The Strawberry Blog

In one week I have been socially thwarted by a Puerto Rican banker, inadverdently dissed by Quincy Jones, and chatted to, by, and with former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.

Pinsky and collaborator pal Michael Mazur were speaking as part of the University of Southern California’s “Visions and Voices” series (Quincy Jones will be there next month). As my professor friend and I tardily approached the lecture hall Thursday evening, we were stopped by a woman outside.
“The lecture has already started,” she said in a stage whisper and horrible skirt, “so please be quiet when entering the hall.”
Please be quiet? We took our seats and, as Pinsky and Mazur discussed collaboration on Dante’s Inferno, I stewed. Quiet? As in refrain from alerting the press, cueing the trumpets, and striking up the fanfare? Did she mean that kind of quiet? As the discussion carried on colorfully on stage I continued to ruminate on the meaning of this poorly outfitted, presumptuous nitwit, wondering why I didn’t fire back with something like “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an ill bred undergrad?” or “Gee thanks, I know I look like Lindsay Lohan but I promise I’ll behave myself in the auditorium.”
After these fantasized fair to middling retorts, I promptly got down to the business of listening. Listening and scribbling, which is what I do when I’m in lecture halls with brilliant minds and the palpable energy of enlightened people.
People who are in The Dante Club, as Mazur calls it, the unspoken guild to which one is automatically assigned when working on a translation or illustration of Inferno—a collaboration with every other artist in history who has ever worked on Dante.
It’s been a long time since I sat down with Dante’s Inferno and curiously, I had forgotten how, in Canto V, “Carnal Desire,” those fixated on sexual thought walk in a perpetual hurricane. And it gave me pause: what, then, might be the punishment for Gross Negligence in Engineering?

What would Dante do?

Might the punishment entail a perpetual state of coitus interruptus? Or prostatic congestion? Or would it involve drinking enough toxic concoction to make one sick—but not mortally injure? He might condemn the Army Corps of Engineers to be ignored in perpetuity. Or, confine them to a state of hopeless struggle, forever building a levee that is never strong enough—one never good enough for the people who commission it. That seems fair enough in hell, don’t it?
Dante ends the Inferno with this:
“Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
The other Pinsky, Dr. Drew, the M.D. better known for his radio show Love Line, in his recently published study cited that stars—or, more precisely, celebrities—are more narcissistic than the rest of us. No shit, Dante! The star of our evening, Robert Pinsky, very un-egotistically inscribed my book thus: “Best Wishes.”

So, maybe—just maybe—there are stars at the end of hell. If they’re Dr. Drew types and not the celestial ones, you’ll find me sipping a cocktail in Dante’s Fifth Ward—waiting for the lust filled to come in out of the hurricane

August 28, 2006

I have a small suitcase with three changes of clothes, all uncarefully packed around a scrapbook. I have my computer; my bag. That’s when I see him cycling aimlessly—really, it’s too aimless, unliterarily so—in a teeshirt. Around and around across the street from my house, at the edge of the park. I hate when he cycles in the dark. When he spots me he wheels over and we embrace until it feels like the stickiness of August won’t ever separate us.
There was never a time we had trouble saying anything. Words came easily, affection naturally. “Baby,” “sugar,” “sweetpea,” roll off the tongue like Italian. There are some people who, out of proximity and instinct, know they’ve got another soul to count on.
Flowers underscore our parting. The sweet olive is all but dormant so, like a dutiful understudy, the slightly overdone, nightblooming jasmine steps in. The stray brother cats loll in the front yard—the brave one slipping under the wrought iron fence watching us under the sodium lights at the curb where I wait for my ride.
I think about taking him with me. Every time I look back at the stray cats I think of taking him and them, with one front seat and no carriers for wild domestic animals. In thirty seconds I make up my mind: I run through all of the scenarios—unwarranted jailtime, unwarranted death.
There is everything to say and no time to say it, so we speak every word silently, and the embrace substitutes for what every other bone, muscle, and organ is helpless to communicate. I ask him to please go home. Safely. Without incident. Now. But to go home to his home safely and without incident is to ask a drug addict to go home via the dealer on the corner who’s open for business. His home is not without incident; I fear that, in his mother’s Section Eight state of mind, he might not make it. I take mental snapshots of my house and neighborhood, stray cats, trees, the stillness. His face. Everyone left hours before. I feel like I’ve overslept.
“Go home, baby. Please. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” We look at each other a long time. I want to say it but I don’t want to worry him.
Then, as if a director cued the red truck, my ride appears. And August pries us apart.
***
One year ago tonight, he was eight and a half years old. We’ve spoken once since then and I wonder how he’s navigating Texas when all he told me in February was how much he missed home.
The other three boys who went to private school I can’t reach at all, no matter how many times I drive by their house. The girl across the park is gone—mom sold the house before Mardi Gras—and I don’t remember her name so I doubt that I’ll ever find her again. She had a hell of an arm; we liked playing football. The last time I saw her we got good and sweaty playing ball, then had the nerve to eat at the Night Out Against Crime picnic with caked on dirt and flushed faces.
One year anniversaries are hard whether it’s a tough first year at marriage or 365 days after death. What is it about a year, about marking time? On the one year anniversary of leaving, and closing in on the one year anniversary of the flood disaster, it doesn’t appear that places fare too much better than we do.

