My school sent me to a workshop on institutionalized racism and privilege. The faculty was tuned-in to how a diverse community could be a vehicle for social justice. Yet in this savvy community, never once do I remember discussing displacement. Gentrification entered my vocabulary in these years, but I saw it as a good thing, a tidying up of the city which would benefit everyone.

A Starbucks and the Gap arrived in our Lake Merritt neighborhood just before us. An Ikea in Emeryville arrived during our tenure in the East Bay. I thought: life on Lake Merritt is so livable. Brunch, groceries, a video store, playground, farmers market, and my school within walking distance. So what if I have to drive far 25 minutes to a Target? We lived there for three years and would have stayed if medical school hadn't taken us elsewhere.

When we bought a condo in Boston’s Jamaica Plain in 2002, a friend who had gone to law school in Boston warned me that it might not be a good neighborhood for kids, "It's kind of rough." Her impressions were outdated. Our real estate agent and many others marveled at how the property values had skyrocketed. We even worried that we were buying high, vulnerable to losing our small savings. But rents were impossibly high and so as we entered graduate school and were living off loans, we bought a condo. We somehow benefited from subprime loans.

I think it is important to note that our maternal grandfathers were builders. Part of our inheritances were made through the construction of low income housing in the 1950s and 1960s in Salem and New Orleans. My great-grandparents were Scandinavian immigrants who were given land in North Dakota through the Homestead Act. At about age forty, my grandfather moved out West to start a construction business, returning each summer to bring in the harvest. In my lifetime, oil was discovered on his land. Philip's grandparents were German Jewish immigrants who arrived in New Orleans in 1938. His grandfather also went into construction. Some of the profits from these businesses trickled down to us, enough to help with our educations and make a down payment on our first home.

Our first week in Boston, Philip took the kids to the JP Tot Lot. When he got home he said they'd had a good time, but that I might not like the parents there. He tried to explain, "Your reverse-snobbery thing will kick in. They're all pretty well-off. It wasn't as diverse as I expected."

When I lived in JP, I wrote several graduate school papers about how the gentrification of the neighborhood was changing the schools, drawing more middle-class, mainly white parents, back into the public schools. Boston's segregated school system and its complicated history of attempting to integrate the schools were part of almost every class I took. I firmly believe that integrated schools improve the quality of education for all students. Wholesale, forced integration has its limits. I wondered: could voluntary integration be the answer?

As part of my  research, I approached an acquaintance about throwing an anecdotal quotation my way. Our sons went to a Boston public school where about a dozen of mainly white middle-class families opted to send our children as a group. Historically the school's population was almost entirely students of color.

My friend had lived in our neighborhood about a decade longer than me and sold real estate at one time. I was fishing for a comment that "got at" how the changing demographics lead to a voluntary reintegration of schools. She looked at me blankly, stunned by my assumptions. "I'm not sure it is a good thing. I'm not comfortable with what is going on."

She went on to explain to me her worries about people displaced by gentrification and the fact that her friends, many of whom were gay women with children, could no longer afford to rent or buy on her street. Cost of living increases far outpaced salary increases. We became friends and spent many afternoons mulling over these issues while sipping hot tea as our kids played in the other room.

I was beginning to see the ugly side of gentrification: displacement. Still, I loved seeing new coats of paint in funky purples on the triple-decker houses I walked by on the way to the food co-op. The invisible market forces seemed beyond my area of expertise. Social justice through education was my gig. I was hoping we'd make a killing on our condo when we left.

Who was I to stand up against gentrification? And what could really be done about it anyway?

NEXT UP: 10 Years in New Orleans: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Mardi Gras Primer

Mardi Gras is hard to explain. I post a lot of photos because my cup is overflowing. You have to see it to believe it. I have to re-see it to believe it. Like a child, my elation must be broadcast.

What do Northwesterners and Northeasterners make of our madness? I imagine pious and cautious people seeing my photos and wondering: what are they doing? Should they really be doing that? I picture worker bee friends seeing my photos and puzzling: what are they doing? Don't they have jobs or other important business?

