Mother's Day has come and gone, and for me, it was very, very nice. My family let me sleep in, we went out to Antoine's for brunch in the Rex room, amidst a spangly queen of Rex gown and innumerable pictures of upper crust, self-styled royalty from 1876 on, and concluded the day with gin and tonics at our friend Justin's house. Life is so hard down here sometimes.
This year's Mother's Day brought some things to mind, however. First thing, an old Quarter street gag, designed to get your money from as easily and as deftly as possible:
Bet you twenty I can tell you how many kids your father had!
If you take 'em up on the bet, you find real soon you're out of your twenty:
Your father didn't have any kids, it was your mama that had the kids!
Haven't seen any of those tricksters on Bourbon lately. My first trip to New Orleans featured them prominently when they stiffed an ex-boyfriend by telling him where he got his shoes. Put him off Bourbon Street for life. Another one bites the dust...
Second thing, a tale of two mamas, recounted through direct contact and conversation at the zoo recently. The zoo is a great place to take kids on a regular basis here, once one becomes a member. It pays for itself many times over, what with a ride on the zoo train, kids' attractions such as the petting zoo, the carousel, a safari simulation ride, and a small playground. My son was crawling all over the playground when I encountered one mom who wanted to read my FEMA T-shirt. Turned out she was chaperoning with her daughter's school group, and she complained a little about the teachers in charge of the group, that they could have walked up to her and told her about where to meet in the zoo rather than calling her on her cell phone. We talked about a number of things as we were sitting on a nearby bench, watching our kids play.
As with most things around here, the talk turned to flooding, to rebuilding, to some of the new hurts people have to endure. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a woman nearby overheard us and chimed in some, too. Chaperone Mom was in the midst of renovations on her house, and was ticked that she didn't have windows yet, and here was hurricane season coming around the corner. The Home Depot was supposed to have come and measured for them around January, and it still hadn't happened yet. I talked of how much I had wanted to help friends we had down here when all hell was breaking loose, and she talked of those she knew, close family members who still needed help after all this time. People who had had to evacuate and couldn't return. People who had died from grief, old and young, at the loss of property and of loved ones. The places they had left had been their homes for generations. C-Mom herself was not in the best of states, having gained at least thirty pounds over the past months since the storm. If she could leave, she would, but home was here, and she was going to make the best of it.
Overhearing Mom talked of having had to evacuate when she was about to move into a new house. Her husband had had tenure at Tulane, until they eliminated his department as part of the university's restructuring. Now they will be moving on to a college in a nearby state, having never moved into or lived in their house here. O-Mom's kids were still pretty young, and would probably be able to take that move okay, but C-Mom's daughter was in grade school and had already endured a lot. Each mom was having to be strong for her kids in different ways. C-Mom wished me good luck with life down here. I was going to need it, she said. She will need it too, as will O-Mom.
Luck brings me to the third thing, sheer dumb luck.
Most of my friends know that my mother and the Big One of 2005 share the same name. When I first saw trackings of Katrina as it was entering the Gulf and picking up steam, I e-mailed my mom and told her there were much easier ways to visit New Orleans. And then it turned into the mess that we are still reeling from.
In the weeks after August 29, my mother went into a department store and pulled out her credit card for a purchase. The clerk took one look at the name on her card and let out an uncomfortable, "Ohhhhh," at the sight of her first name on the card. Sheer dumb luck.
My mom deserves to have many things named for her, but a storm that will go down in history as the cause of one of the biggest natural disasters to hit these shores should not have been one of them. I see the T-shirts and bumper stickers, and even an art show, calling the storm one nasty five letter word, and sometimes it takes major self-control for me not to blurt out, "Leave my mother OUT of this!" Sure Mom sometimes behaves like a force of nature, but she's only human, and her behavior doesn't affect as many people.
Mom was one of the first people in my family to support our moving back to New Orleans. She knew how much Dan and I love the city, and she sees it as another great adventure we are embarking upon, helping to rebuild this place and keep it on the map. If she didn't feel such an obligation to her family, Max the dog, and to her job, she'd probably find a way to get on down here herself. And I'd do my best to live it up with her, because she deserves it, after all these years.
Mom should have gotten her Ph. D. She shouldn't have had me at such an early age. Shoulda, woulda, coulda...hindsight is twenty/twenty. Facts are, she had me when she was still in college, got her BS with child care help from my grandparents, moved us down to Houston for better job opportunities, met and married the man who adopted me and helped raise me, and toiled away as a research technician while dealing with me, the kid with behavior problems from hell. And then, when I was sixteen, she had to move to a teeny Pennsylvania town when my dad got a better job opportunity and took it. That move was hardest on my mom, in the end. She had to make her life over, especially since she was my baby brother's caretaker for the first year or so in town and really was unable to get to know many people at the time. It took time, but she stood up to the challenge.
I love her for that. I love her for her struggles, and for letting us know that it was okay to let off some steam in the process, so long as you forged ahead as best you could. I frequently made the mistake of thinking that all the anger she let off was directed at me, and I'm still afraid of it sometimes - it can be a frightening thing to behold, and you really don't want to get sucked into its vortex. Once the storm passes, however, she's there, like a rock of Gibraltar. She's one of the best nurses on the planet when you're sick. She will move heaven and earth to make life better for her children and her family. She doesn't hesitate to call us on our craziness on occasion, and she's always had the best laugh around. She is a champion worrier - if there is ever an award created for that, it deserves to be named for her. And she is a constant practitioner of the art of letting things go.
A former music theory instructor of mine used to preface our handing back a test with the admonition to "Be a good parent and let it go." I have found my mom to be a fountainhead for teaching, nurturing, and goading one's children - to a point. There is a point when you have no control, and you must go on sheer faith. Faith in your teachings, faith that the synapses are snapping in your child's head, and that, coupled with the values you have taught, will enable the child to make the right decisions at the right times. It's been hard for Mom to hold herself down, but she's been strong enough to do it, God bless her.
Since I've been down here, I've bought my mom two things. One was a cute poster that helped raise funds for the local Children's Hospital, a local artist's print of "Katrina's Party", a cartoon homage to Mardi Gras apres Katrina. The other is a soft velvet throw pillow that, unfortunately will arrive after Mother's Day, but the message on it will endure for ever.
"You can't scare me - I HAVE CHILDREN."
Ain't that the truth.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Thursday, May 11, 2006
A NIGHT AND DAY IN THE (TOUR GUIDE'S) LIFE
Once again, I must make my apologies to Messrs Lennon and McCartney, as well as to my quasi-relevant JazzFest sign concerning guests (see past posts), as my guests in this case were my in-laws and they were not staying in our house, but in a nearby bed and breakfast, formerly an orphanage. That said, overall, a good time was enjoyed by all.
My in-laws arrived from California the Tuesday night before last, collapsed in their funky room in the B & B, and interspersed visits to our place and occasional meals with us with their leisurely schedule (oh, that I could sleep in some on more occasions!) and jaunts through town and just outside of town on their own...until Saturday and Sunday, the last JazzFest weekend of this year. They arrived for three reasons: to see their grandson, to see the city, and to see JazzFest. My husband and I are simply ambassadors for the kid and tour guides through this great, partially ruined city of ours.
Over the phone, pre-visit, my in-laws apparently requested we take them on the great levee breach tour of 2006, one that I embarked on my first day back here (see previous posts) and found myself not wanting to do it again. I was horrified by what I saw, and I really didn't want to go through it again. I heard the same feelings expressed by fellow dog parkers when I discussed it with them, and a good friend with whom we shared our last JazzFest ticket with on Sunday. People who live here are tired of disaster and destruction, "tired of mold", as our JazzFest friend put it. And I don't blame 'em at all.