June 1, 2006

I’ve been getting serious about my foot lately—the foot on which I am forbidden to dance, says my Korean acupuncturist. He failed to negate the command, however, and what came out a few weeks ago was, “You have a choice. You have a choice!” So the intern, sensing that the crazy, illogical wheels in my head were wishfully creaking, quickly pointed out, “He means, You have no choice. You can’t dance.” Hope—once again dashed in TinselTown. When they lit a candle, switched on the New Age sea sounds, and closed the door, I could feel the qi (chi) moving. The mass of stagnation that I’ve been post-hurricane was finally flowing a little, with some encouragement from thin silvery pokers. It flowed right up to my eyes and a few salty drops fell down my cheeks. I couldn’t wipe them away; you’re not supposed to move with needles stuck in your meridiens.
The Chinese herbs are another matter entirely. They taste like dirt trampled by farm animals. I take them on an empty stomach, making big, dramatic farm animal noises with each swallow. But that’s not the extent of my semi-nausea. I’m almost getting used to the taste of the herbs. It’s the date that’s been getting to me lately—since December.
There’s been a daily low level stress in my bones—and everyone else who calls New Orleans or the Gulf Coast home knows it well—a mounting pressure rising imperceptibly with each day, as we move closer to the Day, to Hurricane Season. Some of us missed Christmas, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest…but no one can escape this one. If I were at home, I’d probably attend the same voodoo ceremony I went to a few years ago—to stave off the birthday “presents.” And I’d probably go to church to do the same—to pray in a hallowed place that the misfires of the Army Corps of Engineers don’t fall victim to their incompetence. I’d probably take long walks in the heat—a veritable sauna—to sweat out the impurities, to pray that the sinking feeling and by now mid-level stress isn’t commensurate with the onslaught of climactic “gifts.” NO PRESENTS, I’d say. PLEASE, NO PRESENTS. JUST BRING YOURSELF.
Today is the birthday of Hurricane Season. It is a long, diva season, longer than any other woman’s I know. And today there’s a brass band playing to mark C. Ray’s mayoral triumph and, really, there’s no other choice but to move on and ahead, upward and onward, one unified people and city. And like a good Aries whose birthday season is passed, I say move on and unify, let bygones be bygones…there is no time. No time for quibbling. No time for pettiness or beefs. Light the candles, bang the drum, and someone—I mean this—shake the mayor’s hand for me. I’m far away for a while. But I’m celebrating. I’ve got my own candles. One for my foot and one that there isn’t a hurricane junta. And one for my mother. She would have been 62 today.

April 27, 2006

Saturday night we had dinner at a remarkably authentic French restaurant at the pseudo-Paris casino. And maybe it was the French-born, New York Times photographer (responsible for many of the post-hurricane disaster photos that broke our hearts last year) who said to me, “What? You really think your absentee vote was counted?!” Maybe it was the lingering effects of that statement—at which the entire table cracked up, including me, ever so nervously. Whatever the cause, I was up at 5:00 Sunday morning.
At the time my eyes startled awake, the little red light on my Blackberry was flashing with non-mayoral election information from my neighbor friend. I answered and she texted back, “Damn girl, don’t you sleep? I have an excuse…kids : ). Go to bed so we can have an intelligent conversation later.” And I heeded her advice—with difficulty. Great difficulty. The mind races, nay, relays, baton in hand. I’m every racer, super fast. Flying, dervish minded.
Just before noon we had that intelligent conversation. Then, against my better judgment—I came to Vegas to take my mind off the fact that I was missing Wynton Marsalis & Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s music début and second line—I called my good friend, Bob. I knew where he was; where I wanted to be, at Congo Square, at the concert. I wanted to hear a comforting voice. He answered immediately.
“Hey! Can ya hear it? It’s Wynton. Best damn thing I’ve heard in years.”