Phil worked, some, over the last week; at noon he will be off until next Thursday. I wrote and attended to children and did stay-at-home parent things, some. Mainly, we are doing carnival.

Here's the thing about our lives. Generally, we do the right thing. We get out of bed every morning. We eat whole grains, green things, and healthy protein sources. We dress the part: mom, dad, doctor, spouse. We create a rhythm and routine that is reasonable. We don't put sugar in our coffee or stock coke in the back fridge. Family dinner is at six, weekly activities are charted on our calendar and entered into our phones, we don't overstay our welcome on playdates, we are not extravagant spenders, and we chip away at our to do lists one day at a time. We have priorities and plans.

And then, Carnival season arrives. Our van was a circus clown car last night, holding two parents, two Littles, four seatbeltless teenagers, and a eight-foot ladder with a box seat attached to the top. Last night I heard myself say to Zola, "Finish those potato chips and you can have cake." We plopped her and Opal into the seat on the top of the ladder. It is designed to give children a view of the parade above the crowd. It was on uneven ground. Ramona, wearing a long purple wig, protected her sisters by perching on the step behind them marked "!DANGER: Do Not Stand On Or About This Step. YOU CAN LOSE YOUR BALANCE." The biggest job of the person on the DANGER-step is to catch the beads and throws the little girls cannot reach. Phil stood next to the ladder, securing it with a firm hand.  Zola got hungry mid-parade. Someone nearby offered her a bag of carrots and she and Opal gnawed on them for a while, chasing them with a granola bar. An hour later, two hours after her usual bedtime, Zola ate two cups of mac and cheese with her hands. All of this sounds so wrong, but last night it was right. We were stepping to the beat of the drums, screaming to riders in the floats, soaring.

Carnival is a time when doing the regular, right things is wrong. For about 10 days, long term plans and priorities take a rest and an entire city is driven by something else. Routines and rules take a back seat to the unbridled gaiety of parties and parades and performances and projects.

For weeks before Mardi Gras, school bands can be heard practicing somewhere in the distance. One Saturday morning early in the days of the new year, we rounded the corner of our street to find a band marching in front of our house in street clothes, playing their hearts out. We couldn't help, but stop and shake our booties a little.

For weeks before Mardi Gras, friends gather to create in living rooms across the city to prepare their little piece of Mardi Gras. We spent most of January's Sunday afternoons with our friends, lunching, snacking, and preparing for our Mardi Gras Day pilgrimage. The early meetings center around word play, theme planning. (I have to be oblique about specifics to avoid spoilers.) People from age two to fifty-two are invested. Group themes are brainstormed and discussed, surveys are emailed out, and decisions made. The next round of discussions center around our "throws," items we have a hand in making and pass out to parade-goers as we walk along the parade route. Finally we get down to creating our costumes and doing assembly-line production of the throws. The final preparations involve making grub for kids and adults and engineering how to carry it for our 5 mile trek.

The week of Mardi Gras, the city pulses. If you are up and about after noon, you see the brave musicians and dancers in sparkling uniforms on school buses, shuttling to the start of the parade route. Groups of people on foot in wigs and tutus and leggings, strolling towards St. Charles. These revelers pause to watch police escorted limos zipping parade royalty from lunch to their floats.

I am tugged, drawn to the parade route. A friend, a recent transplant, described the city as a place for extroverts. A truer word was never spoken. There is an energy bouncing around the city that feeds me. As rain and solitude refresh my mom on a bleak Oregon day, glitter, music, and the movement of a parade snaking its way through the city renews me.

When we first moved here, I did not miss a parade. I set up a tailgate on the neutral ground and camped out there for the week. My family and friends were welcome to join me, but I did not need them--I was possessed by the mania. I wasn't always dancing. I sat thru some parades, contemplating how all the mess and beauty of New Orleans was reflected in this chaos. There were always chairs, a cooler with food and drink, and a ladder so that we could set up on a dime. I needed to be in the midst of it, screaming to get the attention of every former student marching in a band. I began my early carnival days pouring over the descriptions and inception myths of every parade and I ended my days watching documentaries about Mardi Gras, grappling with the history.

