Charming, but single

(Title stolen from Cowboy Mouth, “The Avenue”)

Today is two years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and much of the surrounding areas and changed the lives of many people on the Gulf Coast – we Gulf Coasters divide time as “pre Katrina” and “post Katrina.” I scarcely remember a time when Katrina was just a name and not a life-changing storm. And I’m not even from New Orleans, nor was I affected other than my family’s lost homes, living in an evacuee-heavy town, thinking about hurricanes every day for two years and watching a place I love suffer so completely.

I say a little prayer each night before I go to sleep for New Orleans and all of the people who where affected from one end of the coast to the next. I wish on stars for them, I cry for them more than I care to admit. Rebuilding takes time – it is never fast enough, it will never be fast enough, it could never be fast enough. But as a life-long admirer of a city full of the richest food, the most vibrant music, the best energy and the most relaxed pace of anyplace you’ll ever go, my heart is as anxious to heal.

I wish I had some eloquent words to say, something meaningful to offer on this anniversary. Someone else is better suited for that.

But I’ll leave you with a toast I shared with friends when I was lucky enough to be in the Big Easy recently.

“Here’s to being to this great, great city, where so many people would love to be right now.”

A date for Best Friend Ever’s couples shower this upcoming weekend.  As if the horror of not having a suitable date for her out-of-town wedding isn’t enough, it is now en vogue to have men come to bridal showers, once reserved only for women, under the guise of the “couples” shower. Torture for men (I am stereotyping, I know) who probably aren’t jumping up and down over crustless sandwiches, mini pecan tarts, and color-coordinated napkins and dishes on a Saturday night.  I’m trying to spin this one as not going without a date, but as not forcing some poor defenseless man to accompany me to a wedding-related party where my parents and Best Friend Ever’s parents and everyone else will judge his husband potential.

To re-read “Pride and Prejudice.”  I saw Becoming Jane last weekend and since then I’ve had the opening lines of “Pride and Prejudice” in my mind ever since then – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”   I attempted to quote this from memory when my mom was picking someone’s brain about a single man they knew, but I botched the words and the whole thing lost some feeling.

Courage.

Motivation.

Computer help.  Actually, extreme computer help, as I believe my motherboard in my laptop has died, leaving me sans laptop, holding what few words I do have written hostage on a dead machine and keeping me from my lovely, lovely Charming, but Single readers.

Miss you.

Two shots of Patron + red bull and vodka + beer(s) = ill-advised way to relax.

“Did you grab my ass earlier? Because someone grabbed my ass earlier and I think it was you.” = bad pick-up line to use on a woman, no matter how hot you are.

Me + Season Two Grey’s Anatomy DVDs + aforementioned alcohol and flirtation attempt = really bad hangover on Friday.

That is all.

I don’t miss how you text messaged instead of calling. Or how you were too busy to fit me into your schedule and never intended to transition into the role of boyfriend – despite any of the number of reasons why I wanted to believe that you would. Or how you never wanted to go where I wanted to go, even for one evening. Even for one hour.

I miss how you kissed me like you meant it, with confidence and abandon. You made me feel sexier than anyone else ever has.

—

I don’t miss how I was never sure about how I felt about you. Or how you were sometimes too playful, too outgoing, too eager to please.

I miss how your arms and body enveloped me and how I always felt like I had your attention when we were together and that devilish grin you get on your face sometimes and how you always opened the door. You were the only man who ever won me a teddy bear using a claw in a vending machine.

—

I don’t miss that you never were open to being anything to me. That you knew I was crazy about you and fed off of that energy to inflate your ego. I don’t miss how you had me in the palm of your hand and how I would have given myself to you fully if you only would have let me inside your heart for even a second. And you knew that and wouldn’t even entertain the thought.

I miss how I could talk to you forever, about anything and nothing and everything but how I was so taken with you.

“[Charming], I have a prayer for you,” said my Grandmother, a devout Catholic and fixture on her church’s prayer line.

“What kind of prayer?” I asked, with a cautious tone I reserve for moments when I think I’m about to hear something I’d rather not, perfected over years of awkwardness at Sunday dinners.

“Well, I met this woman who worked at Wal-Mart.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, now fully convinced that this gem of advice was probably about to me wildly out of line with my life.

“And she’d had two husbands, and she asked me if I was Catholic,” my Grandmother said.

By this point, wild scenarios of how this conversation even started raced through my mind. I could picture my Grandmother asking the woman working the cash register for advice for marrying off her hopelessly single granddaughter who, “Just works all of the time, you know?”

“And the woman at Wal-Mart gave you a prayer?”

“Yes,” my Grandmother said. “She asked if I knew of the prayer to St. Anne.”

“St. Anne?” I asked. I am familiar with praying to St. Anthony when you’ve lost something or praying to St. Jude, the patron Saint of Lost Causes – and yes, I feared that my Grandmother was about to suggest a prayer to St. Jude. I was fully unaware of a Matchmaker Saint, though I’m sure that if one such saint did exist, my Grandmother would know about it.

“Yes, St. Anne. The prayer goes ‘St. Anne, St. Anne, find me a man.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but for once in a life full of sarcastic comebacks and witty quips, no words came.

“But the woman at Wal-Mart, she said she changed the words around a little because she’d been divorced twice,” my Grandmother said. “So she prays, ‘St. Anne, St. Anne, find me the right man.’”

My Grandmother was so proud of herself for finding a way to appeal to a higher power to intervene in my dating life. And the rest of my family teasingly sang, “St. Anne, St. Anne, find [Charming] a man!” for the rest of the afternoon.