Bob’s a bandleader; he doesn’t dole out compliments like that very often.
“Yes, yes! Keep the phone on, please—it’s beautiful.” I was referring to what I could make from the melody and percussion; it certainly wasn’t the sound quality I was talking about, courtesy cellular.

Bob continued to hold that phone up and I, lying prone, alone in a darkened Las Vegas hotel room, listened. And dreamed. Closed my eyes and danced in my head, in the bed no less, felt the temperature and warmth of the park; saw the people, was one of the crowd. Broken footed, shattered bones. No pain, no progress, no elevation. No spirit, no light, now with no hesitation I danced. For nine minutes and eighteen seconds everything—the absentee ballot and the absence, the unquiet mind and quiet tears —the unrelenting desert depression, vanished, like a mirage up close.

“I’ll call you later, baby.”

And personal.

April 7, 2006

My beloved is a self-described recovering Catholic; the people I call my extended family are fiercely Italian and unalterably Catholic. When last we got together in Washington D.C. last month, I expressed my interest in doing what is, to them, the unthinkable: being Catholic without taking the time, energy, and classes to become Catholic—as in recognized by the church as Catholic. Even my mother—by her own admittance no great student—even she became a proper Catholic. I’ve just been around it for so long—all my life—that it feels right to be Catholic by circumstance. I feel entitled to it. Like being guilty by association.
(For the record, I harbor none of that guilt stuff and won’t when I do become Catholic).
My beloved, an expert in such matters, doesn’t think that I should spend the time to become what he has summarily taken half a lifetime to reject. Before I returned home to New Orleans last month he said, “What’s God gonna do if you take a little biscuit and vino while you’re there?—strike you down?”
My nephew is the president of a prominent Scottish university’s Catholic Society. He neither owns nor drives a car but since the new pope arrived (yes, he went to Rome to be there for the historic occasion) he possesses a bumper sticker that says: THE CAFETERIA IS CLOSED.
I wouldn’t be wrong to assume that he is talking directly to me. To my kind of people—the buffet crowd, picking and choosing what appeals, rejecting what offends. I appreciate the cleanliness to which he approaches his religiosity. However, in my world nothing has ever been so black and white that I would or could boast the kind of bumper sticker philosophy to which he is so clearly affixed, able, and ready. I’ve lived in a world of gradations; my nephew’s world has been one of sheer, polished black granite and alabaster. It is no wonder that he is an excellent ballroom dancer, filled with the kind of preternatural grace that we associate with Fred Astaire or Mr. “Bojangles” Robinson. It is no wonder that it was he who taught me how to waltz on Christmas Eve.
So, with that in mind, what follows might make them reel in horror. However, once they recover (if they’re still talking to me), my family will hopefully recognize that, if I can’t go through with a year’s worth of classes at this time (especially since my fave parish is only physically extant right now), at least I’m moving in the right direction. I felt the spirit and it lifted me to the salty confluence of joy and sorrow.
My friend, Dr. A., was late picking me up but Mass at St. Augustine (in Tremé, New Orleans) is a fairly protracted affair of words and music and, despite the slew of press and the compactedness, we found a seat toward the back. Father LeDoux elicited laughter, Amens, encouraged rises and falls, singing…I was pleased to be back at the only church I’ve ever felt truly comfortable in. And I happily proffered what crumpled cash I had left over from Los Hombres Calientes the night before—an entirely different kind of spiritual experience—and before I knew it, it was time for standing in line with the rest of the congregation.
In line to receive the holy spirit of Christ through a biscuit and a little vino.
Something I’d never done, not in my life, despite countless opportunities to sneak in unbaptized, un-Catholicized, (definitely uncircumsized), and I suppose, because it was pure spirit that moved me, there was no wrath of God in the form of lightning striking me down.
And I wasn’t the only one.
When I returned to my seat, Dr. A confessed in a whisper that she’d “never done that before!” and we both giggled—spiritually reverent of course—like regular schoolgirls who’d just done something naughty for the sake of being good. We’d gone against the grain (hello…Christ?) as dictated by the blood in our veins and the reverberations in our hearts and—I kid you not—we giggled. And we looked up and down and all around for any sign that we had committed a wrong, a sin. Nothing. Not even a deep, barely audible, bass-y sound from the pulpit. Nothing. Niente. We sat in our pews, in our Thirties, schoolgirls with the blood and body of Christ that we’d always wanted but hadn’t had the courage to take for fear of everyone knowing we were frauds.
But spiritual Love is never fraudulent.
It was Father LeDoux’s final mass: March 19, 2006. Though I didn’t tell him later that day that I wasn’t really a Catholic, I did confess (in good fashion, in preparation) that I wasn’t a regular member but I wanted to be. We embraced.
For some reason—officials say it is simply economic, others say it is a surreptitious bond between money and politics—they closed St. Augustine parish and shipped the inimitable Father LeDoux off to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi with nary a laptop to keep him connected to the congregation that loves him. But before you can wag your finger and blame this on me, know that these machinations began long before the good doctor and myself received the body of Christ. The Bay St. Louis relocation had nothing to do with our biscuits and vino.
But Heaven hath no fury like a parish scorned.
UPDATE April 9th: Breaking news. As of yesterday, after much debate the archdiocese of New Orleans has agreed to reopen St. Augustine parish on a trial run for 18 months.