This year and last, we are coming at Mardi Gras from a new angle. It is an honor to march with the 610 Stompers and see the crowds react to their constant grooving. There is not a moment that those ordinary men are not dancing. I remember being in the crowd, especially watching Phil marvel at them, longing. Now, the street is his stage and my guy with legs that are too long is revered with these guys with similarly bald heads and contrasting big bellies. Cameras come out and everyone--all ages, races and genders--move with them. It is a new way to soak it in.

So this week we have a tidy schedule: march, watch, march, watch, march. Lundi Gras, Monday, is reserved for final costume work and assembly line throw production. And then the grand finale.

On Tuesday, we will wake our children earlier than they get up for a day of school so that we can get their make-up just so and get to our start point by 7:30 AM. We will make our way to our friends, and make magic. In other years we've been a band of pirates, cowboys, flight attendants and pilots, a marching band, cheerleaders, and a prom. Mardi Gras Day is a little like Halloween, most people are in costumes, but instead of asking for candy, we are giving our precious throws away. Instead of going door to door, people parade. We strut our stuff all throughout the city, connecting Uptown to the Garden District to the CBD to the Quarter to the Marigny. It feels like all of New Orleans all day. We're home by three, crashing for a nap and reviewing everyone else's day on social media.

For dinner, it is back to green things. And they will never have tasted batter.

On Wednesday, routines and rules are no longer drudgery. We will welcome Lent with relief. Temperance in all things never feels better. It's like another New Year's Day. But even better.

Carnival is now part of our internal clock. Some years we've gone through the motions in the midst of grief. I've felt "meh" some years, hobbling along through the yearly rites. Other years, I've danced out pain, pouring energy into the new day, not the recent loss. Other years, like this one, there is mainly joy. I love seeing all of my people and all of the people I've ever known or even touched in New Orleans in one short week. Next week we may nod at Starbucks, but today we toast to last night's Muses and tonight's untold adventures, promising to see one another along the route.

There is a compulsion to explain all things New Orleans. I am compelled to put into words my life here to make sense of it. I hope my readers are nodding, in agreement or disapproval or confusion perhaps, but nodding. Because nodding is good.

To the pious and hardworking people in the rest of the world, your piety and work ethic can only be improved by Mardi Gras. Come next year and give it a try.

The Very Real Appeal of Gentrification

A few days a week, I take our kids to a nearby playground at Palmer Park. It is a distinctly urban experience. Opal climbs in her City Mini stroller and I push her as Zola rides her scooter alongside me. It is four or five blocks to the park. Sounds idyllic? It is a trek.

We travel the first few blocks to the end of our neighborhood and carefully make our way across the six lanes of traffic that make Claiborne Avenue practically a highway. Safely across, we weave down tree-lined Neron Street's cracked and sinking sidewalks to cross at busy South Carrollton Avenue. At this intersection, the street narrows, and cars are shifting lanes either to merge or changing lanes to speed ahead as soon as space allows The grassy neutral ground in the middle of the street provides a safe spot for moment, but we have to watch for streetcars rumbling by.

Once we cross under the arch at Palmer Park, Zola takes off. Her foot hardly touches the pavement as she scoots across the expanse to the playground. At the play structure, she takes off her helmet, and waits for Opal and me to catch up so she and her bespectacled shadow can storm the castle together. I settle in on a bench to survey the other families. The crowd is mixed, black and white, old and young. Toddlers, preschoolers, and primary school kids play next to fifth graders; grandparents and fathers visit with moms and babysitters. If the girls are lucky, an older kid will organize a game of Red Light-Green Light or Duck Duck Goose. Sometimes someone will agree to race Zola through an obstacle course she's laid out. One day she joined a girl with a husky voice collecting cicada exoskeletons for her mom's art. Mainly, Zola leads Opal around, creating imaginary personas for both of them or showing Opal how to wait in line for the swing and always taking the first turn.