I ended up compensating for their request by pointing out water lines on some of the houses and in some of the neighborhoods as we passed them by, not necessarily in the levee breach areas. After my in-laws' first day at JazzFest, we had a nice dinner at a nearby Spanish restaurant, and then my mother-in-law and I headed off to the Borders' Books in Metairie to take advantage of her gift card and get some albums by some of the JazzFest players she'd heard and liked earlier that day. We headed there by way of Canal Boulevard and the lakefront areas, with a detour down Fleur-De-Lis in Lakeview, just blocks from the 17th Street Canal breach. It was dark out, and the ghostly suburban surroundings closed in once we passed City Park. Once again, it was as though I were passing through New Orleans East, like I did when we were driving down from New York. Hundreds of houses, standing at attention, waiting for their occupants who, in all likelihood, would never return. Nearby streetlights revealed the water lines on some of the houses, shining in the night like sinister shadows. The shock only increased once we drove across the canal and into Metairie...and back into bright lights, shopping malls, and whatever passes for normal suburbia these days..all there due to the grace of God and the sheer luck of having the levee wall hold on the Metairie side.
While I was waiting with my son for my husband and in-laws to come to the restaurant that night, a young college student, eager and green, struck up a conversation with me and participated in the chalk drawings my son was engrossed in making on the sidewalk nearby. She is one of many college volunteers taking time (and, in some cases, gaining some credit somewhere, some way) to help with recovery and cleanup down here. God bless her for coming. God bless her for wanting to get some idea of what the situation is like down here, too, because she could see that aside from the kids in other social work courses like the ones she was enrolled in, and the people who live here, of course, no one else in the world can really grasp the sheer magnitude of the situations people here are facing every day in their struggles to survive, rebuild, and thrive.
Got to say, though, it's not easy having to explain one's home's trials, tribulations, and politics all in one fell swoop. The college student's friend asked me what the deal was with all the abandoned, flooded cars that were still sitting under the interstate (a featured set for mayoral candidate Mitch Landrieu's recent campaign commercials), and I had to explain how the mayor had supposedly brokered a deal that was going to take care of those cars, since for them to be carted away, they have to be emptied of their fluids first. The local paper revealed that the city had not taken the firm with the lowest bid on the job, and then the whole deal collapsed, leaving the cars sitting in their places. Can't say that my little local civics picture really gave those girls a full picture of what's going on, but I like to think that it opened their eyes to life beyond the Fair Grounds here.
Sunday morning dawned for me and my husband, and we decided to go to a local spot for breakfast, only to find that we had arrived there too late in the morning to get a table without a massively long wait. We headed for a birthday party my son was invited to after a late breakfast at home, and then we picked up my in-laws and our friend with whom we shared our extra JazzFest ticket and headed for the Fair Grounds. After moving some garbage cans on the street that were supposedly demarcating someone's spot, we managed to find a parking spot close by an entrance. We got our food, and then I went and enjoyed the music of a local klezmer band with our friend. I had taken care of our son for most of our time at the Fest; now it was my turn to take in some music sans child. Not that I don't love him, but I needed some remembrance of younger days, I guess. Plus, for the most part, he didn't want to be right near such loud music, understandably - though he did surprise me later on when he weaved his way through the crowds to get a close look at the doings of a Zydeco band.
It turned out I also needed the release that comes with dancing my ass off. I danced a hora with other people around me. I kicked off my shoes and danced in the mud. I let my hair down and shook my money maker. A full hour of dancing to the music left me weak in the knees and aching some in my right leg - but man, did I need it! "Happy JazzFest!" a man in full tie-dye regalia I'd been dancing with yelled near the end of the set. My in-laws commented later on how much tie-dye they saw at the Fest - it seemed to have gone east from California, in their eyes. Years ago, when I had first moved down here, I thought that all the Checker cabs that were gone from New York streets had moved west, myself, because I saw so many of them in New Orleans. I guess this city is where all the fads and trends and throwaways end up, eventually - but it only adds to the whole demeanor of the place.
It can certainly work its effect on the visitors here as well. My in-laws were so much more at home visiting us here than they ever were visiting us in New York. Even the funkiness of their B & B here was something to be glossed over, especially since the people who ran the place and worked there were so nice. Their last visit to us in New York, the people who worked behind the desk at their hotel near JFK tried to pull a fast one and book them in a room that was clearly much smaller than what they had booked on Priceline. On another visit, my mother-in-law was staying with us in our second floor apartment around the time our landlords got a primo entertainment center and were blasting their disco music and their American Idol albums such that it could be heard through the floor. My husband and I didn't care, as our son could sleep through anything when he was tired and so could we, more or less, but my mother-in-law likes a quiet house and never failed to comment on it every day she was in town. Bad timing on that one! We told our landlords near the end of the week that we could hear them downstairs, and to their credit (hey, they were a great buncha guys), they were embarrassed about it and kept the music down after that. Overall, New York did not present a good vibe to my in-laws: it cost too much to live there, it was too congested a place to live, and it was way too far away from California for them to put forth true doting grandparent duties.
Of course, my husband, son, and I have gone from a major metropolitan and world center under terrorist watch to one of the epicenters of American natural disasters. That alone would give most people pause, and though my mother-in-law maintains a constant interest in real estate and in property costs all around this great nation of ours, she did ask about whether or not we would be getting some land in the Baton Rouge area - not only because it might be good to have a place to evacuate to that is close to where my husband works, but also because it would probably increase in value once another storm with the potential to blow south Louisiana off the map comes through. At the very least, we could rent it out if we weren't living in it, right? My mother-in-law needs to get a real estate license, is what I think.
My in-laws' observations about the city now, though, were interesting to hear. It looked to them like my son's presence on the streets of the French Quarter was a surprise and a delight to passersby, and they attributed it to the small numbers of kids that were in the city. I would attribute it to that a little, but I would also say that the Quarter is more like Disneyland for adults and has been that way almost from its inception. Any kids there in the daytime were the ones attending the one small school that still remains at the edge of the Quarter, or they were on the streets tap dancing with bottle caps imbedded in the soles of their shoes for tourists' loose change. The only clubs I know of that allow kids in them are Preservation Hall and Snug Harbor in the Marigny - one offers only live music, and the other serves good meals along with its full bar offerings and live music by titans such as Ellis Marsalis. Anyplace else is largely serving drinks and little else with its music - hence, no young 'uns allowed.
Another observation was of how much work is going on on homes and businesses in the areas that experienced no flooding whatsoever. There was a good amount of damage to properties from the winds of the storm, to be sure, but does that really justify the amount of places in our neighborhood, say, that are being remodeled into condos? It was enlightening to my in-laws to see just how many places are taking advantage of the rebuilding frenzy to do things that, in a lot of cases, needed to be done anyway... in the case of the newly designated condo properties, folks are also coming through in the department of sheer opportunism. The whole atmosphere of the non-flooded areas is that of a frontier town - but the buildings have already been here, in some cases, for well over a hundred years. Not exactly Dodge City.
And of course, the fact that a major public transportation artery, the St Charles streetcar line, is not in service right now is confining most tourists to the Quarter. Even Commander's Palace in the Garden District is in on the remodeling bonanza. People coming to visit have to make arrangements of their own to get a good look at the areas badly affected by the levee breaches and the storm effects. Rental cars and locals are the only means by which these folks can do so. And considering my personal reaction to becoming a levee breach tour guide, it comes down to rental cars, I'd say. I'm sick and tired of having this place known for good times and for devastation on a colossal scale. People are busy trying to live here, for crying out loud.
Then again, this is the price people have to pay for calling this place their home, myself included. Those who can face it all and come out the other side with some form of sanity and humor intact will either be stronger than strong or be just plain insensitive. I'm not sure exactly where I am just yet...
Speaking of humor:
More recent bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc.:
Blame Me - I Voted For Nagin
Authentic Trailer Trash - Thanks FEMA
FEMA: The New Four Letter Word
Comebacks, Not Kickbacks
To Move Forward, We Need To Move Back
Once again, I must make my apologies to Messrs Lennon and McCartney, as well as to my quasi-relevant JazzFest sign concerning guests (see past posts), as my guests in this case were my in-laws and they were not staying in our house, but in a nearby bed and breakfast, formerly an orphanage. That said, overall, a good time was enjoyed by all.
My in-laws arrived from California the Tuesday night before last, collapsed in their funky room in the B & B, and interspersed visits to our place and occasional meals with us with their leisurely schedule (oh, that I could sleep in some on more occasions!) and jaunts through town and just outside of town on their own...until Saturday and Sunday, the last JazzFest weekend of this year. They arrived for three reasons: to see their grandson, to see the city, and to see JazzFest. My husband and I are simply ambassadors for the kid and tour guides through this great, partially ruined city of ours.