March 3, 2006

If there is one thing to say about Mardi Gras, it is this: The Plan, your roadmap of festivities and schedule of Bacchanal—which is usually too much for any 18 hour period—inevitably gets tossed and you play everything by ear, taking the day and the magic as it comes.
In that respect, this Mardi Gras was no different. Everything that I had lightly mapped out was turned on its head. Early breakfast and jacuzzi on Spain Street was replaced by bloody marys and a biscuit across the street. I missed the Indians uptown because 6AM was nowhere near my map given the hour I crossed my pillow that morning; I began the day, dressed as Dorothy Parker/Sally Bowles, with neighbors.
And then it hit me. It rang and sang and heartened me from 1920s cloche to leather shoes: The Children Were Back. Naylor and Nicholas, Aureliano and Isabella, Jack and Tyler…I knew they were here. But as I left them, trekking toward St. Charles, more spilled out from a house on Euterpe. For a moment they replaced the pink house where Marcus, Leon, and Dexter lived. I stopped and talked with the only adult in sight.
“What happened to the girl who lived over there?”
“They sold the house, baby,” was the disappointed response.
We tried to fit some post-disaster pieces together then off we went, a group unknown to each other until now. As we reached the Avenue and the Zulu parade, there were even more children: on shoulders, in strollers, holding hands, stretching their arms for coconuts. There was the braided baby and the two flaming redheads. And then, between floats, two mothers cajoled their school aged sons into warm reunion. It had been six months since they last saw each other—and you could tell that all they wanted to do was embrace. But for age and a thousand people in their way, they would have.
After an unsuccessful attempt at procuring a coconut for bespectacled Tristan—I did manage a Zulu pendant—I hoofed down St. Charles, toward the Backstreet Cultural Museum. I hooked up with Aunt Louise and Uncle Jerry, parting ways at Poydras (“Be careful, baby!”), then I found a new cousin in Maya from Boston, late to work and a fast walker like me. I followed her as she excused and northeasted her way crossing Canal (“Come on, people!”), and when warmly we parted at Iberville, it was an excellent time for another bloody mary. My favorite poet at the Bombay Club supports a fierce bartending habit, and he sent me on my Tremé way, tomato concoction in hand.
I ran into more friends, briefly enjoying their circuit party (Part I, St. Louis Street), and when I reached Backstreet there were still more friends and acquaintances, more sunlight on St. Aug, more smiles. And off to the second line with Liberty, the Love Machine, and a man who is self-described as simply exquisite. We passed signs still admonishing THOU SHALL NOT KILL, while under it one woman barbequed and another twirled her umbrella. And then the second line…and more familiar faces. One face told me, “See? If you just come to the right places, we’ll see each other more often,” and another said, “My SIS-TAH!” That hug was nearly death by brooch for poor Dorothy Parker/Sally Bowles.
Loosely grouped at the curb, it happened again, like an Irish joke: More Children. They were everywhere. I made a new friend in Pam who entrusted me with the care of hers, including nieces and nephews, while she headed toward Claiborne for a turkey leg (The Love Machine had brought one back for communal consumption but Pam was determined to feed her own brood). Those children who weren’t embarrassed to be monitered I took by the hand and jockeyed for more Zulu pendants. Then back to the curb for sight seeing.
Still more: yellow-feathered Indian girls, red-feathered boys, standing patiently for pictures. Boys too cool for school or a secondline or a stranger looking after them—but they knew they had to be there. They knew that tradition trumped their middle school surliness. With sunglasses, baseball caps, and Hornets jerseys they gathered at the neutral ground, not standing in ancestral way.
