High School Reunion : To Invoke or Not to Invoke Magic Spells

The Lilith Seduction Spell

3 Red Candles

3 Black Roses

Voice

Synthetic Musk Oil

Use Lilith's help to become a sexy fiend that will  attract any gender. *For women only* 

New Orleans, my ancestral home, is filled with ghost and memories of ghost.  I left New Orleans when I was 18 years old, straight out of high school.  I would have left at twelve.  I can't recall the event or events, but I do remember sitting on my super cool pink banana seat bike with a groovy flower power basket, at the corner of Panola Street and Carrollton Avenue, thinking that this city was the most hateful and decadent place in the world.  

Racism and bigotry interfered in my ability to get a drink of water at the fountain in the J.C. Penny's.  Mr. Rivet was perpetually asking the girls in the hood if he could look at our "coconuts".  Boys from De La Salle would randomly shout "bitch" as they drove down the avenue.  Bobby Sherman was a freaking adult  posing as a teenager.  I know because he had razor stubble.  ShitDamitToHell, I had to rip that Tiger Beat poster off my wall!  LOL!

When I would come home, I was self-medicated by 9 a.m..  Honestly, nursing a Bloody Mary was the only way I could get through the crazy conversations that took place between the three women in my mothers' household.  You tell me, is it normal for anyone to demand you to sit on the side of the tub and listen to which debutante was about to be crowned Queen of Rex while the speaker is taking a potty dump?  I swear to GAWD this is the truth! 

When I would bring friends home from college, I warned them that the city was all about alcohol and sex.  Did they listen?  It never failed, that one of our backyard neighbors would come up our driveway, wearing a kimono or a seersucker suit, extending a bottle of wine (or a hard-on), to one of my girlfriends while she was still sipping her first cup of dark roast chicory coffee.  Freakin' Pervs! 

The consequence of leaving at eighteen was never having an opportunity to live in New Orleans as an adult.  When Katrina hit, I had to ask my sister what the hell the news casters were talking about.  I didn't know that some neighborhoods even had names, especially not the ones we were told to never visit because we would be raped and killed.  Even still, well-bred Southerners, and this is especially so if you were raised in Uptown society, neveaheveah, used words to discriminate between themselves and the domestic help.  What we did was change our pitch as though we were speaking to children.  The first time I heard someone refer to an African American person as "colored", I was very disappointed to find that I was not about to meet a rainbow person.

I did my post Katrina survivor service work.  That August, when I was still writing for a paper in Texas, my editor gave me permission to post a call to any New Orleanian that had come to Austin.  By Thanksgiving, though many of the Katrina diaspora had returned to the city, I made sure those that were taking root in Austin got what their Mama-and-dem would have fixed.  

Two years after Katrina, I finally got up the nerve to go home.  Two years later the devastation was very much present.  Our marina, a bone yard of boats, held the most horrible of sorrows for me.  I learned to ski, sail, and shrimp Lake Pontchartrain.  Houses that had been repaired and newly landscaped, maintained the one wall with the Katrina cross, the codes left by search and rescue teams.  Save for Bourbon Street with its' blanket of tourist and police officers, crack head pirates on bikes rode the vacant streets of the French Quarter. All eight dialects were present, but the people were vacant.

Trauma

Post Katrina Trauma, ya'll

Gawd bless 'em

A Simple & Powerful Wart Removal Spell

One Full Moon

Small Blue Paper

A Sharpie (just kidding) A Pencil

A Blue Candle

In the center of the blue paper write "Wane this wart away"

Light the blue candle and let a few drops spill onto the words.

When I was a little girl, I had learned a handful of magic tricks.  Anxious to share my new power with my MaMere, I sat her down in a chair in her lovely kitchen on Duffosat Street.  As I scrambled to remember the incantation, her eyes toasted my efforts, and she spoke.  "You are magic, Dawlin'." 

No pain last forever, especially if you allow it to wash away.  That seems to be what New Orleans did - they allowed the broken levee banks to push the social ills into the ground.  New Orleanians, with heads above the water, saved one another, and they saved themselves.  New Orleans and I have both matured.  We have forgiven trespasses, linked arms, and found that love is the only magic needed.

We now try to recall what was so lucky about a rabbit without a foot.
We see ourselves as boys on bikes, gliding through allies as thin as sliced white bread.  As girls, dressed in bed sheet togas, mixing herbs from our grandmother's cabinets, speaking in tongues, assuring our success with verbs.

all that gliding
all that French
all that conjugation

Special love toast to the Ursuline Skips '77, Lulu, Dee, Gary, Mary Helen, and all those with family stories linking New Orleans and Merida.

You've done good, ya'll.  Real good.

         

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