Saturdays in St. Francisville prove that birds of a feather truly flock together.

We’ve been feathering our nest here in South Louisiana these past few weeks. More on our repatriation efforts soon.

A short, sweet message brought to you by the poet(s) at the Krog Street Tunnel.

The trouble with having my advisor read my blog is that he now sees fit to keep me honest.

To wit: In a recent post, I wrote “the education of young Paige begins.”

That, of course, prompted him to pick up the phone and remind me that I was not at all young.

Fair enough.

I will edit myself.

The education of this creaky old broad begins…

Happy now?

****

When I’m between stories or waiting for interviews or simply stumped, I like to take on foolhardy creative projects. Last week, while I was shopping for my daughter’s fifth birthday party, I thought “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to knit little baby toys for pregnant friends x, y and z?”

I thought it would be a stunning idea. Just brilliant.

Except the thing is, I’m the poster child for regretsy.com. I can knit a scarf because it is flat and requires little thought. My mother thinks some of my scarves turn out pretty, or even stylish.

But she is my mother, so what do you expect her to say? That she doesn’t want my scarves anywhere near her precious neck?

Anyway…

Scarves are one thing and a perfect project for someone like me who is challenged in the needle arts. Knitting an actual animal shape that will be sewn and stuffed and detailed with embroidery and felt ears? Hm…I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

I bought this book called “Knitted Toys” and the patterns in it seemed pretty straightforward while I was browsing through it in the bookstore. So I blithely flipped to one page, decided “Okay, I will knit little elephants,” and went to the local yarn store to procure all the goods I’d need to do the deed.

I got home, I knitted a front leg. And then I knitted a back leg and connected it to the front. Then I knitted a trunk. Ha ha! I was on a roll. Then I connected the trunk to the rest of the body. Then I looked at the directions and couldn’t figure out why I was 35 rows into this beast and seven stitches short. I went back to the knitting store and asked them what the heck.

They told me I didn’t know how to count (which was probably a polite way of telling me I didn’t know how to knit, either). They also told me I needed to unravel my pachyderm and start over.

So I did.

And here’s where I am right now…

Hopefully I will not have a tarantula when I’m done.

Good weather, andouille sausage and fresh corn…feels like a perfect Sunday night to me.

This post is dedicated to my muses, Shannon and Kristi…

Anything you wrap in a pork product is bound to be good.

Right?

Right.

Now that we have that little bit of my worldview out on the table, let’s proceed with a recipe I made last night. Originally, it wasn’t chicken tenderloins wrapped in basil and Prosciutto. Originally, it was breasts of chicken wrapped in sage and Serrano. But when I made it in its original incarnation, my daughter turned her nose up at it, so I went for something with a sweeter taste.

Enter basil and Prosciutto.

Talk about a super-easy recipe.

Here’s what you need:

1 lb of chicken tenderloins

salt, dried basil (or fresh if you so desire; I had dried on hand) and freshly-ground black pepper to taste

finely-sliced Prosciutto

4 tablespoons olive oil

Here’s what you do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Season each tenderloin with salt, pepper and basil.
3. Wrap one piece of Prosciutto around each tenderloin, so that the seam is on the bottom.
4. Arrange the chicken in a baking dish coated with olive oil, then bake for 20 minutes or until the juices run clear. Then serve. I served mine last night with cous cous and a chopped salad.

Here it is.

I wasn’t a good economics student.

All I remember is that I took the class and that I got a terrible grade. If you asked me to tell you an economic principle I learned (or whatever it is you learn in economics class), I would stare at you stoically until a little tear streamed down my cheek, just like the Native American guy did in the 1970s anti-litter PSA.

To this day, outside of the bad grade I earned (and rightfully deserved), the only thing I remember about economics is a Texas A&M joke my professor once told. It goes something like this:

Two Aggies decide to go hunting for deer one day. Eventually, they decide they’ll bag more deer if they split up. So they do. After a while, one Aggie sees a bush rustling, opens fire into it and out falls his buddy. He rushes his buddy to the hospital and waits and waits. Soon, the doctor comes out, shaking his head, and says ‘You know, he might have had a chance if you hadn’t tried to gut him.’

