New Year's Day starts chilly, breezy, and a little on the gray side. The streets are littered with dead, dry leaves that snap under my feet and make an unwelcome rustle on the pavement. The neighborhood cats chase them - and each other - across the lawns with reckless abandon, pouncing with the grace and majesty of tigers, then losing interest when they meet no resistance. The only sounds are the wind and the plaintive howl of the fenced in beagle two doors down.
I wash down two aspirin and an antidepressant with a glass or low salt V8, give the dogs instructions to wake me when the sun comes out, and rearrange the collection of sleeping cats to make room for myself under the covers. My last waking thought is that later I might drive to the lake with my camera - there is a rumor that several brown pelicans have been spotted. Before I was old enough to be in school, my grandparents took me with them to Florida in the winter and I've loved the short, squat bodied, comical looking birds ever since. They always make me think of warm winters and glass bottomed boat tours, cozy Spanish looking guest cottages and miles of flat, white sand stretching out to meet the incoming ocean. There were always pelicans and sunsets and trips to the circus's winter quarters, shells to seek out and Ida, an enormous, cheerful, uniformed housekeeper who arrived just after breakfast each morning to chase me outside before beginning her cleaning routine. She had been born and raised in Daytona and had been cleaning cottages since her teens - she knew the guests, their families, their likes and dislikes and their histories and had become as much a part of this winter escape as the sun and sand. Nana would often sit with her in the tiny kitchenette, drinking coffee and chatting as if they were old friends, much to the chagrin of my grandfather who frowned on the help taking such liberties. Nigger maid don't know her place, he snapped at my grandmother, She's hired help, not staying next door for Christ's sake! Nana would clear the table with a bitter and defiant smile and she and Ida continued their morning routine each day. She rarely opposed him but in this she took a stand and refused to give in. It was a peculiar place to draw a line in the sand, my daddy said when he and my mother came for their regular week's stay, and shrugged.
Though I was taught otherwise, there was no liberal bias in my family - staunch republicans one and all, they stood opposed to most everything I came to believe in. Welfare was a giveaway program that rewarded those too lazy to work, homeless shelters were a waste of perfectly good space, all alcoholics lived in gutters and panhandled for their next drink, anyone not Caucasian and Protestant should be avoided, integration was an inherently evil idea and poverty was self inflicted. None of this was spelled out in words, of course, we were taught by example rather than lecture and slowly I came to understand the concept of hypocrisy in my own family. The slogan of the funeral home my grandfather owned - proudly emblazoned on subway walls and billboards all over the city - Serving All Faiths - was true enough, although some faiths were served more proudly than others.
Brown pelicans in this part of Louisiana, like tolerance and kindness, are not all that common but I keep looking.
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