The crowd dispersed, I parted with Liberty and Pam, and walked toward the Quarter, to Dauphine Street, where a new friend made on Friday had invited me for what would be the best jambalaya I’d ever had—a perfect blend of flavor and kick. And then the neighbors—some I’d left at breakfast, others I’d never joined for Marigny pancakes—called, “We’re down the street. Come have a drink!” And after a beverage on one of the gayest corners in the city, I left with Jim—a stranger until just last week.
We returned to the Dauphine Street hotspot, made introductions, sat long enough to watch two Korean War veterans get their picture taken by a man with a real 19th century hooded camera and for a big chief to arrive with face paint to spare, and finally did make it down to Frenchmen.
And there we stayed. With more friends. Ducking into Snug for respite both refreshing and biological, talking in the middle of the revelry with a neighbor documentarian—a humanitarian—who must have celluloid friendly angels, I say, watching over him. He will present the real deal, he will have New Orleans gold by the end of the year.
As the spectacular girl in blue feathers and triple wide tarp (my friend Jennifer) waltzed off toward Chartres with a man she’d met at the grocery, I decided to end the day on a high note. “Always end on a high note,” I said to Jim, my new partner in Mardi Gras. “Always leave wanting more…and knowing when you have a plane to catch.”
Crossing Chartres I ran into Steve the trombonist, videotaping while he walked, and we posed like a couple of early 20th century cast offs from the Lyric Theatre for Cheryl and Matt the Photographers; then the impossibly handsome and talented pianist “Lightin’” walked by and embrace we did—when will we see each other again?—and passing by in twos and threes, McNulty the Foodie and Marcie My Fellow Mississippi Evacuee, the guy from Donna’s…they were all—almost—there.
With feet screaming, Jim and I headed toward Canal, toward a taxi. The Bombay poet supplied us one more drink and we crossed right through red carpet rolled out in front of a large hotel on the American side of Canal Street. Jim greeted a man coming our way who turned back and said, “Hey, what’s up, brother!” It was C. Ray, the mayor—no doubt headed for the red where our feet had warmed it.
It was 10:00 PM and there were no more children. Hopefully, they were sleeping with Zulu pendants all snug in their beds. In truth, many were headed back the next day or days to Houston, to Dallas, to points west, north, east. Many could not attend at all but the Times-Picayune ran stories on diasporidic Mardi Gras the states over. Others would never attend. What the Times-Picayune did not run was a letter sent by the Bombay Poet, with an idea suggesting that all of those parading on Mardi Gras, native, local, and tourist, bow their heads for one minute as the hour strikes 10:oo AM, to mourn those lost. Paper sanction or no, perhaps next year we can have that one quiet, masqued minute.
As for this year, the heat was remarkable for February. The Mardi Gras, remarkable therapy.

January 18, 2006

As much as I’d like to put to rest Mayor Nagin’s unchecked spouting; as much as I would like to think that, two days later, I am over it and that I am mature enough to see the error of his vocal ways, that he’s tired and we should just move on…I’m only human—with foibles as many as C. Ray.

Maybe.

First, let’s look on the bright side of Spouting Mayors: at least C. Ray wasn’t caught with a couple of hookers, a vial of crack and the audacity to retort: “Bitch set me up,” like Mayor Marion Barry, of the Original Cité du Chocolat. Instead, Nagin just invoked Willy Wonka and the Jesus Factory. Former D.C. Mayor Barry poisoned the wells of so much water that, despite allowing such crimes as a sum total of four dictionaries per school in Anacostia elementaries, Barry went on to be elected City Councilman of the Eighth Ward. So much for hookers, substance abuse, and being soft on education. A friend of mine who irregularly comments on NPR, calls this American phenomenon “upwardly failing.”

