My Morning Walk

On my morning walk, I noticed jeweled spider webs, strung together with tiny diamonds.

Beach Chair Therapy

"I think worrying is like rehearsing for something you don't want to happen"

Lessons From The Sane Asylum

Do our lives really matter?

 This isn’t a scientific question — there isn’t data we can collect by doing experiments that could possibly measure the extent to which a life matters. It’s at heart a philosophical problem, one that demands that we discard the way that we’ve been thinking about our lives and their meaning for thousands of years. By the old way of thinking, human life couldn’t possibly be meaningful if we are “just” collections of atoms moving around in accordance with the laws of physics. That’s exactly what we are, but it’s not the only way of thinking about what we are. We are collections of atoms, operating independently of any immaterial spirits or influences, and we are thinking and feeling people who bring meaning into existence by the way we live our lives.

The Art of Living

While the day
 chooses it's colors
 and night releases
 it's silken scarf

 A simple sit
 amidst transitions
 with thoughts
 like fallen stars

 Wishes made
 upon memories
 who listens
 from afar

 Like a voiceless question posed
 to passing strangers without ears
 what might life bring
 today?

 Until this one -
 that faced me to say,
 today -
 what will you bring life?

The Art of Living...

Don't believe everything you think. Many times the mind creates its own illusions by linking thoughts that have no connections...

From The Road Series...

On a Sunday morning in June, a day that happens to coincide with the local Creole Tomato Festival, I am eating a hot sausage po’boy in the back seat of Arthur Robinson’s F150 with one of his granddaughters, Little Sergio. A gangly man named Frog is riding shotgun as we drive around the awakening city of New Orleans. Here, Robinson is a celebrity. Better known as Mr. Okra, he maneuvers his brightly painted “wagon” stocked with fruits and vegetables—apples, bananas, pineapples, garlic, onions, avocados, and of course, okra—throughout the diverse neighborhoods of New Orleans, something he’s been doing since he was 15 years old...Lee Matalone.


Spend some time in the Big Easy and you just might spot Mr Okra around 9th Ward and Uptown...great read from The New Orleans Magazine...myneworleans.com

IAN MCNULTY

CHERYL GERBER PHOTOGRAPHS

Arthur Robinson isn’t a performer, and he’s no one’s politician, but his voice is still well known to thousands of New Orleanians. They know him as Mr. Okra – or sometimes just Okra – his trade name as a roving produce vendor who patrols New Orleans streets in a battered, chugging Ford pickup packed with fruits and vegetables and decked in folk art renderings of his inventory. His voice, a deep, bullfrog baritone, bellows out from a truck-mounted, hiccup-prone P.A. system, advising customers of his selection and its goodness.

“I have oranges and bananas, I have good lemons, broc-oh-lee,” Mr. Okra calls as his truck sputters along at a stately parade pace. “I have cantaloupes, collard greens. I have garlic, eating pears, blueberries.”

Mr. Okra talks to New Orleans all day, and all day the city talks right back. Guys on bicycles point and shout his name, excited by the local celebrity sighting. Motorists pull up alongside him and sing his lines before he can.

“I got oranges and bananas,” shouts a carload of smiling girls slowly passing his truck along Esplanade Avenue.

To say Mr. Okra is just a vegetable peddler is to suggest a second-line parade is just a way to ease on down the road, or that an oyster poor boy is just a way to stave off hunger. Some of his most doting fans consider him a mobile totem of New Orleans culture. For instance, Tremé resident and regular customer Jamie Labat says visits from Mr. Okra have been a part of life ever since he was a young boy.

“This truck here,” Labat says, taping its wooden vegetable racks, “it’s like sacred ground. It’s New Orleans, you know. Where else are people this free?”

Many people who have never bought so much as a plum from Mr. Okra have heard about him lately. Roots rock superstar Dave Matthews included a sample of his street cries on his latest album, and Mr. Okra has appeared in videos for local bands such as Morning 40 Federation. Last spring, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival invited him to bring his truck inside festival grounds, where he hollered about fruit and posed for countless photos. This year also saw the debut of Mr. Okra, a documentary short that won the Audience Choice award at the NYC Food Film Festival in June.

