With apologies to Willie -- to all the cats I've loved before

To all the cats I've loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats I've loved before

To all the cats I've loved before
The winds of change are always blowing
And every time I try to stay
The winds of change continue blowing
And they just carry me away

To all the cats who shared the foot of my bed
Who now are someone else's cats, or dead
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats we've loved before

I must be getting old -- I always want to start blogging with a mini weather update -- it's foggy today, with chances of missing kitties. I can't believe I left the garage door open all night! My bike was still there when I got up this morning, but Fats was gone.

The stricken feeling I got made me realize I sometimes pretend to be sorry about things, like putting the knives pointy side up in the dishwasher, but this was the real thing. Fats, aka Kiki (after that annoying WestEnder whose screechy voice and clawing ways reminded me of the new kitty), had been afraid to crawl out from the tiny corner in the garage between a cardboard box and a tire all week. Two days ago I started trying to get Kiki to venture outside the garage. Last night I guess he did.

I had picked him up from the WE house Sunday, at the X's request. I had three cats when I left for Colombia last January. Only Kiki was left when I got back. Sammy disappeared a few weeks after Max died a horrible death at the jaws of some neighborhood dog gang. I was more shaken by it than I'd expected, cried about it for weeks.

Poor Sammy...they were pals, hanging out together for seven years since we brought them home from the shelter. Their little animal personalities developed with each other as the foil -- Sammy was always the timid one, while Max was funny and outgoing. Sammy was always my favorite -- his skittish ways and pitiful mews were so endearing.

Baby Kitty (I clearly didn't name this one) showed up one Halloween night, then disappeared after hopping into the back of X's truck one afternoon and leaping out right before he merged onto the highway, nothing but a kitty-shaped streak in the rear-view mirror.


But I've lost a lot of cats in my day. First Mustard, then Custard, then Pepper and Salt. Kitcat disappeared, his brother Milky Way lived a long life before expiring recently, and the mother of them all, Dora (for the way she always seemed to be on the doorstep when your hands were full of groceries). I dunno, maybe I'm all catted out.

Life in Lilburn

It's been a while since I had anything blog-worthy to say, if ever I did (never send your blog to your brothers). Then this morning my reflection in the mirror asked me what I'm waiting for -- if I want to write, I should write. The past two weeks are a blur, but I feel like my head is finally spinning back around, slowing down as it settles in.

Life in Lilburn...idyllic, yet isolated. It's the United Nations out here, without the interpreters and infighting. Our ice cream truck man (yes, there is an ice cream truck man, Virginia) wears the garb of the Nation of Islam as he passes out the melting treats to kids from India and Mexico, while their black, white, and mixed neighbors look on. Growing up in a very segregated DeKalb neighborhood, moving to an even more segregated West End Atlanta neighborhood, it's hard for me to believe.

And none of this was planned. White flight hit Gwinnett and turned out, in my eyes at least, to be a blessing. Not even a blessing in disguise, just one wearing an outfit that was unexpected, even exotic, to the white southerners who lived here before. Today Gwinnett is "Georgia’s largest and most diverse public school system with more than 100 different languages spoken in our schools..." Gwinnett promoters can brag that their school system "consistently outperforms our peer systems in the state and ranks among the best school systems in the nation in achievement." (Link to full article)
What created this human splatter, this array of languages, dress, and yummy food? Most of Atlanta ranks among the country's worst for residential segregation. It's changed so much since I was a kid, but it's still huge. Out here (I always call it that -- Slim loves it), out here, the housing is cheap and schools are good. Sure, people spend too much time in their cars and no one walks anywhere, but I'm starting to understand why people choose to live "out here" and to be less judgmental about that decision.

But given how much Gwinnett has changed, there's no reason why "out here" has to remain so isolated. We live three miles from the nearest bus stop. No one in the metro area should live three miles away from the nearest bus! I just got my bike back from my sister, but would never even consider riding down Lawrenceville Highway. So I have to use the sidewalks -- illegal, yes, but potentially lifesaving as well. And every time I ride the bus I hear people complaining about how long it takes them to get downtown. It's 25 minutes in a car with no traffic (which happens once a week, on Sundays) but about two hours by bike to Gwinnett County transit bus stop to Doraville MARTA station to Five Points, or an hour and a half by bike to the Indian Trail park and ride to Gwinnett County Express Bus to Five Points.

My bike, how I love it...

If Gwinnett were to approve the MARTA sales tax (or another funding mechanism), it could finally get the train station and quick access to metro area public transportation this diverse, thriving metro county deserves.

Recent article in AJC -- "Another look at MARTA rail: Board representative asks for feasibility study on bringing system to county" By PAUL DONSKY, , BEN SMITH

A group of Gwinnett County leaders is pushing for an extension of MARTA's rapid rail line to the booming area, 16 years after county voters soundly rejected a plan to join the regional transit system. Officials with the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, which spans the Norcross and Lilburn areas, say the issue deserves to be revisited because the county has changed dramatically since the last MARTA referendum in 1990. Gwinnett's population has more than doubled, and its traffic problems now rival the nation's worst bottlenecks.

