When I felt abundant?

Every Sunday my grandmother would take us to Jesuit Church, this huge Church downtown in New Orleans with a solid gold altar. She gave a check every year to the parish she was in (Mater Dolorosa) but she didn’t lke the way the church looked so she had her chauffeur wash off the Cadillac so it was all neat and beautiful and now we would go to noon mass at Jesuit Cathedral downtown, a solid gold altar. Everybody knew her. She liked it. After that we would go to the restaurant of  our choice, usually a very lovely restaurant something equivalent to the Waldorf Astoria. It was called the Roosevelt and I would order the club sandwich or the turkey breast and after that she would take us to the movies. And we would pick out any movie we wanted.  You could bring as many friends you wanted to. The more people the better and she would give you unlimited money for popcorn and cokes and milky ways or heavenly hash. She didn’t resist. You wanted to go 3 times and get candy she didn’t care. She just kept handing us money. My grandmother loved love stories. She particularly liked things that were lewd. 

And one of the things that she enjoyed was to try to take us to a movie that my mother disapproved of. So she would look through the paper. At that time the Catholic church rated things a,b,c. C it was condemned and you would go to hell. But we would often go see a B which means it like had sex scenes in it and she would say don’t tell your mother. I am going to see this anyway because I hear it’s good.  My mother was so religious and tried to raise people only under the umbrella of good moral entertainment. And my grandmother who thought the most wonderful thing was to have a sex scene. After the movie, her chauffeur would circle. She’d give him 10 dollars and say go get a ham sandwich and he would pick us up and we’d drive home for dinner. She’d had the maid cook and put up everything in the refrigerator and we would have a picnic before the tv set  a linen tablecloth in front of the tv and cokes and chicken breast sandwiches, and watch tv, the movies, whatever we wanted. I remember how depressed I was when Sunday ended that all that fantasy world the big screen you know to have to go b ack to school. Massive depression at the thought  of having to go back to school. A veil of sorrow would fall over my head. I wanted always to be in the movies because I fell in love with people like Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor. Those beautiful people on this huge screen and subliminally I felt I would have a lot of power, freedom, and beauty if I got involved in the movies. That was one area that a woman could go in to and make a lot of money. It looked like there you could express yourself creatively. As time went on , it got harder to see a good movie. There weren’t as many made and tv was in contention with the movies. The movie theatres started to get seedier. My grandmother’s eyes were getting weaker and she had a hard time adjusting to the changes of light, but when we did go we often went with as many as 10 kids in the car, me and my friend, Cathy, my cousin Dale, her sister Lyn, and they would bring friends.  I remember being dropped off at my parent’s house on the way home and she’d say to the chauffeur, 

“Pull up to the cottage two doors from the corner, Little cottage over there. She was always deprecating about the fact that my mother’s house wasn’t very big and hers was a mansion. Life seemed so tedious and ordinary at my house as compared to my grandmother’s and at the movies where everything looked so glamorous. People seemed like they were desperately loved, desperately adored. Lots of highs and lows.

Why don’t I feel abundant now?

I do want to be grateful to god for all the wonderful things I’ve been blessed with. But for a long time New Orleans was home for me.  I lived in an area in which…My grandmother lived several blocks away. I could walk there. My uncle was 7 blocks from her, I could walk there. People went to church up the street which was 2 blocks away. We’d walk to church on Sunday. I knew my neighbors to the left and to the right and across the street. Because I came from money (my grandfather had been the most prominent doctor in the American Medical Assoc. and ran an important clinic; the began transfusions in La.) He was very famous locally. So when I would say the family I came from it was like having been a Kennedy in Boston. It was like immediate acceptance. My family had lived in that town so long I had such a network of relatives almost like Queen.

So when I left New Orleans it was a total rupture for me. So many of my friends my past. I lived most of my girlhood and my adulthood there. With the exception of about 12 years in my life (when I was teaching at Beaver College, Rider College and Princeton) and when I went to UCLA, I always lived in New Orleans and I was always going back to New Orleans. Even when I didn’t live there my mother who was so persistent, she would send me every week every article about theatre in the New Orleans paper.  I knew exactly when I went to New Orleans how to found a theatre because I knew everything about the history of New Orleans theatre for 20 years. She wanted me to come back to New Orleans and she was always including me in that world. So when I left New Orleans it was a rupture from many parts of my life. When you get to middle age you are supposed to rupture from things. I don’t think you are supposed to hold on to your old bedroom or—it was an all in one kind of cut off and I still haven’t recuperated. 

I hoped to go to NYC and ground myself there, but my 2 children left and it was very harsh living there. I hoped to live in Ithaca and there was an abrasion there. Ithaca was the closest thing I could find to New Orleans in terms of a community of culture. People locking in and loving it. A lot of places you go people don’t want to live there.

People are in New Orleans cause they really really really love it. New York is the same way. People think you are a fool if you leave.  So what would I need to give up to feel abundant again?  Probably a way of thinking and looking back.