"September Eleventh Again"

"Ob-la-di Ob-la-da life goes on,
Lala how the life goes on . . ." - The Beatles

I beat a telephone to death on my Birthday, rain cooled the evening as hoped, and Kermit Ruffins played "Happy Birthday (to me)" at Saint Augustine's Friday night fish fry (now that is something I would not mind having engraved on my tombstone). Reverend Jerome LeDoux, Saint Aug's Parish Priest, discussed the funeral he celebrated in 1997 for Sidney Bechet (L. A. Norma and I had been there, sitting in a pew just behind the French Ambassador). I said it had been a great send-off, in a true New Orleans style. Father Le Doux replied, "We do call it a Celebration Mass."

All in all, this was the best Birthday of my many.

The phone came unplugged while talking to my Mother in Illinois. Mother and Son conversations are terrible, wonderful, joyful, awful things. This one had been full of recollections about what she was doing, "that day." The phone had recently learned to disengage itself from the earpiece, leaving me feeling awfully silly blabbering into dead air. This time the plug popped out while we were saying goodbye.

"Not on my Birthday, you soulless piece of technology!" I swung the phone by its tail, crashing it on the floor till little plastic pieces rained through the air like carnival beads. It was a satisfying, life-affirming moment.

I now have a phone that looks like a 1959 Cadillac, with headlights that flicker when it rings, and blood-red bullet taillights that glow like the eyes of Beelzebub (the honker-ringer does not work, thank God). I do not feel at all bad about the old phone, though it could ring its head off and had great big buttons. The new phone is sexier'n Britney Spears and a perfect addition to Squalor Heights.

FRENCH QUARTER FICTION publisher Joshua Clark treated us to dinner at Fiorellas, and asked about the telephone incident - word travels fast when old peace-niks turn violent.

NPR's Linda Wertheimer interviewed Publisher Josh and John Biguenet earlier that day. Great interview. Great Birthday night. Andrei Codrescu shook hands and said, "I first met LEJ twenty years ago," when the talented Publisher Josh was nine years old. Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, life goes on!

Meanwhile, down on Frenchmen Street, L. A. Norma's waiter friend toasted the years passed since September Eleventh, and Publisher Josh presented me with a seven-foot hatchet - a great Carnival prop looking thing like Genghis Khan might have carried. (Should a publisher give a writer a hatchet like the Genghis Khan used, knowing dead telephones lie in his past?)

Another day, Dean Paschal and I drank at the Spotted Cat's early set, and Tim Eskew, from Michael's Bicycle Shop across the street, stopped by with "Leonard," his newly rescued chow-mix. A cool rain, Kermit Ruffins, a seven-foot hatchet, and a dog named "Leonard." It does not get any better than this; at least it has not so far.

Please forgive this column being late, and truncated. I have been celebrating my Sixtieth Birthday, no small achievement in this day of disease and war mongering. May you have one, too, and then some!

Hear the NPR/FRENCH QUARTER FICTION interview.