I bring this up because yesterday I ordered nearly $200 in economics books. Given the interests I will be pursuing in graduate school these next few years, I and my major professor decided it might be wise for me to learn economics for real this time. So he recommended one three-volume work and another book with Prometheus in the title. And if I’m still into it (and eagles aren’t eating my liver…or what’s left of my mind), then my professor says he has even more books to recommend.

This is sort of exciting (says my inner masochist), unnerving and peculiar to me, after spending the past 15 years pursuing a wide — and not terribly disciplined — array of reading and writing interests. But my husband is encouraging, my family is encouraging and my professor is encouraging, so much so that he said “I envy you” when I told him I would be reading those books soon.

It’s not every day that someone tells you that they envy you because you’re about to read thousands of pages about economics. This ought to be good.

The education of young Paige begins.

In the middle of the night

Miss Clavel turned on the light

and said, “Something is not right!”

– Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

***

As writers, we start with the feeling and everything follows from that.

– U2 guitarist The Edge in “It Might Get Loud”

***

I got trifocals recently. Yes, trifocals. My optometrist calls them progressive lenses, but admits that’s just a nice way of saying my eyes needed some major help. Getting adjusted to these new specs has been something of a chore. But when I can figure out where my eyes are supposed to go to see different increments of near and far, it’s amazing how crisp and clear the world is.

I knew something wasn’t right last spring when I found myself squinting in my old, Buddy Holly-style frames. My optometrist (who had a maddening habit of calling me “old girl”) at the time told me I would be fine for another year, but by December I was noticing that I was reading fine print over the top of my glasses and squinting to see, well, pretty much everything. A few weeks ago, I finally dialed up a new optometrist (new only because his predecessor was no longer covered by my vision plan) who decided that it would behoove me to have housefly eyes.

So far, the newfound clarity is dizzying. This, coupled with a fresh outlook, has brought on quite a bit of change as of late. In recent years, I’ve felt that I needed to shake things up a bit. I had a vague sense of how I might actually do that shaking up, but when the vision of how it would all go down snapped into focus, I found myself…talking myself out of it.

I suppose that’s easy to do when you’re an “old girl” like me.

The saving grace in all of this? I have a disturbing habit of going to France and coming home with a fresh outlook. Last fall’s trip was no exception. I immersed myself in a wonderful city with my family, was reminded of my lifelong love for the country’s history and, in the process, stumbled upon a story that I felt I had to tell. That sense, coupled with a tremendous afternoon in Shakespeare and Company bookstore, left me feeling overwhelmed and goosepimply. I sat in a cab, crying, as a couple of things became frighteningly clear.

I ran screaming from graduate school some 15 years ago because I felt I lacked the patience and maturity to study dead Frenchmen and their impact on the world. Though my maturity is still suspect, I knew during my cab epiphany that it was high time for me to be a student again, and a student of French history, no less. When I returned to Atlanta, I studied for the GRE, took the test the day before Halloween and began applying to schools shortly after that.

I was humbled by the process, from rounding up recommendations to writing a purpose statement that explained my background (eclectic) and interest (an inevitable byproduct of being from the great state of Louisiana). I submitted my applications and then waited.

The result? Like Drew Brees, my family and I have been called to Louisiana. We will be moving to my hometown of Baton Rouge where I will be a graduate student in history at Louisiana State University this fall. I will be working with a beloved mentor, someone I probably didn’t appreciate enough in my twenties even though he saw something in me back then, some beast he felt he could unleash. Fifteen years after the fact, I have decided to find out whether he was right. I am looking forward it.