Let us not continue that particular American Phenomenon, please. Let us not say to our children, “thou shalt fail to meet your highest expectations and so ye shall reap the rewards of great failure—American Success!” Let us not—because I have not forgotten the first paragraph of this essay—go easy on elected officials and hold them to lower standards. As much as C. Ray wants to forget about his lexical trespasses, as much as he thinks he was possessed by lack of sleep (or just requires a new PR girl), the fact remains that our elected mayor spewed instead of remaining dignifiedly silent; belched uncontrollably instead of gathering the words of his frustration into graceful cohesion. Instead, C. Ray seemed to have taken a page out of Barry’s book, refusing to consult a dictionary much less a thesaurus.

And all of this disgorging…on such a winter’s day. Could it have been a more ironic situation in which Ray Nagin let loose and foul his diatribe? Of all days, C. Ray—Martin Luther King day. If King was known for one principle, it was inclusion. So fervent was King’s desire that all of God’s children play together on one tarmac that not only did some younger lions of his Southern Christian Leadership Council revolt and split, he was killed for it. Of all principles to rant against by way of sloppy oratory, Mayor Nagin. Of all times to rail against the healing of our city.

Instead, let’s look to the carefully wrought words of someone who knows a thing or two about timing, about measure and tone—musician, scholar (and gentleman) Wynton Marsalis, who delivered the Tulane/Xavier/Loyola/Dillard Universities’ (inclusive) keynote address Monday night. Marsalis appealed to MLK day itself as an honor, “because it was Dr. King’s tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another…empowered with the feeling that if we want to we can speak truthfully to one another.”

The day itself, a reopening of four universities—two historically black—now commingling under two academic roofs—was one powerfully demonstrated by doing (thank you, Tulane President Scott Cowen). In fact, Marsalis’ speech could best be described as an impetus to do. To not simply whine and complain in dorm rooms and bars but to take the baton passed by another generation and continue its principled and spiritual drive. “We can work together, ” he said. “We can rely on one another because Dr. King’s actions made his dream our reality, and this rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we’re ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. Look around this room and realize that the final chapter of that movement still waits for a generation with the courage to write it.”

Marsalis even quoted Ben Franklin’s, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ He reminded us that, “a few hanging together can lead a nation to change.” And in one gracefully segued paragraph to the next, Marsalis eschewed the hackneyed and frustrated for the well wrought and measured. At one point he challenged the young generation in his audience to “[push] an older one to a higher standard.” That it’s been a long time since that notion was turned on its head.

I could go on—and he does, beautifully—but this essay is not an academic reading of Wynton Marsalis’ keynote address. It is simply a critical look at a day solemnized for a man gifted in oratory, in which two contemporary men delivered speeches aimed at higher ground.

And only one reached it.

Upon comparing the two speeches, the history books and future scholars will lament the irony but praise the honor by Marsalis for King. Hopefully, for Nagin’s sake, they will forget his ill chosen phrases and vernacular back peddling.

Then again, it’s been almost 16 years and I still remember Barry’s infamous crack/hotel room words. Why? Because words are mighty; they are powerful. They can be hands by the whirlpool and grist for the mill. Witness these last few that Marsalis spoke and then tell me just how mighty that sword can be:

“I’m here to tell you, when young folks are motivated to action, when they act with insight, soul and fire, they can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation. It’s time somebody woke us up.”

Sssshhhh. Just don’t wake up C. Ray. He clearly needs the sleep.

December 5, 2005

We will hasten the flow of elegy; we shall render it history; we shall yield to a wider ocean.

It will happen: one day we’ll realize that we’ve slowed the pace of our frenetic obsession; that most of our thoughts and reactions are not a direct result of an enormous disaster. That the aftermath is no longer our constant companion but, instead,
part of our collective story—a reference point so vast that every one of her affected citizens can hang their tale on its wash line. A chain of oral histories tattered and torn, some intact, some fractured. Stories related, no matter their relation, despite their kin and color. The question is, when? How much time will suffice? When will we be free of its effects?