Over the phone, pre-visit, my in-laws apparently requested we take them on the great levee breach tour of 2006, one that I embarked on my first day back here (see previous posts) and found myself not wanting to do it again. I was horrified by what I saw, and I really didn't want to go through it again. I heard the same feelings expressed by fellow dog parkers when I discussed it with them, and a good friend with whom we shared our last JazzFest ticket with on Sunday. People who live here are tired of disaster and destruction, "tired of mold", as our JazzFest friend put it. And I don't blame 'em at all.
I ended up compensating for their request by pointing out water lines on some of the houses and in some of the neighborhoods as we passed them by, not necessarily in the levee breach areas. After my in-laws' first day at JazzFest, we had a nice dinner at a nearby Spanish restaurant, and then my mother-in-law and I headed off to the Borders' Books in Metairie to take advantage of her gift card and get some albums by some of the JazzFest players she'd heard and liked earlier that day. We headed there by way of Canal Boulevard and the lakefront areas, with a detour down Fleur-De-Lis in Lakeview, just blocks from the 17th Street Canal breach. It was dark out, and the ghostly suburban surroundings closed in once we passed City Park. Once again, it was as though I were passing through New Orleans East, like I did when we were driving down from New York. Hundreds of houses, standing at attention, waiting for their occupants who, in all likelihood, would never return. Nearby streetlights revealed the water lines on some of the houses, shining in the night like sinister shadows. The shock only increased once we drove across the canal and into Metairie...and back into bright lights, shopping malls, and whatever passes for normal suburbia these days..all there due to the grace of God and the sheer luck of having the levee wall hold on the Metairie side.
While I was waiting with my son for my husband and in-laws to come to the restaurant that night, a young college student, eager and green, struck up a conversation with me and participated in the chalk drawings my son was engrossed in making on the sidewalk nearby. She is one of many college volunteers taking time (and, in some cases, gaining some credit somewhere, some way) to help with recovery and cleanup down here. God bless her for coming. God bless her for wanting to get some idea of what the situation is like down here, too, because she could see that aside from the kids in other social work courses like the ones she was enrolled in, and the people who live here, of course, no one else in the world can really grasp the sheer magnitude of the situations people here are facing every day in their struggles to survive, rebuild, and thrive.
Got to say, though, it's not easy having to explain one's home's trials, tribulations, and politics all in one fell swoop. The college student's friend asked me what the deal was with all the abandoned, flooded cars that were still sitting under the interstate (a featured set for mayoral candidate Mitch Landrieu's recent campaign commercials), and I had to explain how the mayor had supposedly brokered a deal that was going to take care of those cars, since for them to be carted away, they have to be emptied of their fluids first. The local paper revealed that the city had not taken the firm with the lowest bid on the job, and then the whole deal collapsed, leaving the cars sitting in their places. Can't say that my little local civics picture really gave those girls a full picture of what's going on, but I like to think that it opened their eyes to life beyond the Fair Grounds here.
Sunday morning dawned for me and my husband, and we decided to go to a local spot for breakfast, only to find that we had arrived there too late in the morning to get a table without a massively long wait. We headed for a birthday party my son was invited to after a late breakfast at home, and then we picked up my in-laws and our friend with whom we shared our extra JazzFest ticket and headed for the Fair Grounds. After moving some garbage cans on the street that were supposedly demarcating someone's spot, we managed to find a parking spot close by an entrance. We got our food, and then I went and enjoyed the music of a local klezmer band with our friend. I had taken care of our son for most of our time at the Fest; now it was my turn to take in some music sans child. Not that I don't love him, but I needed some remembrance of younger days, I guess. Plus, for the most part, he didn't want to be right near such loud music, understandably - though he did surprise me later on when he weaved his way through the crowds to get a close look at the doings of a Zydeco band.
It turned out I also needed the release that comes with dancing my ass off. I danced a hora with other people around me. I kicked off my shoes and danced in the mud. I let my hair down and shook my money maker. A full hour of dancing to the music left me weak in the knees and aching some in my right leg - but man, did I need it! "Happy JazzFest!" a man in full tie-dye regalia I'd been dancing with yelled near the end of the set. My in-laws commented later on how much tie-dye they saw at the Fest - it seemed to have gone east from California, in their eyes. Years ago, when I had first moved down here, I thought that all the Checker cabs that were gone from New York streets had moved west, myself, because I saw so many of them in New Orleans. I guess this city is where all the fads and trends and throwaways end up, eventually - but it only adds to the whole demeanor of the place.
It can certainly work its effect on the visitors here as well. My in-laws were so much more at home visiting us here than they ever were visiting us in New York. Even the funkiness of their B & B here was something to be glossed over, especially since the people who ran the place and worked there were so nice. Their last visit to us in New York, the people who worked behind the desk at their hotel near JFK tried to pull a fast one and book them in a room that was clearly much smaller than what they had booked on Priceline. On another visit, my mother-in-law was staying with us in our second floor apartment around the time our landlords got a primo entertainment center and were blasting their disco music and their American Idol albums such that it could be heard through the floor. My husband and I didn't care, as our son could sleep through anything when he was tired and so could we, more or less, but my mother-in-law likes a quiet house and never failed to comment on it every day she was in town. Bad timing on that one! We told our landlords near the end of the week that we could hear them downstairs, and to their credit (hey, they were a great buncha guys), they were embarrassed about it and kept the music down after that. Overall, New York did not present a good vibe to my in-laws: it cost too much to live there, it was too congested a place to live, and it was way too far away from California for them to put forth true doting grandparent duties.
Of course, my husband, son, and I have gone from a major metropolitan and world center under terrorist watch to one of the epicenters of American natural disasters. That alone would give most people pause, and though my mother-in-law maintains a constant interest in real estate and in property costs all around this great nation of ours, she did ask about whether or not we would be getting some land in the Baton Rouge area - not only because it might be good to have a place to evacuate to that is close to where my husband works, but also because it would probably increase in value once another storm with the potential to blow south Louisiana off the map comes through. At the very least, we could rent it out if we weren't living in it, right? My mother-in-law needs to get a real estate license, is what I think.
My in-laws' observations about the city now, though, were interesting to hear. It looked to them like my son's presence on the streets of the French Quarter was a surprise and a delight to passersby, and they attributed it to the small numbers of kids that were in the city. I would attribute it to that a little, but I would also say that the Quarter is more like Disneyland for adults and has been that way almost from its inception. Any kids there in the daytime were the ones attending the one small school that still remains at the edge of the Quarter, or they were on the streets tap dancing with bottle caps imbedded in the soles of their shoes for tourists' loose change. The only clubs I know of that allow kids in them are Preservation Hall and Snug Harbor in the Marigny - one offers only live music, and the other serves good meals along with its full bar offerings and live music by titans such as Ellis Marsalis. Anyplace else is largely serving drinks and little else with its music - hence, no young 'uns allowed.
Another observation was of how much work is going on on homes and businesses in the areas that experienced no flooding whatsoever. There was a good amount of damage to properties from the winds of the storm, to be sure, but does that really justify the amount of places in our neighborhood, say, that are being remodeled into condos? It was enlightening to my in-laws to see just how many places are taking advantage of the rebuilding frenzy to do things that, in a lot of cases, needed to be done anyway... in the case of the newly designated condo properties, folks are also coming through in the department of sheer opportunism. The whole atmosphere of the non-flooded areas is that of a frontier town - but the buildings have already been here, in some cases, for well over a hundred years. Not exactly Dodge City.
And of course, the fact that a major public transportation artery, the St Charles streetcar line, is not in service right now is confining most tourists to the Quarter. Even Commander's Palace in the Garden District is in on the remodeling bonanza. People coming to visit have to make arrangements of their own to get a good look at the areas badly affected by the levee breaches and the storm effects. Rental cars and locals are the only means by which these folks can do so. And considering my personal reaction to becoming a levee breach tour guide, it comes down to rental cars, I'd say. I'm sick and tired of having this place known for good times and for devastation on a colossal scale. People are busy trying to live here, for crying out loud.