Excitement abounds. The little one is sugared up from a Valentine’s Day party at her preschool. That same preschool announced it would close one hour early, before a snowflake even fell. And when it did fall in its cute little Southern snowfallish way, the little one couldn’t help but notice that there was snow on trees, on cars, in the street, on leaves and so forth.

Deja vu all over again, eh?

We won’t get the three feet of snow that my sister is still digging out of in the metropolitan Washington area. But we will get more than the laughable dusting we got almost a month ago. What’s more, we’ll get wet, packable stuff that’s good for snowballs and maybe even a snowman too.

A ridiculously petite snowman…but a snowman nonetheless.

Mom is probably being accused of leaving games early in this picture.

Long before my parents divorced, my mother spent a good number of years telling my father that she didn’t want anyone to know he was her husband. This happened in the early 1970s. Back then, Dad would leave our home in Baton Rouge on Sunday mornings in various states of disrepair from LSU games the night before so he could attend Saints games in New Orleans. My mother thought he was insane (which was partly true) because she couldn’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily get up and invest several hours of one’s time in something that was so bad.

In Mom’s defense, she said she tried to hang in there for about the first six or so years. And by the first six or so years, she meant the first years of the Saints franchise, not of her marriage. She hung in there for 12 years of that. But all during this past season, Mom remembered those early days when she could still bear to watch, even during the 1970 halftime show when a guy shot off his fingers during a re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans.

“I wonder what happened to that guy,” I asked her.

Her reply: “Oh I think he was okay, but people pretty much forgot about him when the guy with the foot came along.”

She was talking about Tom Dempsey, who kicked a game-winning, 63-yard field goal against the Detroit Lions. Final score: Saints: 19, Lions: 17.

“And to think I almost left that game,” she added.

She left other games and Dad stayed at a lot of them. But is this story and this Super Bowl really about the scores and the games and so forth? Not really. For all that has been written about Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding and uniting the city, for me this game today is about family. Not just my family, but a lot of families in Louisiana who have suffered through the ups and downs, been there for each other through good and bad, and occasionally hurt so much that they just had to look away.

This is about my father, who died two years ago February 5, but who is certainly sitting somewhere nursing a beer and doing his level best not to tell my mother “I told you so.”

This is about my mother, who has devoured every story, every picture, every radio piece about the Saints in recent weeks in spite of the aforementioned history and who has sent me messages admitting that she couldn’t help but cry once the team clinched the NFC in overtime. She’s making red beans and believing right now.

This is about my uncle, who once told me “Every family in Louisiana has one.” He was talking about my father at the time, who I once felt had let me down time and time again.

Here they are together, circa 1967:

My father and uncle explain that this is a football in their front yard on Carrollton Ave.

But my uncle could have just as easily been talking about those Saints, who people have hung with for 40-some-odd years, paper bags and all.

This is about the friend who bought me a black Saints hat of my very own once I told him how much I liked his. He used to scream strange things about former Saints quarterback Aaron Brooks in the middle of trying LSU games and I used to tell him to get over himself. But I knew in my heart that when you’re born into a family like this – one that sprouts fleur de lis and shouts “Who Dat!” (among other things) – there are certain things you just can’t help. Men are wearing dresses and marching down the street in New Orleans. People are reportedly putting yellow flowers with black ribbons on their loved ones’ graves. There are probably grown men who are thinking about all the games they used to attend with their fathers, who are no longer alive. Stores are closing, people are drinking, things are bubbling on the stove.

Seafood gumbo’s on my stove.  See?

What’s on yours?

It is time. And my four-year-old daughter is running through the house with a Saints balloon chanting “Who Dat!”

I’ve never seen a Saints game in the Superdome, but I’ve seen plenty of them in the Georgia Dome with my husband, who is an Atlanta Falcons season ticket holder. Yes, the marriage is still intact, in no small part because the Saints are far more superior. I remember the night we sat down to watch the first Saints game in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Before the game, there was a NFL-generated spot in a church where the pastor was talking about rebirth and faith and my husband began to groan about how horrible and corny it was. Just as those words came out of his mouth, New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas came strutting down the aisle of the church singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I sobbed, “How dare you? This isn’t horrible. This is Irma Thomas!”

