The feeling of the van leaving the asphalt and the metal rails perpendicular to the tires, the whole body suspended for a moment -- and then, in my imagination gathering itself like an animal underneath me, legs curving while flying, and slamming back down on the other side -- is something I cannot give up, even though I am a single mother with three girls who lives a near-saintly daily existence of work and school runs and practice and laundry.

The fact that my car is an 11-year-old green Mercury Villager van, with honor roll bumper stickers, and dents put in the body by hit-and-run idiots, doesn't negate the fact that my car has enough power to fly up over those tracks, to fly around curves on desert highways and orange grove dirt roads.

I speed up when I see the tracks, when it's late at night and I'm alone in the van after dropping someone off for a sleepover, or picking up something near midnight at the grocery store, when I feel so lonely for my old, sometimes-wild life and my gone brother that I have no other choice but to turn the radio to Van Halen or AC/DC and pretend he and I are still driving together and not giving a damn about safety or sanity or anything but the pounding music and blur outside our open windows.

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But, of course, the partying is subdued these days in New Orleans. The French Quarter is open for business, music cascading from open bar doors, the smells of spicy food mingling with shouts and laughter. The city is so grateful for this convention that welcome banners hang everywhere, saying, "We're jazzed you're here!" (And in many souvenir shops, newly printed T-shirts proclaim, "Librarians Do It by the Book! ALA 2006.")

Other T-shirts serve as reminders of last year. "FEMA Evacuation Plan -- Run, Bitch, Run!" And "Girls Gone Wild -- Katrina and Rita" printed over two swirling hurricane images strategically placed on the chest.

And nearly a year after Katrina, many parts of the city are still utter wastelands, streets full of cars and boats and debris but completely empty of people, and even the historic shutters that once shielded windows from hurricanes are being scavenged and stolen and sold from houses where no one expects to return. It was true -- unless you've seen it, and smelled it, you can't truly understand.

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We were driving the two miles home from another family gathering in my father-in-law's driveway. There had been only close family that day, which meant nearly a hundred of us -- blood relatives, relations by marriage and years of friendship. This Memorial Day, there will be more than a hundred people again. My ex-husband and his brother and his cousin will buy more than a hundred pounds of meat.

For the feast that day, as always, we women brought our signature dishes, and meat was everywhere.

The men barbecued. Pork ribs like huge xylophones on the oil drum grill. When they came off the grill, a cousin cut them apart with a hatchet. Chicken, hot links, hamburgers, hot dogs. We had a fish fry, too, because cousins and friends had caught 30 trout at a local lake.

The side dishes? All my sisters-in-law and female cousins and I were responsible for our specialties. Barbecued beans with sausage, green beans with bacon and salt pork, black-eyed peas with neck bones and salt pork, collards with softened meat floating amid the tangled ribbons of green, and my dirty rice with saffron, black beans and lots of hot-pepper sausage.

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I don't belong to you. My mother always said I didn't belong to the old Msieu, and I wouldn't belong to God until I died. I belong to her. I am hers.

"What is your name?"

We stood in the yard between the kitchen and the house. The wind had grown colder as we came further north from New Orleans and the Barataria, where he'd gone to Lafitte to buy the stolen Africans. He said we were near Opelousas now. The trees here were bare of leaves, their branches dark as though burned.

"Can you speak any French?" the new Msieu called out.

None of the Africans answered.

The new Msieu sat down at a wooden table. He took papers from his coat and spread them out. He wrote January 19, 1811.

"Athenaise is your name," he said, toward the first African. "Sometimes they learn words on the ship," he said, turning toward a driver on a horse, a man with a sparse red beard like ants on his cheeks. "Not this group. So expensive. I even had to buy the chains from Lafitte," he said.

"Athenaise." The finger stabbed the air before the first African. "Athenaise." Then the finger moved sideways, to direct the African to shuffle slightly nearer the driver.

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It was our first driveway. He held court there in his discarded barber chair, while his friends and brothers worked on old engines and talked continual smack. A friend bragged how he used to bring down starlings with a slingshot and cook them in the field, and a brother-in-law laughed about the door to his Pinto, stolen by Midnight Auto Supply, two friends who lifted car parts on order.

But eventually, all the men mentioned the same thing.

"When you gonna put up a hoop for your kids?" they'd say to my husband.

"When you havin' kids?" they'd say to me.

He'd been a basketball star, a pretty big name in Riverside, where we were both born and raised. I'd met him in the ninth grade, hanging out after his summer league basketball games, where I'd wandered over from the tennis courts after practicing my backhand for the tennis team.

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"It's a Michael Jackson song," my daughter says, rolling her eyes. "He sounds like he's choking on a peanut or something."

She leans forward to poke the button. "Don't change it," I say, listening more closely. I have never heard this particular song, but the shadow of the beat takes me back -- back to when Michael Jackson was the sexy yet innocent soul singer with Milky-Way skin and huge Afro who ruled the girls in my neighborhood.