“He’s so iconic and such a part of the fabric of my community,” says T.G. Herrington, the New Orleans native who directed the film. “After the first screening in New York, people walked up to us and said, ‘This makes me want to move to New Orleans, I want to know people like Okra.’ I think people get that this is part of a way of life that’s disappearing. It goes beyond commerce, it’s engaging with the past, if you will.”

For Mr. Okra, the role of roving peddler is a family tradition that began in the 1930s when his father, the late Nathan Robinson, took up the trade.

“My daddy was the first Mr. Okra man,” says Mr. Okra, now 66. “He started selling fruit from a wheelbarrow, then from a horse and buggy, then from a truck. I always rode around with him when I could and when I got big I went off on my own.”

Mr. Okra took up other vocations. He worked at a service station and shipped off as a crewman on a freighter for a year. Back home again, he ran his own tire shop for a while, servicing 18-wheelers. He has been married and divorced, and his grown children have made him a grandfather several times over. Today, he’s engaged and plans to remarry next year.

He began street peddling full time about 30 years ago, and hasn’t stopped since. Unless he’s sick or his badly ailing truck suffers one of its frequent breakdowns, Mr. Okra and a helper hit the streets seven days a week.

The producers of Mr. Okra made him a part-owner of their film, and have pledged 10 percent of the film’s profits to help rebuild his Arts Street home, still badly damaged from the Hurricane Katrina levee failures and a run-in with a crooked contractor. But otherwise, Mr. Okra struggles with the question of turning all the recent attention he’s attracted into a more comfortable living.

“I’m a celebrity, but I’m a broke celebrity,” he says.

New Orleans once rang with the calls and cries of itinerant hawkers and bootstrap entrepreneurs like Mr. Okra. The landmark 1945 collection of Louisiana folktales “Gumbo Ya-Ya” describes the great multitude of vendors working the city streets, like the ice man, the coffee man, the charcoal man and many others who brought their goods or services directly to customers’ doors. Some announced their approach with a few loud notes from a trumpet, which typically brought housewives out with their purses, plus gaggles of excited children.

Mr. Okra has a megaphone rather than a trumpet, but the effect is the same. People wait for him on stoops and street corners, and some snap photos of their children buying melons from his tailgate. Hard-looking young men leaning on car bumpers flag him down for bananas. Night shift nurses in uniform stop him for groceries. Elderly shut-ins shuffle to their window screens and converse with Mr. Okra as his helper fills their orders. Mr. Okra often idles his wheezing truck before the doors or below the balconies of regular customers, calling to them specifically.

“I got that okra you wanted,” he tells one lady.

“Well, I ain’t got the money until the weekend, I’ll get them then,” she says.

“Might not have them on the weekend, better get them now and pay me later,” Mr. Okra offers.

“No, no,” she says, waving him away. “Credit makes enemies. Let’s me and you stay friends.”

“She’s right you know,” Mr. Okra tells his passengers as he drives off. But he also says he’s rarely been burned by his customers. On the contrary, he enjoys a close and supportive relationship with many of the people on his route.

One such customer is Bob Shaffer, the Bywater folk artist known as Dr. Bob. He painted Okra’s truck and has rendered other assistance, like rebuilding the truck’s vegetable racks once New Orleans potholes shook them to pieces.

“This guy’s out there working everyday. I’ve helped him out and on the flip side when I was sick he would come by my house and check on me,” says Dr. Bob. “I have a lot of respect for hard-working people doing what they can to keep a smile on this town’s face.”

Mr. Okra’s route covers a huge and diverse swath of the city, from the Bywater, through the 8th Ward near his own home, around the Tremé, along Esplanade Ridge and deep into Mid-City.
  
“You got a different class of people all over my route. Some areas, the people are so nice. Others, you wish you didn’t go down there,” he says, looking through his windshield at collapsed houses, overgrown lots and deeply cratered city streets.

“I remember when children would see you coming, they’d call for their parents, saying ‘Mama, Mama, here comes the vegetable man!’ Now, you pass by in some of these areas they got here, you ask the kids if their parents want something and they look at you like you’re crazy.”

But, out of loyalty to some of his oldest customers, he still includes some areas that are no longer profitable.

“People say, ‘Why don’t you come down my block no more,’ then you tell them and it hurts their feelings,” he says.
The intangibles wrapped up in being a cultural icon aren’t always easy to manage. But on he rumbles, hollering about his produce. Approaching a block on N. Derbigny Street, two young men and a girl lean over a porch railing and sing his own street jingles to him.