Then again, this is the price people have to pay for calling this place their home, myself included. Those who can face it all and come out the other side with some form of sanity and humor intact will either be stronger than strong or be just plain insensitive. I'm not sure exactly where I am just yet...
Speaking of humor:
More recent bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc.:
Blame Me - I Voted For Nagin
Authentic Trailer Trash - Thanks FEMA
FEMA: The New Four Letter Word
Comebacks, Not Kickbacks
To Move Forward, We Need To Move Back
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
I feel the need to explain myself and storms. Why I feel this need has something to do with what I mentioned in my last post, that I was anxious recently during the onset of a big rainstorm that carried tornado watches for our area with it. It also has to do with my son's reaction to a midday storm that poured down on us while we were running some errands yesterday - more on that one later.
Storms in Houston, where I grew up, and here in New Orleans are not events for the faint of heart. During the summer, storms that come up in a blaze of black fury, with much thunder and some lightning, will dump some water on us in midday, usually lasting under an hour, and then the atmosphere afterwards is still hot, just extra steamy. No relief comes from those summer showers, that's for sure.
Winter storms are different only in that the temperatures are generally lower, so a storm simply adds more dampness to the cold. I woke up on a few mornings when I was a kid to loads of thunder and lightning that, in some cases, was a carryover from the night before, and it could shake the house with the noise and even knock out power for a few seconds. One storm dumped so much water that it flooded the route to my school. My father was turned away by some firemen blocking the route. "How high is it?" he asked the guys cockily. My dad drove a '79 Bronco. Surely it could make it through those piddly flood waters.
"Higher than your truck", the firemen said. Dad made a u-turn and there was no school for that day.
Still, there was always something thrilling about the onset of a storm - the way it could turn a sky in midday black as night. The thunderous noise that announced its arrival. The sounds of the rain plopping onto every surface it could, sometimes slowly building in intensity, sometimes dropping it all in one shot, it seemed. For me, it was like watching a symphony descending from the sky, complete with its own light show. And if it was bad enough, it could keep you out of school - bonus!
That's how I looked at Hurricane Alicia when it hit Houston. Granted, I was a kid, but any instruction to batten down the hatches, evacuate if you had to, and sit it out was great to me.
We got our food and water, candles, flashlights, and batteries for the radios and got ready for whatever would come. Oh, we should have gotten a good dose of sense while we were at it. At least we didn't live right near one of the concrete-lined bayous that threads its way through many parts of the greater Houston area. Most folks selling flood insurance wouldn't even give those homeowners the time of day anymore, it was rumored - and it may well have been true. After a hard rain, the amount of water rushing through those things was enough to give anyone pause.
I fell asleep in my room the eve of the hurricane and awoke to wind howling around the house, torrents of rain sounding like thunder itself as it whipped its way on top of the house, around and over. I also awoke in my parents' bed. My mother told me she had had to move me to their room last night because of the rattling coming from the window right above my bed; they didn't want it to blow out and have shattered glass carving me up while I slept. Good one, family. I thank you.
The windows were so steamed up, one couldn't see a thing out of them. I don't remember exactly when the power went out, but it did at some point. I seem to recall my father still watching TV when I woke up, but I know we had no power for a good twenty-four hour period. When things such as the humming of the refrigerator and the squawking of the TV and other appliance sounds are no longer there, it only amplifies the sounds of the screaming winds, high-pitched and seemingly never-ending. If a basic rainstorm is a symphony from the sky, I'd put a hurricane in the operatic category - if Wagner and the Who had collaborated on the Ring series, say. Long and LOUD - and then, quiet, as the eye of the storm passed over us.
Maybe my dad actually ventured out at that time. It's something he was surely capable of doing, and in some ways, still is. The winds returned, but it didn't seem so bad after that, probably because we knew the thing was passing. Our neighborhood seemed fine, but our backyard wasn't. A large tree in our backyard featured a number of trunks coming from one root system, and now one of those trunks had fallen into the backyard, making a once-large grassy spot into one giant mess of fallen tree. The tree was right by the den of the house, and if a different trunk had been ripped out, it would have crushed in the house and smashed up the den, couches, TV, and all. We were lucky.
We counted ourselves even luckier when we went out for a drive and saw the bayous swollen with water all the way to the bottoms of the bridges spanning them. Some people had become caught under the bridges by the rushing water and had to be rescued. Shingles were missing from rooftops. Downed trees and large limbs were features of this new landscape. We passed a high-rise building with a driveway beneath one of its eaves, and insulation blew from under its overhangs. Overall, it was a mess, but not an impossible one.
I never was all that anxious about hurricanes after that. Loads of sound and fury, and you clean up afterwards. Sounds more like a party to me. They don't have the term "hurricane party" around for nothin'. Everyone's stuck inside due to the hell outside. Why don't we raise a little hell inside?
Hurricane Georges didn't conjure up much anxiety in me, either, because here I was in New Orleans. I wasn't alone in my house - I was staying in one apartment of many that a gorgeous old decaying Victorian mansion had had carved into it around the turn of the century or so, and my landlady and several other tenants were staying put. Stories were told every so often about Hurricane Betsy and how it flooded the eastern part of the city (yeah, like Katrina originated that!). The Mississippi began to flow backwards, and it looked like Georges was going to head right up and give New Orleans a visit. Listening to the radio and hearing the rain falling outside, I heard on my radio from one caller that he was sitting in his house with a canoe on his coffee table, ready for the water. The one concession I made to the possibility of the severe nature of the storm was to pull my bed from beneath the window under which it was positioned to the middle of the room. What my parents had done years ago stuck with me, for sure.
Georges ended up being a bust. It turned to the east and paid a visit to Mobile Bay instead. The New Orleans area had dodged a bullet. Life was good and charmed. We could all return to our sleepy, humidity-soaked ways once again. And I was secure in my knowledge that big storms were like the big bad wolf and us little pigs had homes of brick that could resist such a force, or at least cause it to reconsider. La LA la la LAAAAAAA...
So here I am, and the first big storm we have, I'm running around town in my car, getting shoes for my son and some stuff for dinner and for my pets, and the sky is hovering over, ready to drop its wet load on us any minute. It begins to rain some when I am near the end of my rambling, and I make it home before the real downpour begins. So I don't get too wet, but I do feel some faint strains of fear when I am out and about, as though the skies will open up and throw every bit of fury directly on me, opening me up and throwing every blue tarp, every piece of debris, every clod of dirt brought into the houses by the flood waters down my gullet. Yes, the fear is faint, but it's there.
Yesterday, there was a midday rainstorm, and my son was in the car with me. Suddenly, it was as though the faint fear I'd had days before had become a three year old child with an elephant-sized bundle of anxiety in my backseat. He was afraid of the rain, my son was. Afraid we would be flooded out. Afraid our car would become a floating mass in a rainwater river. A large part of this anxiety was from tiredness, and my son conked out in the backseat shortly after his tirade.
Since then, however, he has expressed several times his conviction that rain will bring destruction with it, and he ain't necessarily wrong. Not all rain does, though, and lately I have been eyeing some plant candidates to grow in our yard and in outdoor planters to try to prove to him that rain has other functions in this life. My son seems to be a bit of a lightning rod for the anxiety that lurks beneath the surface of this town, flowing beneath the normality of everyone's actions and thoughts here in this city barely preserved by the grace of God and returning residents.
How best do I combat this, especially since my own long-held impressions of storms have been shaken some since I've been back down here? Maybe when the summer storms return, their everyday presence will kick his anxiety in the teeth - or maybe it will make it worse. I now dread the beginnings of hurricane season this year, especially since the new evacuation plans for the city have been revealed. Most of the provisions in the plan are things that should have been implemented with Katrina, but at least one thing has everyone I've talked to clucking with impatience: the mandatory evacuation when it looks like a category 2 storm will be coming our way. That is a real cover-your-ass move on the part of our mayor if I ever saw one.