This week, Jackson was cleared of allegations that he molested a boy in Los Angeles in the late 1980s -- but still awaits trial in Santa Barbara on charges of molestation of a child at his Neverland ranch. But we're listening to the Michael Jackson of my own youth, his voice spiraling into the car windows.

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We laughed, because that morning we'd read in our local newspaper that our mayor pro tem wanted to explore legal options against the network for slandering our city. On "The O.C.," a show about the lives of rich kids and their parents in Newport Beach, characters take special care to imply that Riverside is a white-trash hell. And the nearby city of Chino doesn't fare much better: City officials there say their city is being depicted as a "dirtbag town."

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I put on moisturizer since I just turned 42, apply the kind of cheap Maybelline lipstick that doesn't come off so I can kiss my kids goodbye without leaving traces of me on their cheeks, and attempt to plug in the curling iron before hearing them turn up the car stereo.

That's why they take my keys and wait in the van -- so they can blast the music. I give up, unplug the curling iron, and pull my hair into those clips all the harried moms wear.

When I descend the porch steps, I see all three of my daughters, heads bobbing, bass thumping from the open window as they sing along with their new favorite song: "Angels Must Die."

OK. So if there had been a personable single male jogging in front of my house, or maybe wanting to use the phone because he'd run out of gas, I'm willing to bet that he'd take one look at us and head the other way.

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FLOUR BAG BABY, it began. My daughter rolled her eyes much more dramatically than I did and folded her arms. "This is the dumbest assignment ever. I can't believe we have to do this."

I read (with errors intact): "Your student is participating in the Family Life section of Science. Part of this section includes a major project called the 'Baby Project.' Materials: One five-pound bag of flour. Please wrap the bag in plastic so that the flower doesn't leak onto the ground. You may wrap the flour with masking tape, but only making tape. Do not use packing tape, duck tape, or electrical tape."

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"Do we get to pick a color?" I asked, trying in best goofy-mother fashion to distract Gaila.

She looked serious, though, and said, "I want purple. Purple and yellow. For the playoffs."

My three daughters are fierce and absolute in their devotion to the Los Angeles Lakers, and since this is an all-female household, the sight of Laker bumper stickers, Kobe jerseys, and the sound of shouts on game nights have startled some unwary neighbors. Especially junior-high boys who know Gaila.

She rolls her eyes as only someone her age can. "Every morning after a game, I hear the boys talking and I say, 'Samaki's got more offensive boards than Shaq because the refs aren't even letting Shaq breathe under the basket.' They look at me like I'm crazy."

I like this crazy.

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If there was a baby. She was dizzy, her head ached, she tasted oil at the back of her throat. But she felt nothing in her belly. She wouldn't look down. She wouldn't even touch her skin, by the navel, because what if there was a baby, and it felt her fingertips? Thought she loved it?

She didn't. Because there wasn't anything to love. She was dizzy because it was 110 today in Tourmaline, and she'd been washing clothes in the bathtub. Her father's girlfriend Callie said, "We can't walk to the laundrymat in this heat and anyhow we ain't got the money." As Elvia hung them outside, the t-shirts were already drying, stiff as flat people.

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Very dramatic.

I knew the pick hammer was a bad idea when my neighbor handed it to my daughter. But I was detached. I thought, "Cool. They'll stay busy excavating that huge dried-mud pile and I'll clean the kitchen."

Detachment parenting is not good, I know now. I admit right here that I only learned what attachment parenting was last year, by reading about it in magazines. Bonding with your baby, the family bed, carrying your infant and toddler at all times, like in a Snugli. Cool.

But see, I'm 11 years into this already. I've been messing up for more than a decade. First off, I work. I have been working since I was 14. And the choice remains clear today, in my house: Mom works 25 hours a week, we eat three meals a day plus mucho snacks.

I bonded big time with my first daughter, Gaila. At 3 months, she stayed with my mother-in-law, who cuddled her and sang without cease, while I rushed back from work twice a day to breast-feed. When Gaila was 2, though, I had to leave her with my husband's godmother, who'd provided home day care for 30 years.

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One box yellow cake mix
One box French vanilla instant pudding (or vanilla)
3/4 cup cream sherry
3/4 cup cooking oil
Four eggs
One teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 5 small loaf pans or 2 large loaf pans.

Combine all ingredients and mix with electric beater about 4 minutes on medium speed. Pour batter into loaf pans. Bake 35 to 40 minutes for small pans, 45 to 55 minutes for large pans. Test with a toothpick -- it should come out clean when inserted in the middle of the loaves.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and cool in pan about 5 minutes before turning out onto rack. (I leave the small cakes in disposable foil pans until cool, then wrap them with colored plastic.)

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I make wine cakes for everyone. I can't even tell you how many of the rich fragrant little loaves we give away, because we make them all the time. At Christmas, we make about 50. In July, we gave away a few to people who hosted us for dinner at a writers' conference in Arizona. A few months ago, I made a big one for my brother, who'd just cut himself on the stomach with his chainsaw while decimating a dead orange grove for firewood. He was probably working while -- while fueled. Liquidly, perhaps pharmaceutically.