“I got oranges, bananas,” they bellow in fake croaking voices.

“You ain’t got nothing,” Mr. Okra sings right back, barely suppressing a giggle. “I got it all.”

Beach Chair Therapy

"Enjoy where life takes you. Just hope it's where you want to go."

What is the Soul?

“Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.” Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.” For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals." ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

My Daily Walk

The ocean was fairly calm this morning. Calm before the storm as they say as I keep a watch on the dark western skies. Seems there is a storm brewing in the gulf. One of those tropical cyclones as they call them. I had to smile this morning. Before a storm in is part of the world they remind you to upload your insurance policies to iCloud. You know we need a storage like that for our dreams.

I noticed this young boy building a sand castle. He was at that age where his two front teeth seemed to big for his face. Very precise he was.. building his dream in the sand. If the wall was not just right he would take his shovel and repack the sand in the plastic mold and place it just to his liking. As I walked by I complimented his effort. He smiled showing those two large front teeth.

He was in a race against the tide to finish his dream before it was washed away. A lot like all the dreams in our mind. Just perfect before they are washed away by the tide of reality. I am sure he will rebuild his dream again. Maybe tomorrow, next year or even thirty years from now when he brings his children to the beach and shows them how to build a castle in the sand.


Wind blowing out of the southeast as I feel the heavy air of the low pressure streaming its way to the north. As I made my way against the wind there was a poem that stuck with me like the salt was sticking to my skin. I came across it in my reading last week and it seemed fitting for this day...

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten…
―James Russell Lowell

Enjoying my dreams in the calm before the storm.

His name is Haden...with one of those smiles that made you smile.

Stopped To Ponder

Where poets and scientists converge is the idea that while the universe itself isn’t inherently imbued with meaning, it is in this self-conscious human act of paying attention that meaning arises.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Therapy...

"The problem is really never the problem. The coping is the problem.
Just as life is what it is supposed to be. It just Is. How we cope with is makes the difference."

Beach Chair Therapy

"Some may say I'm bitching. I call it Verbal Release Therapy.
Just a matter of perspective."

Beach Chair Therapy

"I'm in therapy to learn to deal with people who need therapy."

My Daily Walk...

Memorial Day weekend on the beach...what a sight. The first plunge into summer. What a release to let go of winter past. Young families, hoping to share a moment and maybe establish a tradition. At least that's what I think they hope for. What I noticed most was the children. For some their first experience of sand and waves. This little one, about three years old, I suppose. I guessed at her age based on the age of my granddaughter, but a good guess never the less. Red candy striped swim suit, blond hair and in her own world. That age where they explore with their senses one moment and the next just run in circles like a child possessed, or like the feeling of the greatest freedom. I think she felt free. Who knows but she was a delight to observe as she splashed her feel in the surf filled holes as the tide rolled in, paying little attention to the cries of her parents to be careful. Such beauty as she played with the waves lapping at her feet then retreating.

Then there was this father with his young son, dipping in the sand with one of those nets and  sharing the capture of a sand crab...will they remember that moment? I hope so, I will reflect on it often.

Then I noticed this small, independent one. Still wearing diapers covered by one of those Micky Mouse swim bottoms. He would not let his father hold his hand to make it to their resting spot. Very insistent  to make his way on his own. About two years old, was my guess, still a little wobble in his walk, teetered with every step, especially in the depressions of the foot prints. Almost falling with every step and when he reached the decline of the beach his little body speeding much faster than his brain. How funny as he struggled between the line of balance and face down in the sand. Pausing occasionally to do what ever his body needed to keep it all together. It suddenly dawned on me that he was experiencing what I experience. You see as you age, there is a point where one experiences the same feelings as my little friend, teetering on the  edge of balance or face down....it's so nice to be two again...

Then my eyes happened upon this young lady, under her umbrella, reading a book,then pausing and staring into the sea. Could be many souls trying to find a moment of peace but her mood was different. Behind that stare was a loneliness. You know it when you see it and it was not her loneliness that captured my attention but it was her special power.  I realized what power she had... in the magic of hiding her loneliness as she smiled and bid me a nice day...Doc