Then again, maybe a road trip might be just what we all would need if and when it happens. My son has always done well with those. Then again, it might be a signal that one can run from your problems when they get too big. Of course, a force of nature is sometimes just way too big to deny. And my internal pendulum swings back and forth on this and many other questions when it comes to my son. What is right? What is wrong? it is questions such as these that make parenting an insanity-inducing profession.
And I thought surviving my first year in my college's freshman dorms was tough...
Storms in Houston, where I grew up, and here in New Orleans are not events for the faint of heart. During the summer, storms that come up in a blaze of black fury, with much thunder and some lightning, will dump some water on us in midday, usually lasting under an hour, and then the atmosphere afterwards is still hot, just extra steamy. No relief comes from those summer showers, that's for sure.
Winter storms are different only in that the temperatures are generally lower, so a storm simply adds more dampness to the cold. I woke up on a few mornings when I was a kid to loads of thunder and lightning that, in some cases, was a carryover from the night before, and it could shake the house with the noise and even knock out power for a few seconds. One storm dumped so much water that it flooded the route to my school. My father was turned away by some firemen blocking the route. "How high is it?" he asked the guys cockily. My dad drove a '79 Bronco. Surely it could make it through those piddly flood waters.
"Higher than your truck", the firemen said. Dad made a u-turn and there was no school for that day.
Still, there was always something thrilling about the onset of a storm - the way it could turn a sky in midday black as night. The thunderous noise that announced its arrival. The sounds of the rain plopping onto every surface it could, sometimes slowly building in intensity, sometimes dropping it all in one shot, it seemed. For me, it was like watching a symphony descending from the sky, complete with its own light show. And if it was bad enough, it could keep you out of school - bonus!
That's how I looked at Hurricane Alicia when it hit Houston. Granted, I was a kid, but any instruction to batten down the hatches, evacuate if you had to, and sit it out was great to me.
We got our food and water, candles, flashlights, and batteries for the radios and got ready for whatever would come. Oh, we should have gotten a good dose of sense while we were at it. At least we didn't live right near one of the concrete-lined bayous that threads its way through many parts of the greater Houston area. Most folks selling flood insurance wouldn't even give those homeowners the time of day anymore, it was rumored - and it may well have been true. After a hard rain, the amount of water rushing through those things was enough to give anyone pause.
I fell asleep in my room the eve of the hurricane and awoke to wind howling around the house, torrents of rain sounding like thunder itself as it whipped its way on top of the house, around and over. I also awoke in my parents' bed. My mother told me she had had to move me to their room last night because of the rattling coming from the window right above my bed; they didn't want it to blow out and have shattered glass carving me up while I slept. Good one, family. I thank you.
The windows were so steamed up, one couldn't see a thing out of them. I don't remember exactly when the power went out, but it did at some point. I seem to recall my father still watching TV when I woke up, but I know we had no power for a good twenty-four hour period. When things such as the humming of the refrigerator and the squawking of the TV and other appliance sounds are no longer there, it only amplifies the sounds of the screaming winds, high-pitched and seemingly never-ending. If a basic rainstorm is a symphony from the sky, I'd put a hurricane in the operatic category - if Wagner and the Who had collaborated on the Ring series, say. Long and LOUD - and then, quiet, as the eye of the storm passed over us.
Maybe my dad actually ventured out at that time. It's something he was surely capable of doing, and in some ways, still is. The winds returned, but it didn't seem so bad after that, probably because we knew the thing was passing. Our neighborhood seemed fine, but our backyard wasn't. A large tree in our backyard featured a number of trunks coming from one root system, and now one of those trunks had fallen into the backyard, making a once-large grassy spot into one giant mess of fallen tree. The tree was right by the den of the house, and if a different trunk had been ripped out, it would have crushed in the house and smashed up the den, couches, TV, and all. We were lucky.
We counted ourselves even luckier when we went out for a drive and saw the bayous swollen with water all the way to the bottoms of the bridges spanning them. Some people had become caught under the bridges by the rushing water and had to be rescued. Shingles were missing from rooftops. Downed trees and large limbs were features of this new landscape. We passed a high-rise building with a driveway beneath one of its eaves, and insulation blew from under its overhangs. Overall, it was a mess, but not an impossible one.
I never was all that anxious about hurricanes after that. Loads of sound and fury, and you clean up afterwards. Sounds more like a party to me. They don't have the term "hurricane party" around for nothin'. Everyone's stuck inside due to the hell outside. Why don't we raise a little hell inside?
Hurricane Georges didn't conjure up much anxiety in me, either, because here I was in New Orleans. I wasn't alone in my house - I was staying in one apartment of many that a gorgeous old decaying Victorian mansion had had carved into it around the turn of the century or so, and my landlady and several other tenants were staying put. Stories were told every so often about Hurricane Betsy and how it flooded the eastern part of the city (yeah, like Katrina originated that!). The Mississippi began to flow backwards, and it looked like Georges was going to head right up and give New Orleans a visit. Listening to the radio and hearing the rain falling outside, I heard on my radio from one caller that he was sitting in his house with a canoe on his coffee table, ready for the water. The one concession I made to the possibility of the severe nature of the storm was to pull my bed from beneath the window under which it was positioned to the middle of the room. What my parents had done years ago stuck with me, for sure.
Georges ended up being a bust. It turned to the east and paid a visit to Mobile Bay instead. The New Orleans area had dodged a bullet. Life was good and charmed. We could all return to our sleepy, humidity-soaked ways once again. And I was secure in my knowledge that big storms were like the big bad wolf and us little pigs had homes of brick that could resist such a force, or at least cause it to reconsider. La LA la la LAAAAAAA...
So here I am, and the first big storm we have, I'm running around town in my car, getting shoes for my son and some stuff for dinner and for my pets, and the sky is hovering over, ready to drop its wet load on us any minute. It begins to rain some when I am near the end of my rambling, and I make it home before the real downpour begins. So I don't get too wet, but I do feel some faint strains of fear when I am out and about, as though the skies will open up and throw every bit of fury directly on me, opening me up and throwing every blue tarp, every piece of debris, every clod of dirt brought into the houses by the flood waters down my gullet. Yes, the fear is faint, but it's there.
Yesterday, there was a midday rainstorm, and my son was in the car with me. Suddenly, it was as though the faint fear I'd had days before had become a three year old child with an elephant-sized bundle of anxiety in my backseat. He was afraid of the rain, my son was. Afraid we would be flooded out. Afraid our car would become a floating mass in a rainwater river. A large part of this anxiety was from tiredness, and my son conked out in the backseat shortly after his tirade.
Since then, however, he has expressed several times his conviction that rain will bring destruction with it, and he ain't necessarily wrong. Not all rain does, though, and lately I have been eyeing some plant candidates to grow in our yard and in outdoor planters to try to prove to him that rain has other functions in this life. My son seems to be a bit of a lightning rod for the anxiety that lurks beneath the surface of this town, flowing beneath the normality of everyone's actions and thoughts here in this city barely preserved by the grace of God and returning residents.
How best do I combat this, especially since my own long-held impressions of storms have been shaken some since I've been back down here? Maybe when the summer storms return, their everyday presence will kick his anxiety in the teeth - or maybe it will make it worse. I now dread the beginnings of hurricane season this year, especially since the new evacuation plans for the city have been revealed. Most of the provisions in the plan are things that should have been implemented with Katrina, but at least one thing has everyone I've talked to clucking with impatience: the mandatory evacuation when it looks like a category 2 storm will be coming our way. That is a real cover-your-ass move on the part of our mayor if I ever saw one.
Then again, maybe a road trip might be just what we all would need if and when it happens. My son has always done well with those. Then again, it might be a signal that one can run from your problems when they get too big. Of course, a force of nature is sometimes just way too big to deny. And my internal pendulum swings back and forth on this and many other questions when it comes to my son. What is right? What is wrong? it is questions such as these that make parenting an insanity-inducing profession.
And I thought surviving my first year in my college's freshman dorms was tough...
Monday, May 01, 2006
Well, I started to write a post on the twenty-eighth, but here it is, May already, and it's been a while since the last post. Things have intervened. LIFE has intervened.