To be free from its effects is to erase it from the collective—to lose our relations. What I am suggesting is that one day—who knows how long—we will notice that the minutiae of the aftermath (Hurricaniana?) will cease to be the overarching conversation. One day we will get back to business with only minor references to Pre- or Post K. However, this will only happen when our city is restored to something resembling normalcy. That’s tricky, of course, saying normalcy, considering many people find that New Orleans is the only city that loves them back—and that she was never quite normal to begin with. But whatever normalcy she possesses will have to be restored for her citizenry to break through. And how can we do that with so few returned, so many in limbo, and still others disavowing her?

If she were not a city but instead, say, your mother, your grandmother—would that be different? If we didn’t have the funds for her best care, wouldn’t we patch together a family hospice? Wouldn’t we take, borrow, and steal the best medicine to salve her pain and stave off inevitable depression?

A body of neighborhoods, a row of houses, a string of porches. They are bodies nonetheless; interconnected, breathing entities. Of blood and brick, skin and mortar, spirit and cypress. More complex, multifarious in nature.

But a body still.

November 30, 2005

Stable sleeping patterns of New Orleanians are relative at best these days. If the Katrina Tickle hasn’t already sought refuge in your throat, the mold spores have. Once again, I can’t sleep. So I shall take the Tour of Death and Destruction—the one I’ve avoided for two weeks—in a few hours, once curfew has ended. Curfew. It’s anathema to New Orleans, to a city steeped in such independent concoction—at once the edge of North America and straddling the Third World.

I’ve avoided the Tour not because I don’t want to see it with my own eyes (and not CNN’s), but because I’ve had very good, solid excuses: Don’t want to do it alone. It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death. I’m packing the house today. It’s Monday. Well, perhaps that last one is more pathetic than grounded. Today is The Big Day for this reason: I leave Thursday and won’t return until Christmas. Therefore, it follows that Wednesday is the last possible chance to see It for myself. I hadn’t thought of doing it at the crack of dawn, but what better time? Metaphorically at least, it might signal something positive. And although he had no idea when he said it tonight, I’m prepared for the worst only because my friend Stephen told me, “We’ve lost everything; I have no shame in Red Cross lunches; and I’m looking forward to my Christmas FEMA trailer.”

All with a smile in his voice. Now if that kind of hope doesn’t infect you then you ought to crawl back into bed and dream a little dream of faith.

November 16, 2005

The whirlwind of Saturday night’s return home—barbeque at the neighbors’, the Brothers French at Donna’s, and a post curfew Mid-City bacchanal—has given way to the ungentle fact that we now live in a cow town. Well, not quite a cow town; just a small town in a hand me down geography. Too big for our britches yet not big enough to fill them. My friends were right: fuses are a little short, eyes a bit glassy, there is endless repartée of repair.

You know you’re in the transitional New Orleans when John Boutté closes his emotional, spiritually uplifting evening with, “Thank you very much. Good night. Now, go clean y’alls houses!” Which brings me to this: how many ways can you say, “I’m cleaning.” Because when you’re sharing a drink with friends you haven’t seen in three months, that is what’s on your mind.

“Hey, what are doing, what you been up to?”

“Oh, you know, I’m just moving stuff around.”

“Really? Yeah, me, too.”

Riveting. You may be working on a book of essays or composing music; perhaps you’re defending the preservation of your city from salivating developers or painting pictures of its storied past. At the end of the day, we’re all engaged in some manner of debris removal, bleach scouring, sheetrock installing, organization of things shifted. In a word, cleaning. How do I clean thee? Construction, destruction, demo. Brushing, sweeping, moving. Face it: we are all our grandmothers now. Our names are Gladys, Bernice, Ethel Mae, Sophia, Big Molly.

A logical deduction to all of this industriousness is that we have created numerous trash piles that previously would have been collected twice weekly. One of my friends—a scientist—finds herself, post-Katrina, wracked by a littering disorder. And there are enough trash heaps around to sustain her habit, to prevent her from thinking that she’s a shadow of her former, ecologically concerned self. She tells herself and anyone who has physically stopped her from this peculiar torment, that she’s just “adding to the pile around her.”

Just yesterday a friend, finishing an oil canvas depicting a mob running a notorious mistress out of 19th century New Orleans, said: “Gone are the days of ‘Mr. Good Guy.’ From now on, no more nice pictures.”

These are odd, odd times, indeed. But, as an elderly evacuee to Indiana recently said, “I’d rather be smelling the sewer in New Orleans than the roses in Indianapolis.”

Those sewers will be smelling like roses soon enough.