Weeping for New Orleans

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Last Spring my friend Kevin and I were in the pool swimming lazy laps and discussing the world. “I’ll tell you something,” he said, “before this summer is over we are going to lose a major American city.”

At the time we thought we were talking about terrorism but today, as I watched the videos on the CNN website of the water rising through beautiful New Orleans, his words echoed in my brain. Who would have thought this possible? And yet, what city in all this country, has always been more fragile? I don’t have a television and, at times like this I am glad that I do not. Because today I would have been glued to it. Watching the videos on CNN’s web site were bad enough. Those poor people. Those poor, poor people.

Yet, when you look at the aerial footage - on one side vast Lake Ponchatrain, on the other the torrid Gulf of Mexico, and along the length of the city, the Mississippi River - it is a wonder it ever existed at all. Isn’t it always the way that those things most fragile and vulnerable are somehow always most beautiful?

I’ve never spent any length of time in New Orleans but made enough weekend trips there when I lived in Texas to have a deep fondness for it. There was a mystique about New Orleans that always tantalized. I spent time exploring the densely hot and strange Cities of the Dead crowded with marble and sheltered by plantain leaves so thick it could be dark as late evening in the middle of the day. My story Asa came from one of those places.

Once my Mother went with me to New Orleans. We stayed in the French Quarter and she carried a guide book with her everywhere we walked and read paragraphs to me about the houses we passed. “Do you know who lived here?” she would exclaim stopping dead in the middle of the street and staring up at the black wrought iron balconies dripping with bougainvillaea. We had an adventure there, my mother and I.

We were sitting in the courtyard of a café drinking iced tea and writing out postcards to send home to Pennsylvania. There was a jazz band playing nearby, kids break-dancing in the street, and, across the street, Christmas carols jingled from the doorway of a year round Christmas store. Two men were sitting at the table next to ours and asked if they could join us. They were visiting from Germany and were very friendly. Very friendly - very, very friendly. My Mother, who never met a stranger, was a little overwhelmed by their generous offer to spend some time with us - perhaps have dinner and go to a jazz club, make an evening of it. I, being more experienced in these matters and less friendly, strong armed her away from the table and across the street to the Christmas shop on some dumb pretext. She was absolutely dumbfounded when I informed her that they were trying to pick us up.

“Oh, I don’t believe that!” she huffed and then, considering it, she added, “do you really think so? Oh, I can’t wait to tell your father.”

I bought a pink ceramic Mardi Gras mask with a unicorn horn in a gris-gris shop and a bunch of candles in tall glass votives painted with the images of saints I’d never heard of. My mother talked about our adventure for the rest of out trip.

On other visits I attended performances at Preservation Hall and shared a candle-lit dinner at Brennan’s with an Australian photographer named Nigel there. I never went much farther than the French Quarter but why would you?

In the earthy rituals of some ancient cultures there was a practice called Days Out of Time. The people believed that those days - used for feasting and revelry of every sort - were days that were off the calendar, that what happened on those days didn’t count, and any child conceived at that time was a child of the Gods with no mortal father. I always felt that my trips to New Orleans were like that.

Hemingway said of Paris in the Twenties that it was a Moveable Feast and that if you were lucky enough to have been there then, it would always be a part of you. New Orleans will re-build. It will be beautiful again. But there will always be two New Orleanses - before Katrina and after. No one knows what the future holds but New Orleans before Katrina was a Place Out of Time and if you were lucky enough to have known it then, it will always be a part of you.

Thanks for reading.