Sumner and Ramona never played at this playground. Soon after we moved into the neighborhood in 2006, we visited the park. I don't think we walked. The streetcar didn’t make it all the way to the end of the line because of Katrina’s damage to the tracks. The intersection of Carrollton and Claiborne housed a vacant supermarket, a rotting gas station, and a Chase bank that was housed in a doublewide while they determined if they should build a new bank. At the time, despite Phil's warnings, I figured the park on the fourth corner couldn't be that bad. It was a mess. The litter was overwhelming, broken glass and discarded food packages everywhere. The metal play equipment was a wreck. We opted to make the best of the big open space and kicked a ball. There was one other family there, but they were far away and conversation was impossible without a way to focus children's activities. The other dozen or so people at the park, who were sitting or sleeping on the benches circling the war memorial or under the flag, were probably homeless, possibly mentally ill. My street smarts told me that this wasn’t safe. So, we didn't use Palmer Park. Instead, we drove beyond our neighborhood to play at Audubon Park or City Park, where the play equipment was safer and there were people to play with.

Palmer Park in 2006 reminds me of the beloved little house in Virginia Lee Burton's book of the same name. In this book, the main character is a quaint house built on a hill in the country. The little house has neighbors on other hills, but no one next door. The only fences are to keep animals in their pasture. Soon enough, the little house is surrounded by a subdivision of little houses where fences mark gridded property lines and the road in front of the house is a thoroughfare. Next thing she knows, the other little houses are torn down and replaced by row houses, perhaps tenements. High rises loom on the horizon. A streetcar runs on the thoroughfare and on the next page the streetcar is sandwiched between a raised commuter train and a subway. Finally the row houses are torn down to make way for high rises. But just like the widower Carl's house in the movie Up, the stubborn little house remains in the middle of a changing landscape that wants to swallow it. The house is suffocating, falling apart, possibly abandoned. It seems an impossible situation. The city is no place for a sweet little cottage.

Palmer Park is like the little house, a spot of nature that continues to survive in the city. All it wants is to be used and loved. In 1831, the plantation that was where Palmer Park now sits was purchased by investors. Two years later, they divided the whole area into plots of land.  This investment property became the village of Carrollton. The handful of plots where the park is now were designated as public space and named Hamilton Square in 1861. Thirteen years later Carrollton was annexed by New Orleans. I read all about this in Kevin McQueeney's Palmer Park: A History. I imagine the natural, open space of the square quietly observing houses rising on the plots surrounding it. McQueeney details other big moments the little park must have relished: political rallies, croquet games, Mardi Gras parades, Christmas caroling and music concerts. There was an ongoing public argument about how the space should be used, as a promenade or as a park for playing sports and recreation.  Plans for sports fields, pools, and playgrounds were defeated several times over.

Sadly, I imagine the park was aware of the persistent racism woven into its history. The 1902 name change from Hamilton Square to Palmer Park was made to celebrate a Presbyterian pastor best known for his defense of slavery and echoed other New Orleans civic renamings as part of the post-Reconstruction assertion of white supremacy. I hope the park bristled at its new name, knowing it was designed to glorify slavery and cement segregation. For a century, the park observed slaves and later black citizens systematically excluded from basic relaxation and recreation. In 1934 a black-owned shoe shine business was removed from the park while white vendors were allowed to stay. Oral tradition suggested that the land for the park was donated long ago by an African-American but the park's centennial booklet, published by white businessmen, put that "rumor" to rest. The park was most likely integrated after 1958 when the federal government threatened to intervene in New Orleans and force compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 park integration ruling. Post integration, a group called the Concerned Citizens of Carrollton fought efforts to build a playground. In a 1972 advertisement they placed in the Times-Picayune newspaper, they suggested that building a playground would lead to a rise in crime and white flight. While the white residents of Carrollton fought to keep the park for whites only, the park yearned to be shared with black citizens who passed by it each day.  

After everyone was finally allowed to use Palmer Park, in the 1980s the park fell on worse times. This was a rough patch for the little park. Litter and vagrancy were serious problems. More troubling, assaults and robberies were frequent. I suspect the park's concerned citizens abandoned it at this time. No one gave it the attention it needed. So the park's heart was breaking, trapped like the little house. The park, like the little house, was in a melancholy stupor.