My version of alcohol intake is wine cake batter. I don't drink. Not because of any grandiose moral vision of the world, but because I did all my serious drinking when I was 13 and 14. Three friends and I graduated from dark German beer lifted from one girl's garage to cheap Strawberry Hill wine to wanting the hard stuff.

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Do I say: Rosette, my baby girl, my third and last daughter, the one who looks least like me but sleeps curled into my side each night, hand twined in my hair, spine against mine, the only one who was never rocked by her grandmother Alberta but inherited her full cheeks and winged eyebrows and love for footwear, the one not old enough for piano lessons but who sits at the keys to play a lilting-sad repetitious tune before telling me: "That was for my Gramma Alberta that died before I was born and I never got to even meet her" -- do I say, I don't know much, but this is what I know about all your grandmothers?

Your father's grandmother's mother had no name. Her father, a Cherokee, disappeared when she was a child near Nashville and her mother died when she was 8 or 9. She was taken away from the empty house by a white family who, though this was 1870 or so, used her as a slave.

They named her Fine. She was beaten and denied food and clothing; she picked wild blackberries to survive. One day, searching for berries, she found a bullet by the side of the road. She thought it would be her salvation and revenge against the old woman who abused her most.

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I spend Friday nights on a cracked leather loveseat combing out three damp heads springing with waist-length, freshly conditioned spiral curls. While we watch vapid teenage television shows, I spray detangler and separate trying-to-dread locks and then braid the long hair for the night.

I take my daughters' hair very seriously. They are part me -- Swiss and French-American -- and part their father -- Creek, African and Irish-American. They are women of color, girls with burnished gold skin and black eyebrows. In our family, and in the black community where much of our family has lived, the care and maintenance of hair means more than just barrettes and ponytails; hair reflects pride and care, and neglected heads display a serious lack of mother's love.

I'm just grateful for conditioner. I recall pain from my childhood, when my mother combed my waist-length straight blond hair without creme rinse, which she'd never heard of. Let me put it this way: My bathroom looks like a salon sometimes, with frizz-ease, shampoo and leave-in spray.

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I will be cooking for an acquaintance from my daughters elementary school. I dont know her well, but we have talked in parking lots and at birthday parties for five years. She is a single mother, like me, and she works with disturbed and autistic children at school. This week, she will have surgery for breast cancer, followed by seven weeks of chemotherapy.

I will take her one dinner a week for two months. Its not a church assignment, or a pity assignment. Its life.

I'd always seen the phrase "company dinner" in magazines and newspaper cooking sections. My oldest daughter recently read the novel "Betsys Wedding," which Id read years ago, where the main character agonizes over developing her own company dinner. Every woman should have one meal that reflects her taste, her cooking, her life, right?

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Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Arrange washed and dried chicken parts in a non-stick or a buttered 13-by-9 baking pan. Leave the skin on, for roasting juices and good taste.

Arrange the diced potatoes around the chicken. Pour the cream sherry over the chicken to moisten it. Mix the garlic salt, pepper, paprika and rosemary together and sprinkle the mixture over chicken pieces and potatoes. (I like to cover the chicken skin with the spice mix to make a nice roasted crust and just put a little bit on the potatoes.)

Slide the pan or pans into the oven. Bake for at least an hour, maybe as much as one hour and 15 minutes, checking after 45 minutes to see if basting is needed. For a nice glaze on the potatoes and a tasty crust on the chicken, baste with pan juices (mixed with more cream sherry if needed) several times during last 20 minutes or so.

Each pan serves three.

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In junior high, where I met my future husband Dwayne, we witnessed mass fights and riots. I saw girls with razors in their hair and boys with fists. There were more riots in high school; boys fought viciously, one with a tire iron. Fights could be brutal; our friend B.D. got his jaw broken over a quarter in a parking-lot craps game. But no one was killed in school, and no one had guns.

Dwayne had seen guns in his neighborhood. Many fathers there, originally from the South, still hunted. On New Year's, they shot guns in celebration.

But Dwayne never had a gun. When we were newly married, hanging out at my longtime girlfriend's house as drugs really exploded in our city, Dwayne was terrified when my girlfriend's husband pulled out a semiautomatic pistol from under the couch. A potential customer, or killer, had knocked. I was upstairs with my friend and her new baby.

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Make my funk the p-funk,

I wants to get funked up

Make my funk the p-funk

I wants my funk uncut

-- "P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)," Parliament

Saturday night is '70s night on my R&B oldies radio station, which I
can only get in the kitchen. So from my blue Formica counter with the
permanent halo-like blisters where my ex-husband once dripped Krazy Glue,
the ancient radio plays loud, bass-heavy funk. Every radio in this house
is small and old, except for the small and new one in my daughters' room.
Their father gave the radio to my oldest girl for her 8th birthday, her
first since he left.

Since I have to listen to this station in the
kitchen, I clean the floor, the counter, the cupboard doors. My kitchen
is shinier than it has been for years. It is fairly free of funk, using
the definition my husband and my friends always employed when they spoke of
it as dirt. Clean this funky house, man; get this funkhole in shape; man,
your house is funky.

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