Sunday, September 04, 2005
Tell us your stories
Both New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast are special places to me. Exotic, alluring, and in a real sense, a lost home.
New Orleans was the first really big city I ever saw, as a sophomore in college on a bus trip to see the King Tut treasures at the museum in City Park. I drank my first beer on that trip (it's true, I swear it), ate my first raw oyster, craned my neck to see the top of One Shell Square from the bus window, and vowed I'd be back often.
And after I graduated, my first job was with the newspaper in Biloxi, Miss. I lived for 14 months in Gulfport and made lifelong friends. We celebrated with shrimp parties, hunkered down through Hurricane Frederic, took long walks on the mud flats when the tide went out, watched teenage couples stick flounder, and said we'd never grow up and get real jobs. That was before the casinos brought big money to the Coast, before the Sun and Herald merged into a bigtime newspaper, when memories of Hurriane Camille were still fresh and everyone thought such a storm would never come again.
I did grow up and move away, but less than a year later, I was back in New Orleans. Married by a justice of the peace in Chalmette at Mardi Gras and living in a second-floor flat at the east end of Decatur Street, overlooking the Old Mint and the French Market. Renovation plans forced us out at the end of the summer, so we moved to a complex in Kenner just inside the levee. That place is a park now, or was until last week. We have gone back to New Orleans for our anniversary nearly every year for the last 15 years.
A few years ago, on a business trip, I met a woman who worked for the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce -- I invited her and her daughter to share a table with me at the Cafe du Monde when all the tables were full and a long line waited to get in. I told her that my daughter was born in New Orleans and still liked to say she was from there. The woman mailed me a few "Proud to call New Orleans home" bumper stickers. My daughter put one on her car, but I think I still have a few left.
The loss is staggering, personal. And yet while many thousands like me have a special love for New Orleans and for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, our sense of loss is minuscule next to the anguish of those whose lives Katrina has devastated. I am proud that our community is making a place for some of them to begin rebuilding their lives.
New Orleans was the first really big city I ever saw, as a sophomore in college on a bus trip to see the King Tut treasures at the museum in City Park. I drank my first beer on that trip (it's true, I swear it), ate my first raw oyster, craned my neck to see the top of One Shell Square from the bus window, and vowed I'd be back often.
And after I graduated, my first job was with the newspaper in Biloxi, Miss. I lived for 14 months in Gulfport and made lifelong friends. We celebrated with shrimp parties, hunkered down through Hurricane Frederic, took long walks on the mud flats when the tide went out, watched teenage couples stick flounder, and said we'd never grow up and get real jobs. That was before the casinos brought big money to the Coast, before the Sun and Herald merged into a bigtime newspaper, when memories of Hurriane Camille were still fresh and everyone thought such a storm would never come again.
I did grow up and move away, but less than a year later, I was back in New Orleans. Married by a justice of the peace in Chalmette at Mardi Gras and living in a second-floor flat at the east end of Decatur Street, overlooking the Old Mint and the French Market. Renovation plans forced us out at the end of the summer, so we moved to a complex in Kenner just inside the levee. That place is a park now, or was until last week. We have gone back to New Orleans for our anniversary nearly every year for the last 15 years.
A few years ago, on a business trip, I met a woman who worked for the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce -- I invited her and her daughter to share a table with me at the Cafe du Monde when all the tables were full and a long line waited to get in. I told her that my daughter was born in New Orleans and still liked to say she was from there. The woman mailed me a few "Proud to call New Orleans home" bumper stickers. My daughter put one on her car, but I think I still have a few left.
The loss is staggering, personal. And yet while many thousands like me have a special love for New Orleans and for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, our sense of loss is minuscule next to the anguish of those whose lives Katrina has devastated. I am proud that our community is making a place for some of them to begin rebuilding their lives.
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New Orleans is the heart of our country. And our heart is breaking.
If America is to become a multiracial nation, New Orleans has showed us how. Bitter, vicious racism and classism still exist there, but the colors and cultures have blended enough to show that we really can live together.
But now, the raw and gritty town with music in its soul and a vague Brooklyn accent is crushed and bleeding. Dennis Hastert has said to bulldoze it, forget what it means, build a Disney version on reinforced concrete stilts. Scatter the Confederacy of Dunces to the winds.
Katrina has caused unbearable misery in both Mississippi and Lousianna, but something about the suffering of New Orleans resurrects the feelings of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. There is a feeling of impending failure, a despair that all our efforts are collapsing.
New Orleans has crime, poverty, and smelly streets, but we love it for its sheer aliveness. If we smell garbage and urine down an alley in the Quarter, or we are approached by a vaguely threatening tattooed and pierced panhandler, we accept it as part of the package -- like our smelly, misbehaving baby children, we love it for itself.
In the next months, hundreds of thousands of refugees from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will move into our back yards for the duration. Like the dustbowl Okies, their vacant, angry eyes will reflect the raw wounds suffered by our communal self.
Welcome them, tolerate their impatience and misbehavior, and help them to build their home back again. After all, It is really us who have lost our home.
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If America is to become a multiracial nation, New Orleans has showed us how. Bitter, vicious racism and classism still exist there, but the colors and cultures have blended enough to show that we really can live together.
But now, the raw and gritty town with music in its soul and a vague Brooklyn accent is crushed and bleeding. Dennis Hastert has said to bulldoze it, forget what it means, build a Disney version on reinforced concrete stilts. Scatter the Confederacy of Dunces to the winds.
Katrina has caused unbearable misery in both Mississippi and Lousianna, but something about the suffering of New Orleans resurrects the feelings of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. There is a feeling of impending failure, a despair that all our efforts are collapsing.
New Orleans has crime, poverty, and smelly streets, but we love it for its sheer aliveness. If we smell garbage and urine down an alley in the Quarter, or we are approached by a vaguely threatening tattooed and pierced panhandler, we accept it as part of the package -- like our smelly, misbehaving baby children, we love it for itself.
In the next months, hundreds of thousands of refugees from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will move into our back yards for the duration. Like the dustbowl Okies, their vacant, angry eyes will reflect the raw wounds suffered by our communal self.
Welcome them, tolerate their impatience and misbehavior, and help them to build their home back again. After all, It is really us who have lost our home.
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