By the way, Burton's little house is rescued. A descendant of the original owners of the house pass by and, feeling a connection to the house, decides to save it. He moves the little house, an effort that makes the whole city, or at least the city's traffic, pause for a moment. The little house escapes the city and finds an untouched hill in the country, much like the one it started on.  

As a child, this book really troubled me. I liked the little house, but I also really liked the hustle and bustle of the city that grows around it. I wanted to leave my hometown and go and live in a place where people were densely concentrated, even if that meant a scarcity of open space and no animals in green pastures. I wanted the exhilaration of the people speeding around the city, but I hated the that little house was orphaned. I wanted to find a way for the little house to make it without have to run to the suburbs.

What has happened at Palmer Park might be the answer to what troubled me about the fate of the little house. Palmer Park was also rescued, but just like many of the shiny, remodeled houses that face the park, it remains right where it always was. A new, brighter lease on life is in the air. In 2007, the New Orleans Arts Council began hosting a monthly art market in the park.  In the first week of 2011, a couple of national charities partnered with volunteers to put in the new playground that we now use all of the time. The vacant grocery was torn down and a new market and drug store filled its footprint; the doublewide bank is gone and an attractive brick one rose in its place; and the rotting gas station became a quick-change oil place. Sumner and Ramona can now walk to the store to get me cilantro or ginger (two ingredients rarely used in Louisiana cuisine) when I need it and I had my oil changed in less than 15 minutes yesterday. Just like the little house, I would guess that most of this "revitalization" was initiated by descendants of people who grew up in or around Carrollton.

What could possibly be wrong about this? Now when I am at the park I can enjoy diversity, which research says is good for my kids. Getting outside to play and exercise is much easier than it used to be. Once a month I can shop locally, buying handmade things from my artist friends. I can bring the whole family to lunch during the market and each of them will find something to meet their discerning tastes. If someone litters, I can play at collecting garbage as a hobby, but I can also let Zola run barefoot on the rubberized playground without concern she'll cut her toes. The city doesn't feel as threatening and oppressive as it did when I first moved here. All of this is good for me, right? This is what appeals about gentrification.  

School Selection Frenzy: A Letter to My Two Selves

Sumner on his first day of kindergarten.

Dear Emily (a parent dizzy from the kindergarten admissions process),   

I get it. It feels like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You are unsettled because in eight short months you will drop off Zola at a yet-to-be-determined school where she will be molded and nurtured. You hope you will get lucky and make a decision that will stick for the next six to thirteen years. The pressure is on to get it right.

In the midst of the madness, it is hard to remember the lessons you’ve painstakingly learned. Don’t fret. You know better. Do not get swept away in school-selection madness. It’s mania and you know it. So snap out of it.

It will be okay. Zola will be admitted to a public school in New Orleans and it will be acceptable. At times, it will be exceptional, inspiring. You have never, not ever, heard of a child whose parents wanted them to go to a New Orleans public school, who ended up without a seat in August. If somehow she doesn’t get a spot in a public school of your liking, it may not feel like it, but you have other choices. You can cut corners and send her to a private school. You can homeschool her. You’re lucky like that. You have choices. It will be okay.

Until it isn’t okay, because nothing is ever perfect. This human truth applies to education. Zola will be excited and tentative on her first day. She will probably love it. On some days, she will be bored or insecure or both. She will make life-long friendships, yet there will be times when she has no one to play with. She will have magical teachers and she will encounter a terrible teacher or two, but most of her teachers will fall somewhere in between because no one and nothing is ever perfect. School will help Zola discover things she is passionate about and it will quell her enthusiasm for other things.  She will have classes that are too hard and classes that are too easy. You will agonize over all of this. Some days she will be in tears about what happened at school and she will cry very hard. After she is asleep, you will cry harder. Other days she will be bright and fulfilled and you will feel blessed. If you homeschool Zola, all of these things will be true too, only you will be the only one to blame.