I told a graduate student in my major, when I was in my last undergrad year in college, that I didn't get into grad school, ho-hum, and she looked pained, and said,"Oh, no, but life gets in the way if you don't go to grad school right away!" I was thinking at the time that I wanted life to get in the way, thank you, after approx. 16 or so years straight of school in one form or another. And here I am, eleven years later, looking back on that assessment of mine and, cumulatively, I'm glad I made the choice I made. However, I have my moments...
Went to the JazzFest on Sunday, which, crowds-wise, turned out to be the day to go in the first weekend. It helped that it rained the night before, because once that happens, the only ones who come out are the die-hard locals who just don't care, and the out-of-towners who have come to see Bruce Springsteen or Elvis Costello and have paid too much to come down here in the first place, and rain will not deter them from seeing who they came to see. I used to come to JazzFest, year after year before we moved, as an exhibitor on one weekend or another, working for my ex-boss at a craft booth, so I knew some of the crafters, but something held me back from going over to them and just saying hello. They were there working at their booths, and what could I tell them? Hi, I'm just popping by! Oh, just raising my son and keeping house these days! My feelings of inadequacy came to a real head when I browsed the book booth and saw that a girl I once had a good relationship with shortly before I moved down to New Orleans the first time was there signing a children's book she and her husband had written and illustrated. She got mad at me over housing woes of mine that involved her boyfriend (no, nothing like what you all might be thinking!), and I was very sorry all the time, tried my best to treat her well, but she kept treating me like dirt. And here she was, signing a book with her husband.
I wanted so badly to tell her how well I was doing, too, out of meanness, more than anything else, I'll admit. But I said nothing and walked out of the booth. All I could think of anyway was schmoozing about Montessori school admissions woes. Oooh yeah, real show stopper, that one.
My husband said later that she didn't matter, but that my crafter friends would probably have loved to see how I was doing, and that I do a lot outside of the kid and house thing. "You sang at Shea Stadium, for crying out loud!" he said. "You just sang at JazzFest Shabbat! You have taken on cooking and cross-stitching like nobody's business! You were a board member at our synagogue in New York! You took JTS courses! And you're raising a great kid!"
God bless my husband. One of many reasons why I married the man is his honesty, which can be damned brutal, but which can also be comforting. Now if only I could clone him and carry him around as a confidence booster. When I was still doing the crafting thing, I went into a co-op craft shop to deliver some merchandise and asked the girl behind the counter to validate my parking ticket. "I need to be validated," I said.
"You're so good," she said. "Don't ever change."
One way in which I was validated, repeatedly, was for wearing my Mets' cap at the Fest. Stood behind some kids when I was checking out Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello, and one of the kids did a double take at my cap. "Oooh, our bud's a Mets fan," he said. "Didn't think we'd meet anyone else around here who was, though." Walking through the Fair Grounds, I encountered two buddies, one wearing a Yankees cap, both of 'em guys who alternately booed and cheered me. Waiting on a porta potty, I encountered a fellow in line who was a Mets fan, but whose spouse was a Cubs fan, like my husband. The Mets fan and I both agreed it was high time for them to get back to winning ways; the last time a Mets team did its thing in the World Series, the management disbanded the team out of sheer fear of the players' antics off the field. Here's hoping that won't happen again.
I was also validated by the one food item that truly makes it JazzFest for me: Prejean's pheasant, quail, and andouille gumbo. At the Prejean's booth, a girl came by asking for their crawfish enchiladas, and immediately walked away when she heard that they were out. I should have yanked her back and chided her for walking away from some superb gumbo. Some folks just don't know what they're missing in this life. The first year I had the gumbo, I noticed some fellows making a beeline for the booth in the early hours of the festival and I asked them if it was any good. "Any good? " they exclaimed. "We've been waiting all year for this!!!!!" Is that a good recommendation, or is it?
One thing I repeatedly missed in all the years I've gone has been the kids' section of the Fest. They have a tent with some musicians and storytellers, and they also have a whole lot of kid activities and crafts there. My son had a ball making like he was paddling a pirogue down the bayou and catching big plastic crabs and crawfish in nets. He could also take his catch to a play kitchen, where he told me he was going to make some crawfish pies. He played some instruments made of PVC pipes and made a small house to put on a large model of the New Orleans area, where kids could "rebuild" businesses and homes on the map. What he was most fascinated by, though, was the cooking demos held by New Orleans and other Louisiana chefs. Zatarain's sponsors these demos and has the chefs cooking in a setup of the usual pots and pans and stoves and ovens, with a tilted mirror positioned over the whole thing so the audience can see what's cookin' in the pots and pans. Everyone gets samples afterwards. My son was so fascinated with the cooking and the chopping, until he had to go to the bathroom and ended up smashing our water bottle on the floor in the back of the audience. Dan chastised us a little for missing the samples of the blackened fish and tomato salad we had been watching the chef prepare, until I told him the specifics of our situation.
As for what we did previous to our JazzFest visit, we went to rehearsal after rehearsal for our synagogue's JazzFest Shabbat this past week, which is why it took me a while to get it together on the blog. JazzFest Shabbat is what our synagogue has done for the past fifteen-plus years, through four cantors, one cantorial soloist, and our one constant through all those times, our choral director and organist. The service is always held on the first weekend of JazzFest in the synagogue's main sanctuary, and the reharsals the week of the performance are fun and sometimes harrowing, especially since the big organizers are the cantor and our long-suffering, marathon-commuting choral director. Not only is the man a Catholic, he works as the music director for a Presbyterian church in Mobile, Alabama, he teaches a load of college level music courses at a school there, and then he hops into his car every week and heads to New Orleans to hold choir rehearsals and play the piano and organ at our services. Thursday was a particularly trying day for him, as he was feeling the effects of commuting back and forth more than usual, he was trying to get the jazz band performing with us to shape up some more, and his car's windshield had been smashed from stray rocks from a construction vehicle. God bless the poor mensch.
Despite it all, it was a great service and performance this year, albeit a bit long and drawn out. It was all the more important that it happened because of all the stuff this city has been through in the past months since late August. Even the people who were unable to attend this year must have gotten some comfort that the program is still going strong...as I'm sure they are happy all over this country, or even the world, that the JazzFest itself is still going on. Traces of the tragedy have reamined, however...
The children's book the girl who snubbed me co-wrote and co-illustrated was about telling one's young 'un (or, more accurately, young animal) about the hurricane and how to prepare for it, and possibly, leave one's home. For every few people acting like the usual JazzFesters, there were some wearing recovery-inspired t-shirts and/or buttons. Outside Gabrielle's restaurant off Esplanade Avenue was a couple selling cheap water, sodas, beer, and mixed drinks, and on their sign was a small addendum, a FEMA trailer tour for $2. I asked where that money was going, and they said, only half-jokingly, it was all going to the government. We have a break here and a slight return to normalcy, despite all the crazy news that pervades the atmosphere, but it doesn't take much to yank us back to the present. I present -
Exhibit A: The official recommendation that FEMA is too flawed to fix, and should probably be dissolved or folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, honey, save us from our eroding marshlands, our governments, and our Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe NOW we'll get the fourteen billion dollars the feds turned down so that 25% of this country's oil, most of the seafood, and the livelihoods of generations of bayou dwellers would get washed into the gulf with major assistance from Katrina and Rita. Yes, that'll work...
Exhibit B: The fact that if the local public school system is going to rebuild itself, it needs the funds to do so. Right now, what remains of the Orleans parish school board has control over the better performing schools in the parish, and the rest are under the control of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Even though the latter schools are under BESE's control, however, the Parish school board is still responsible for a large number of the debts incurred by those schools. And don't even mention the environmental health issues the two boards might be liable for if they cave to the pressure to reopen schools early and they haven't gotten flooded or storm damaged buildings up to snuff. I can only describe myself as slouching towards masochism when I contemplate the fact that I am trying to get my son admitted to this rats' nest. Hooray for me...