And then I told him what my team was going to do to his.

That was almost four years ago. Plenty of times since then, I have walked away from the television in disgust only to hide in another room to watch the black and gold with the bedcovers pulled up underneath my chin. There was one season where I couldn’t watch at all, after I saw the way the Colts picked apart the Saints’ secondary in an early season game.

But I believe that won’t happen tonight.

Because I believe, period.

God Bless Our Boys!  And let’s Geaux Saints!

Though the details are hazy, I remember seeing the dolphin shows at Marine Life Oceanarium in Mississippi when I was a little girl. I loved dolphins (still do) and remember how my father walked me out to the holding pens where trainers kept the sleek, smiley-faced mammals when they weren’t performing. I don’t remember what my father told me when we watched the dolphins swim around and around in these pens. I do remember that I was happy that I could be so close to something I loved.

Yet I still recognized the size difference between the ocean where these dolphins usually swam and the rusty pen that was now their home. But as small as I was back then, my takeaway was probably that I got to be close to the dolphins, much closer than anyone could get to them at the show.

Marine Life doesn’t exist anymore. It was destroyed in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The dolphins that once lived there were swept out to sea in the storm surge and eventually found. But I’ve never forgotten that place or the push-pull in me that began that day out by the pens. After all, I’ve gone on two dolphin swims and am currently an aquarium member, but am conflicted about putting mammals like these in captivity.

Watching “The Cove” this past weekend did little to settle me down. The documentary, which is now an Academy Award nominee, features a group of dolphin activists who travel to Japan to expose an annual dolphin slaughter that local fishermen have tried to keep out of the public eye.

The most prominent of those activists is former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry, known for his work on the television show “Flipper.” After arguably sparking a worldwide fascination with these creatures through his work on the show, O’Barry decided that dolphins weren’t meant to be jumping through hoops for audiences or confined to aquariums for educational purposes. So he has spent the past few decades fighting against dolphin captivity and, in some cases, getting arrested and sued for his efforts.

In some circles, O’Barry’s not what you’d call popular. In this movie, he’s aroused a fair bit of ire from the Japanese government, which, among other things, says a. its catch quotas are based on scientific information and b. foreigners like O’Barry need to respect “national and cultural differences” in diet. Both arguments are fair. However, when you see what the fisherman actually do to round up these mammals so that some can be sold to aquariums and others can be sold for meat, you understand why the filmmakers went to the lengths they did to catch this on film. Rigging the entire cove where the slaughters took place with concealed cameras and microphones, the film crew captures scenes that are truly horrific. Add to this the discovery that high concentrations of mercury were discovered in dolphin meat being sold in Japan, and it’s easy to be disturbed by this film.

So, see “The Cove” if you haven’t. And if you have seen it, let me know what you thought in comments.

*****

Debarking Since I’m on an animal rights kick today, take a peek at this story in today’s New York Times about debarking, or the act of cutting your dog’s vocal cords so that they can’t make a lot of racket. The good news is that the practice is falling out of favor. The bad news is that people actually still do this to their pets. Maybe those owners should be debarked too.

Number One The new online viral sensation is the meme “What was the number one song on Billboard when you were born?” For me, it was “Me and Mrs. Jones” by soul singer Billy Paul. Interestingly enough, the song that preceeded it at the top of the list back in 1972 was “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy. Then, after Paul’s three week run at number one, Carly Simon took over with “You’re So Vain.” I choose not to read too much into any of this, but would like to know what the number one song was on the day you came out of your mama’s womb.

Eliot Spitzer Say what you will about the past year of his life, but the former governor has been on the airwaves a lot lately talking about how people should be furious that the banking system is being rebuilt exactly the same way it was before it all collapsed. Here’s his recent appearance on last night’s “Colbert Report.”