Remember: nothing is forever. Children change, you change, schools change. When Sumner was four, you were looking for an open-admission Boston public school and a challenging, individualized curriculum was a bonus. You stood on high moral ground and refused to move homes or look at private schools or apply to so-called “test-in” schools. Later, when Sumner was six and you moved to New Orleans, you compromised. While diversity and open-admissions were still priorities, art, challenging curriculum, and proximity to home rose to the top. Still later, you paid (gasp!) to send Ramona to a school because there was a teacher she clicked with, no homework, lots of outdoor time and art, and space for her to recover her health and her confidence. And now look at you, someone who poured a career into public schools, homeschooling your teenage son. Watch what you proclaim, because priorities change, people are dynamic. Nothing is forever.

Finally, stop judging everyone. The Lusher parents aren’t all elitists, the Newman parents aren’t all rich, the St. Andrew’s parents aren’t all saints, the homeschooling parents are not all introverted radicals, the dual-language parents aren’t all bilingual and dress like the French, and the Bricolage parents of five, six, and seven year-olds don’t have it all figured out. In fact, these parents are your friends and they are just like you. How a family educates their children is very personal and sometimes born out of accident or circumstance. Everyone takes it very seriously. And just like you, most people harbor some degree of insecurity about their choices. So stop judging. Just listen and support your friends.

Everything will be okay.

Sincerely,

Emily (the parent of children who have been to and through kindergarten)

P.S. Good luck choosing a high school and visiting colleges this year.

New Orleans, Bike City

“Go medium speed, Mom,” four-year-old Zola requested as we pedaled to school, “I want to have time with you.” The ride is short, a little over a mile and a half, so I dialed down my pace. Zola was wearing pink cowboy boots and a pink helmet; my boots were tan and my helmet green. We talked about how the story of Rapunzel could be different if she had a twin sister who stayed with her real mom and dad while "Rapuzey" was shipped off to live in a tower. Separated at birth, a new concept for her. Her tag-along bike, a wheel with a seat and handlebars attached to my bike, jingled with leftover Mardi Gras beads and a gold pine cone dangling from her crossbar, while she wondered aloud how the sisters could be reunited.

We biked over potholes and passed cemeteries. We crossed St. Charles, listening for the clatter of the streetcar while avoiding cars going in both directions. We even rode by a movie filming on location. We greeted people every couple blocks and noticed how the cold morning was warming. I love biking in New Orleans. We’re not a hard-core biking family. We have two cars and drive when we need to, but we bike when we can.

New Orleans bikes when it can too. The city wants so many things. It believes it already is so many things. I think it especially wants to be a bike city. When New Orleans imagines itself Bike City, it envisions something different from what the rest of America sees.

New Orleans is naturally bikeable. It's flat, and there are ways to zigzag the city without being blocked in by major highways and stuck biking on six lane mega-avenues. Part of the reason it is so horrible to drive in New Orleans is why it is to bikeable. Potholes can be easily avoided on a bike. Quiet residential streets, where parked cars make it impossible for two cars to pass in opposite directions, are easily navigated by bike and link to bike arteries.

This summer thirteen-year-old Ramona stood at the windows of Portland's science museum on the banks of the Willamette River, watching bikers zip by on the paved path along the river. She called me over, "Mom, there's some sort of bike race going on. Do you see all those bikers?" I peeked out the window. Sure enough, there was a steady flow of bikers racing by on expensive bikes, wearing fancy bike helmets and special biking outfits. Even their water bottles screamed screamed high-end. But they weren't racing. These folks were headed to work.  When I shrugged and told Ramona they were just daily commuters, she didn't believe me, "Mom, that's impossible. So many people biking to work? And look at their outfits." Who would be caught dead at work in spandex with a padded butt?

My dad jumped into the conversation, ready with a statistic and sunny fact about perfect Oregon. "Portland is the number two biking city in America. Guess what number one is?" It's Minneapolis. I wondered: How do they determine that? Raw number or percentage per capita of commuters? Miles of paved bike paths? New Orleans will never be Minneapolis or Portland. I bet there’s a ranking somewhere of excellence in biking by state and I am sure that Louisiana is at the bottom, 48 or 49. And, as my son says, Mississippi probably “has our back” at 50. We suffer from an inferiority complex down here.  

