LOVE IS POWER

LOVE IS POWER. At least that’s what the man’s sign says on the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana. He stands by the streetcar stop in hopes that somebody might offer some money. I believe he believes what his sign says.

I make a right on Louisiana and pull in front of a giant frying pan. The outside of the restaurant has been planted out with Alabama red okra and zinnias, a spot with some muscadines, cucumber vines past their summer time and more. I think what I might add to the space. 

I don’t know how much a papaya weighs. I do know that these that came from Independence Street go for two bucks a pound. I know that the first chef took five good-sized ones even though four might have been twenty pounds. I was happy to give, happy to see where these green papayas become the work of artists, for is this not what chefs really are? A combination of scientist and artist.

I stopped at the coffee shop in the pouring rain to try to get some money to Potter. Alex said he was leaving town tomorrow and I thought a little traveling money would be especially nice considering the papayas fell in front of his house. 

I stood on his porch, talked on the phone with Brandon who said he would bring me mahi mahi from Gulf Shores, Alabama. 

Potter poked his head through the front curtains. 

I held out forty dollars. I said, “This is for you.”

“No,” he said.

I said, “For the papayas.”

He said he didn’t even eat papayas. I asked him if he had read what I had written, that both me and Angie found the downed tree and wanted to make sure the papayas didn’t go to waste. 

He said he had.

I didn’t tell him that Angie planted the dead chicken from Lesseps in the empty lot next to her house instead of beneath a peanut butter fruit tree on Needle Street. 

I tried to give him twenty, but he refused. 

The chef from the big frying pan restaurant said that the papaya came at just the right time. He said that he just got in some mahi mahi. I didn’t tell him I was supposed to be getting mahi mahi, too. I didn’t even know if Brandon meant what he said.

Before I sat to write this I knew I wanted papaya leaf tea. I knew I would have to wash the teapot and some other dishes, and sometimes sitting will be trumped by any other distraction. Maybe this happens because of my fear of misrepresentation. Maybe the idea of not having anything to say. But sitting here and now I consider how sixty pounds of papaya that might have rotted on a sidewalk in the 9th Ward will be served in three different ways at three distinct spots within the city.

My last stop required a journey to Mid City where there was a sapote growing in a giant planter along with a curry tree. I dropped twenty pound there and messaged the chef that I'd love to talk to him sometime about plants. He said he’d like that. 

I know that to continue moving forward requires action. 

This papaya leaf tea tastes a lot like fig leaf tea. The internet praises the benefits of both. There is a spiciness to the tea, almost the taste of the papaya seeds. Both teas I would drink the same way I eat moringa, with the consideration and intent that each time I ingest my body and mind become stronger.

I wonder if I taste the calcium or the vitamin A. I wonder where all of this will lead, the idea that love is power and what does that mean, and if power is what runs through the course of everything, is there a way to tap into this and flow, to go on ahead without the need to know the outcome. This must be the true love.

Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Love is our highest word and the synonym for God.”

I found this quote in a book called “The Power of Intention.”

The book was dedicated to me from Chris, a man who extolled the virtues of the words inside back in 2019. 

The last time I saw him we cleaned his apartment of moldy dishes and moldy clothes and pill bottles and whiskey bottles. He told me he wasn’t afraid of death. He said that his dead ex had brought him to visit, that the architecture was baroque and the streets were filled with people fucking and fighting. He said he quite liked it.

We dropped him at detox that day at his request. The next day he left. The day after that they found his body. 

I wonder if he left this plane actively believing in infinity.