Public comments on the article here. The first comment (and a fairly typical one) reads:

By Stephen W December 6, 2006 05:19 PM | YES! Please bring MARTA into lower Gwinnett’s booming areas!

It’s time to move past the old racist arguments that it will bring crime. Anyone who’s actually been on a MARTA train will tell you that riders aren’t loaded down with stolen DVD players and Plasma TVs —Yes Gwinnett, let’s move into the 21st Century and say YES to this one!

image of Gwinnett County Courthouse, by architect Edmund Lind, from the GA Encyclopedia

la despedida

Colombia called. Said they'd call back, no message.

Photos from the massive going away blast:

Ellie, don't kill me for posting this - it's so cute! And I asked David's permission...

Goodnight

I wrote an (*ahem) beautiful post about my people here and what a lovely last day it's been in Bogota, but it got deleted somehow. Given what passes for sleep for me lately, that's not a big surprise.

I probably dragged out what I wanted to say anyway. Just this: home is where the people you love live, and you can have more than one. My home in Atlanta is where Slim sleeps, waiting patiently for me as he has all year, but Bogota will whisper softly to me in the night from time to time, so long as the people I came to know and love live here. I miss you all already. Goodnight!

ow. it hurts to leave.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Connections are made slowly; sometimes they grow underground," writes Marge Piercy in her book *Circles in the Water.* "You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet." Piercy advises us to use this strategy in our own lives. "Penetrate quietly as the earthworm. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us interconnected with burrows and lairs." It so happens, Taurus, that this is the perfect astrological oracle for you, beginning now and throughout 2007.

(Brezsny's horoscopes)

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I started out quietly, sitting and watching, waiting for Colombia to show itself to me. Today I have a Colombia-shaped stain on my shirt, embedded in the fibers, odorless except for a faint whiff of cut grass and sweetly rotting fruit, but soft to the touch, and warm, so warm. I wonder if it will launder out.

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"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

most emailed articles

I'm going to start a new recurring item: most emailed article of the day, on the theory that this says something about the current preoccupations, interests, and fears of the online news reading population.

Today's most emailed article from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution is, tellingly, in the business section: "Low-key, laid-back Jekyll Island targeted by developers." I found this out by emailing it myself, and after getting a little worked up by the article itself, I was somewhat comforted by the realization that others were interested in what was happening, or what will happen, as well. Hard to say what direction the interest goes in this case -- our *great state has been selling off state parks for years (see Stone Mountain, never a bastion of democracy, now a private sugary "historic" park).

If you grew up in Georgia, you probably have fond memories of a school trip to Jekyll Island's 4-H club, the way I do. I could never forget the Great Blue Herons that sprung, startled and wild from their nesting place above a swamp pond, or the look in our instructor's eyes when he told us that the sight was growing rarer and rarer. I can still taste the prickly pear's surprisingly sweet purple flesh, and feel the sting of the spines I hadn't removed in my haste to get to the fruit they protect.

Prickly pears...one of nature's secret delights. Removing the spines is laborious, something only a child has the time or interest to undertake. But the juicy interior's flavor clings to your tongue, leaving its taste in your mouth long after the buds have faded. It's not for everyone, but it's accessible to all who care to explore it.

I wish Jekyll had spines like that.

Eat. Words.

www.lacucaracha.com

I hate to do this, I really do. I ran across a column by David Brooks in the Times from two years ago that made me reconsider my passionate *ahem, dislike of his column. I'm a big girl, fully able to admit when she's been not 100% correct (known in the reality-based community as being "wrong"), so today I'm going to quote from and link to...gasp...a column by David Brooks, my second least-favorite New York Times columnist. Any guesses on the first?

The title, "The American Dream", comes from a Samuel Huntington (a good nemesis if anyone out there is looking for one) quote from one of his later broadsides against modern-day America: "There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." Get this guy a time capsule, he's crumbling before our eyes.

You have to give Huntington a break -- remember he was stopped illegally and then felt up by that racist cop in Los Angeles, and ever since has been struggling with feelings of anger towards...wait, I think that was "Crash." Huntington, on the other hand, has no excuse for the pseudo-academic nonsense he's been spouting for the past twenty years. Maybe he's truly concerned with the demise of his "Anglo-Protestant society." I just don't know where it ever existed in the first place. The only truly American art forms are jazz and hip-hop, and Eminem and Michael Bolton not withstanding, neither is exactly a bedrock of Anglo-Protestant influence.

But back to Brooks, whose columns I normally enjoy ripping apart. In this one, though, he really gets it right. I think in light of the national debate over immigration policies, it's worth re-reading.

We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.

Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.

That's the real threat to the American creed.

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