"New Orleans is a biking city too," I offered.  Ramona and my dad scoffed. They weren't having it. I defended New Orleans, "Sure it's not the thousand-dollar bike capital of the country and the roads suck and the drivers don't know how to share the road with bikers and it's very difficult to protect yourself from punctures. I had three flats tires in one week last year," I admitted, "But there are no hills and people bike. Lots of people bike. Some do because they don't have another way to get where they're going and bikes are more reliable than public transportation. Some bike to be hip. Some bike to prove a point. In fact, I bet if New Orleans shunted all its commuters onto one path, it’d be busier than that rat race down there.” And less self-conscious too.

For a second, I considered if maybe I was projecting my feelings on my city's psyche. I am prone to unbridled optimism. Maybe it is just me who wants New Orleans to be a bike city? Nah, I decided. New Orleans is just a different kind of bike city.

After I dropped Zola off, I traveled a few blocks to a coffee shop and set up my laptop to write. I forgot my lock again, so while I worked at an outside table, I kept a close eye on my bike and that dangling pine cone, which sat a few feet away, just out of arm’s reach. Bike theft, like other more violent crimes, is a real problem here.

Using twisted logic, I am convinced that this proves that the city yearns to be a cycling metropolis. Everyone who lives here knows a couple wild theft stories. Sumner's best friend Joe had his bike stolen in broad daylight while he stood on the porch of his teacher's house, selling her a coupon book for his football team. The month we moved into our house, my bike was pilfered from our open garage on the day our gate was rebuilt. Were both Joe and I to blame for leaving our bikes unsecured? Partly. While cynics may see this as a knock against determining New Orleans as bike friendly, I see something else. Why would so many people steal bikes if they didn't so badly want to be biking? I believe New Orleans is hungry for bikes.  If a hungry person steals a loaf of bread, who can blame them? At least that’s what I got out of Les Miserables.

I don't condone bike theft. I once pulled over and chewed out a teenage stranger for stealing a bike. He was about six feet tall and no older than fifteen. He was riding a pink dirt bike that just didn't fit. His friend was walking next to him. When they hit Claiborne, he ditched the bike in the gutter. Driving by, I stopped, rolled down my window, and called out to him in my middle-school teacher voice, "Why did you steal that bike if you are going to dump it? Take it back. Tell me where you got it and I'll take it back."  He and his friend picked up their pace and moved away from me, shouting over their shoulders about how it was their bike. "I'm a little sensitive about this," I shouted back, cupping my hands around my mouth and leaning out the window, "My bike was stolen a few months ago. Don't. Steal. Bikes," I crescendoed. I felt a little bad that I might have scared them, so I added "and God bless you" for good measure. There was a chance they could run as fast as my mini-van.

After my fancy “hybrid” bike was stolen, I rode a three-speed bike that had been gathering dust in Philip's grandmother's garage. A few years later, Sumner harvested a mountain bike from the same stash. New Orleanians don't need to outfit themselves with a bunch of special stuff to climb on a bike and get somewhere. All of the Skeldings have been caught in an afternoon downpour while riding, but that didn't send us to REI to buy rain gear. We just learned to read the clouds and the breeze and weather.com's radar better. Sure, over time Ramona added a rack and a crate to the back of her bike so she doesn't have to carry her overloaded school bag on her back and after five years or so I upgraded to another fancy bike that I love.

I often see riders on bikes that don't match. An eighteen-year-old boy in his house slippers on a sleek road bike. A old man, upright and smiling on a hipster's yellow cruiser. A hipster with a big skirt around her ribs on a mountain bike on Saturday night. And most people don't wear helmets. I rant about this often, but I know it is part of an easy attitude towards biking. Bikers here think: no need.

Excepting the helmet part, I like this attitude. We don’t need a big budget or lots of stuff or a training schedule to get out of our cars and bike. This also applies to the actual endeavor of cycling here, not just gear. New Orleanians don't need to paint or pave a perfect path to get where we need to go. It is possible to just climb on a bike.

When we landed here I puzzled at the flatness of New Orleans. It appeared easy: no steep climbs or burning thighs. I worried that biking here would be too easy and condition me to laziness. In New Orleans, the pace is slow and steady. Sometimes my native children have to remind me to slow down. We don't move furiously like we did when we lived in New York or London or Boston. We rarely sprint. It's predictable. It's pleasant, but it’s not without risk.