Exhibit C: A recent big rainstorm carried with it tornado watches, some anxiety on my part, and enough winds to snap a large chunk off the top of my friend Edie's evergreen tree in her front yard. She was already looking for a large amount of dirt to fill the hole left over from a large tree that was downed by the hurricane, and now she has almost half a large tree sitting in her front yard again. I was racking my brains trying to figure out where I'd last seen a pile of dirt she could use for the purpose, even going so far as to retrace my path through the city to the pile I'd seen a while back, which was still there, complete with its "Free Dirt" sign.
Yep, yet another thing to add to a resume, should I want to return to the working for a paycheck world: I can locate a pile of dirt in a ruined, recovering city for the purpose of reusing and recycling. Now that's contributing to the environment!
I told a graduate student in my major, when I was in my last undergrad year in college, that I didn't get into grad school, ho-hum, and she looked pained, and said,"Oh, no, but life gets in the way if you don't go to grad school right away!" I was thinking at the time that I wanted life to get in the way, thank you, after approx. 16 or so years straight of school in one form or another. And here I am, eleven years later, looking back on that assessment of mine and, cumulatively, I'm glad I made the choice I made. However, I have my moments...
Went to the JazzFest on Sunday, which, crowds-wise, turned out to be the day to go in the first weekend. It helped that it rained the night before, because once that happens, the only ones who come out are the die-hard locals who just don't care, and the out-of-towners who have come to see Bruce Springsteen or Elvis Costello and have paid too much to come down here in the first place, and rain will not deter them from seeing who they came to see. I used to come to JazzFest, year after year before we moved, as an exhibitor on one weekend or another, working for my ex-boss at a craft booth, so I knew some of the crafters, but something held me back from going over to them and just saying hello. They were there working at their booths, and what could I tell them? Hi, I'm just popping by! Oh, just raising my son and keeping house these days! My feelings of inadequacy came to a real head when I browsed the book booth and saw that a girl I once had a good relationship with shortly before I moved down to New Orleans the first time was there signing a children's book she and her husband had written and illustrated. She got mad at me over housing woes of mine that involved her boyfriend (no, nothing like what you all might be thinking!), and I was very sorry all the time, tried my best to treat her well, but she kept treating me like dirt. And here she was, signing a book with her husband.
I wanted so badly to tell her how well I was doing, too, out of meanness, more than anything else, I'll admit. But I said nothing and walked out of the booth. All I could think of anyway was schmoozing about Montessori school admissions woes. Oooh yeah, real show stopper, that one.
My husband said later that she didn't matter, but that my crafter friends would probably have loved to see how I was doing, and that I do a lot outside of the kid and house thing. "You sang at Shea Stadium, for crying out loud!" he said. "You just sang at JazzFest Shabbat! You have taken on cooking and cross-stitching like nobody's business! You were a board member at our synagogue in New York! You took JTS courses! And you're raising a great kid!"
God bless my husband. One of many reasons why I married the man is his honesty, which can be damned brutal, but which can also be comforting. Now if only I could clone him and carry him around as a confidence booster. When I was still doing the crafting thing, I went into a co-op craft shop to deliver some merchandise and asked the girl behind the counter to validate my parking ticket. "I need to be validated," I said.
"You're so good," she said. "Don't ever change."
One way in which I was validated, repeatedly, was for wearing my Mets' cap at the Fest. Stood behind some kids when I was checking out Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello, and one of the kids did a double take at my cap. "Oooh, our bud's a Mets fan," he said. "Didn't think we'd meet anyone else around here who was, though." Walking through the Fair Grounds, I encountered two buddies, one wearing a Yankees cap, both of 'em guys who alternately booed and cheered me. Waiting on a porta potty, I encountered a fellow in line who was a Mets fan, but whose spouse was a Cubs fan, like my husband. The Mets fan and I both agreed it was high time for them to get back to winning ways; the last time a Mets team did its thing in the World Series, the management disbanded the team out of sheer fear of the players' antics off the field. Here's hoping that won't happen again.
I was also validated by the one food item that truly makes it JazzFest for me: Prejean's pheasant, quail, and andouille gumbo. At the Prejean's booth, a girl came by asking for their crawfish enchiladas, and immediately walked away when she heard that they were out. I should have yanked her back and chided her for walking away from some superb gumbo. Some folks just don't know what they're missing in this life. The first year I had the gumbo, I noticed some fellows making a beeline for the booth in the early hours of the festival and I asked them if it was any good. "Any good? " they exclaimed. "We've been waiting all year for this!!!!!" Is that a good recommendation, or is it?
One thing I repeatedly missed in all the years I've gone has been the kids' section of the Fest. They have a tent with some musicians and storytellers, and they also have a whole lot of kid activities and crafts there. My son had a ball making like he was paddling a pirogue down the bayou and catching big plastic crabs and crawfish in nets. He could also take his catch to a play kitchen, where he told me he was going to make some crawfish pies. He played some instruments made of PVC pipes and made a small house to put on a large model of the New Orleans area, where kids could "rebuild" businesses and homes on the map. What he was most fascinated by, though, was the cooking demos held by New Orleans and other Louisiana chefs. Zatarain's sponsors these demos and has the chefs cooking in a setup of the usual pots and pans and stoves and ovens, with a tilted mirror positioned over the whole thing so the audience can see what's cookin' in the pots and pans. Everyone gets samples afterwards. My son was so fascinated with the cooking and the chopping, until he had to go to the bathroom and ended up smashing our water bottle on the floor in the back of the audience. Dan chastised us a little for missing the samples of the blackened fish and tomato salad we had been watching the chef prepare, until I told him the specifics of our situation.
As for what we did previous to our JazzFest visit, we went to rehearsal after rehearsal for our synagogue's JazzFest Shabbat this past week, which is why it took me a while to get it together on the blog. JazzFest Shabbat is what our synagogue has done for the past fifteen-plus years, through four cantors, one cantorial soloist, and our one constant through all those times, our choral director and organist. The service is always held on the first weekend of JazzFest in the synagogue's main sanctuary, and the reharsals the week of the performance are fun and sometimes harrowing, especially since the big organizers are the cantor and our long-suffering, marathon-commuting choral director. Not only is the man a Catholic, he works as the music director for a Presbyterian church in Mobile, Alabama, he teaches a load of college level music courses at a school there, and then he hops into his car every week and heads to New Orleans to hold choir rehearsals and play the piano and organ at our services. Thursday was a particularly trying day for him, as he was feeling the effects of commuting back and forth more than usual, he was trying to get the jazz band performing with us to shape up some more, and his car's windshield had been smashed from stray rocks from a construction vehicle. God bless the poor mensch.
Despite it all, it was a great service and performance this year, albeit a bit long and drawn out. It was all the more important that it happened because of all the stuff this city has been through in the past months since late August. Even the people who were unable to attend this year must have gotten some comfort that the program is still going strong...as I'm sure they are happy all over this country, or even the world, that the JazzFest itself is still going on. Traces of the tragedy have reamined, however...
The children's book the girl who snubbed me co-wrote and co-illustrated was about telling one's young 'un (or, more accurately, young animal) about the hurricane and how to prepare for it, and possibly, leave one's home. For every few people acting like the usual JazzFesters, there were some wearing recovery-inspired t-shirts and/or buttons. Outside Gabrielle's restaurant off Esplanade Avenue was a couple selling cheap water, sodas, beer, and mixed drinks, and on their sign was a small addendum, a FEMA trailer tour for $2. I asked where that money was going, and they said, only half-jokingly, it was all going to the government. We have a break here and a slight return to normalcy, despite all the crazy news that pervades the atmosphere, but it doesn't take much to yank us back to the present. I present -
Exhibit A: The official recommendation that FEMA is too flawed to fix, and should probably be dissolved or folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, honey, save us from our eroding marshlands, our governments, and our Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe NOW we'll get the fourteen billion dollars the feds turned down so that 25% of this country's oil, most of the seafood, and the livelihoods of generations of bayou dwellers would get washed into the gulf with major assistance from Katrina and Rita. Yes, that'll work...
Exhibit B: The fact that if the local public school system is going to rebuild itself, it needs the funds to do so. Right now, what remains of the Orleans parish school board has control over the better performing schools in the parish, and the rest are under the control of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Even though the latter schools are under BESE's control, however, the Parish school board is still responsible for a large number of the debts incurred by those schools. And don't even mention the environmental health issues the two boards might be liable for if they cave to the pressure to reopen schools early and they haven't gotten flooded or storm damaged buildings up to snuff. I can only describe myself as slouching towards masochism when I contemplate the fact that I am trying to get my son admitted to this rats' nest. Hooray for me...