This morning Zola and I had to pull over when an over-zealous carpool mom in a Suburban rode too close to Zola’s little wheel, begging us to get over, instead of waiting to pass us when the road widened. Maybe she had been trapped in her car for a while, poor thing, driving in from the burbs to drop children at various schools around the city. Who knows? We stopped, smiled, and let her pass, hoping that our calm gentility would provoke kinder road sharing in her hurried soul. I’ve been her. I get it.

Two years ago, when they were fourteen and eleven, Sumner and Ramona convinced me to let them take our bicycle-built-for-two, also procured from grandmother's garage, for simultaneous haircuts and then lunch. On this maiden duo-voyage, they were hit by a truck.  They were crossing St. Charles at Broadway on a green light. A man on his phone turned into them, crushing their front wheel and hurting Sumner's toe. The driver barely pulled over and never hung up his call. He shouted to see if they were okay before moving on. Still, we want our children to bike. It gives them freedom of movement, teaches them street smarts, and gives us back the hours of our day that we spent shuttling them places.

Despite their brush with death, Sumner and Ramona take opposite approaches to sharing the road with cars. Sumner believes he owns the road and that no one will dare hit him. He is aggressive: weaving between cars without regard for protruding side mirrors, taking over the width of the street when things narrow, and shouting at drivers who text while pausing at a stop sign. He figures out his route out as he goes. He's a confident rambler; he knows the road and he owns the road.

Ramona on the other hand is careful. Very careful. Her confidence comes from planning. She sees every car as a threat and instinctively imagines the worst-case scenario. I rode with her to school at least ten times before she was comfortable taking the journey alone. The journey is one mile on one street, a right turn, and three-quarters of a mile on another street. Still, she wanted to know and be able to articulate exactly how to navigate each stop sign, light, bike lane, and construction zone before she felt safe.

These two approaches embody New Orleans. Sumner's the rambling person who enjoys Mardi Gras by walking down the Avenue with a (vegan) drumstick in one hand and a drink in another, unsure where he'll end up or how he'll wipe his hands, but knowing that he'll run into people he knows and it'll all work out. Ramona is the tailgater who is aware of all of the potential hazards a Mardi Gras parade can throw at her. She is the person who packs enough food for herself and everyone she may see (including her brother), she maps out area bathrooms, she figures out exactly how she'll get to and from the route with minimum hassle, and she knows the start time and number of floats in every parade. She enjoys the triumphs of the city only when she is protected from its trials. If you know New Orleans, you know the ramblers and the prepared patrons. They both bike.

I tend to be more of a rambler, but the vulnerability of biking with kids caused me to consider being a bit more thoughtful when I set out on a ride. After getting those three flats in rapid succession, I decided I don't really need to travel with a pump and a patch kit. The reason is that I learned that anywhere I bike, I am only a few blocks from a friend. I will always be able to walk my bike (and maybe a bike trailer and small children) to a friend's house or porch or business and get help. And people will love helping us, hosting us. They did three times last year. One day my flat didn’t slow us down, as Zola, Opal, and I ended up dumping our bike at a friends’ and borrowing her double stroller to continue to our destination. After another flat, we rode along with a different savior on her errand to the farmer’s market before she dropped us at home. That acquaintance became a friend. The last time, our friend just fixed our flat and sent us on our way.

Whenever I drop Zola off, I wind my way to the coffee shop or home on a different path. When Zola is on the bike with me, I chose quiet streets so that I can hear her when we talk. I hardly ever bike to and from somewhere in New Orleans by retracing my steps. One-way streets can be an obstacle to tidy routes. New sinkholes force me to discover new courses. Sometimes the flow of school traffic confounds a there-and-back pathway. Even the foot traffic between classes at Loyola or Tulane can send me on a winding route home. There's always a chance that I might opt to go home a different way just so I can ride under the trees on South Carrollton or to take advantage of half the loop at Audubon Park.

It doesn't matter what course I take to get there. How I get there is what matters. I bike as much as I can, at a medium speed, in this Bike City.