Exhibit C: A recent big rainstorm carried with it tornado watches, some anxiety on my part, and enough winds to snap a large chunk off the top of my friend Edie's evergreen tree in her front yard. She was already looking for a large amount of dirt to fill the hole left over from a large tree that was downed by the hurricane, and now she has almost half a large tree sitting in her front yard again. I was racking my brains trying to figure out where I'd last seen a pile of dirt she could use for the purpose, even going so far as to retrace my path through the city to the pile I'd seen a while back, which was still there, complete with its "Free Dirt" sign.
Yep, yet another thing to add to a resume, should I want to return to the working for a paycheck world: I can locate a pile of dirt in a ruined, recovering city for the purpose of reusing and recycling. Now that's contributing to the environment!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Well, I'm a tad appalled. Hopeful, but appalled.
Part of the application process for the Montessori school we want my son to attend involves attendance on the parents' part: a classroom observation meeting and a curriculum meeting for the parents of prospective kids. I scrambled to get to the school early this morning to find the cafeteria chock full of parents, most of them attending for the pre-K observation meeting, about sixty-plus parents in that group alone. We were split into two groups and shown around a couple of classrooms.
My group ended up in the pre-K gifted Montessori classroom with an instructor who had been there for twenty-plus years and kept exclaiming, and not in a good way, at how many parents were in the room. He was grateful that his kids were in the library at that moment, or else they would have been freaked out by the sheer numbers of the parents in the room. He explained the Montessori method, a very short synopsis of the things kids work on in the class and the philosophy behind the method, and at how the program itself had been built up at Audubon physically by involved parents over the years. I told him at the end of the talk to brace himself, that another group of parents was coming. He was not enthused.
We all wandered on to the school library to see a storytelling session in progress, with the gifted pre-K teacher's kids sitting in a circle around the librarian, and then most of us crowded into the cafeteria again to sign forms saying we had attended the classroom observations. I joked with a fellow parent that they should just let us all write "We were here" on the walls and date that. I turned in my form and grabbed some breakfast stuff on a nearby table to nosh on, and sat down, watching all the other parents assembled in the room, signing forms and schmoozing with one another.
The enormity of what I was trying to do hit me then. This was not going to be a cakewalk, for sure. My son could have what it takes (and he does) in terms of his intellect and preparedness for this program, but the luck of the draw and the lack of space and resources, good as they are, in this one school building would make his chances of attending next fall at best fifty-fifty. The crowds of parents at the meeting today are signs of good and bad things to come in the future. near and far. So many parents are in this city wanting a great education for their young 'uns on the cusp of school age - how great is that for a recovering city such as this? So many of them were busting the seams of the school today largely because the prospects for good early education in the remnants of this city's public school system are pretty piddly - how scary is that?
I've said it in a previous post - and after what I've seen today, I'd amend the need for public education to the need for child care as a must for the economic rebounding of New Orleans. Save the school system down here, please. Somebody, anybody. Everyone we can possibly get to teach, to help administrate, to hustle for funds now that all of the public schools here, including the Montessori school I went to today, are charter schools - just COME ON DOWN. This is a new frontier in terms of our kids and their education and well-being. What needs to be kick-started is some sort of educational subsidy to teaching programs across this country - come down here and blaze a new trail in education, please.
What I saw in that room was a lot of hope, faith, and a certain determination to play the odds on the parents' part, because in the end, that is what attendance at this one school will come down to. I know this deep down.
Friends had warned me about this, namely Edie. She had just quit from the school where she had worked for umpteen years as teacher and administrator, and she told me it would be hard to get my son into this Montessori school. I chalked it up to her general rants about "the school system in shambles", most of which were dead-on analyses. Yes, a lot of teachers retired or relocated after Katrina. Yes, the charter school system is effective only with the right combination of affiliation with a benevolent sponsor(s) and crack fundraising administrators. However, Edie is a champion kvetch on any and all things, and after a certain point, it can be easier to just tune her out.
I joked with Justine yesterday that I had already put in a deposit for next year with my son's current preschool, and if Edie's worst scenarios came to pass, well, we had a backup. This is no longer a joke.
A parent departing the meeting wished me good luck, and I wished her the same, because we are all going to need it, big time. We are paying so much in so many ways to be here. Why should prying at the doors to good public education be any different?
The thing is, it can be different. And that's what makes all this so infuriating.
Part of the application process for the Montessori school we want my son to attend involves attendance on the parents' part: a classroom observation meeting and a curriculum meeting for the parents of prospective kids. I scrambled to get to the school early this morning to find the cafeteria chock full of parents, most of them attending for the pre-K observation meeting, about sixty-plus parents in that group alone. We were split into two groups and shown around a couple of classrooms.
My group ended up in the pre-K gifted Montessori classroom with an instructor who had been there for twenty-plus years and kept exclaiming, and not in a good way, at how many parents were in the room. He was grateful that his kids were in the library at that moment, or else they would have been freaked out by the sheer numbers of the parents in the room. He explained the Montessori method, a very short synopsis of the things kids work on in the class and the philosophy behind the method, and at how the program itself had been built up at Audubon physically by involved parents over the years. I told him at the end of the talk to brace himself, that another group of parents was coming. He was not enthused.
We all wandered on to the school library to see a storytelling session in progress, with the gifted pre-K teacher's kids sitting in a circle around the librarian, and then most of us crowded into the cafeteria again to sign forms saying we had attended the classroom observations. I joked with a fellow parent that they should just let us all write "We were here" on the walls and date that. I turned in my form and grabbed some breakfast stuff on a nearby table to nosh on, and sat down, watching all the other parents assembled in the room, signing forms and schmoozing with one another.
The enormity of what I was trying to do hit me then. This was not going to be a cakewalk, for sure. My son could have what it takes (and he does) in terms of his intellect and preparedness for this program, but the luck of the draw and the lack of space and resources, good as they are, in this one school building would make his chances of attending next fall at best fifty-fifty. The crowds of parents at the meeting today are signs of good and bad things to come in the future. near and far. So many parents are in this city wanting a great education for their young 'uns on the cusp of school age - how great is that for a recovering city such as this? So many of them were busting the seams of the school today largely because the prospects for good early education in the remnants of this city's public school system are pretty piddly - how scary is that?
I've said it in a previous post - and after what I've seen today, I'd amend the need for public education to the need for child care as a must for the economic rebounding of New Orleans. Save the school system down here, please. Somebody, anybody. Everyone we can possibly get to teach, to help administrate, to hustle for funds now that all of the public schools here, including the Montessori school I went to today, are charter schools - just COME ON DOWN. This is a new frontier in terms of our kids and their education and well-being. What needs to be kick-started is some sort of educational subsidy to teaching programs across this country - come down here and blaze a new trail in education, please.
What I saw in that room was a lot of hope, faith, and a certain determination to play the odds on the parents' part, because in the end, that is what attendance at this one school will come down to. I know this deep down.
Friends had warned me about this, namely Edie. She had just quit from the school where she had worked for umpteen years as teacher and administrator, and she told me it would be hard to get my son into this Montessori school. I chalked it up to her general rants about "the school system in shambles", most of which were dead-on analyses. Yes, a lot of teachers retired or relocated after Katrina. Yes, the charter school system is effective only with the right combination of affiliation with a benevolent sponsor(s) and crack fundraising administrators. However, Edie is a champion kvetch on any and all things, and after a certain point, it can be easier to just tune her out.
I joked with Justine yesterday that I had already put in a deposit for next year with my son's current preschool, and if Edie's worst scenarios came to pass, well, we had a backup. This is no longer a joke.
A parent departing the meeting wished me good luck, and I wished her the same, because we are all going to need it, big time. We are paying so much in so many ways to be here. Why should prying at the doors to good public education be any different?
The thing is, it can be different. And that's what makes all this so infuriating.
Monday, April 24, 2006
A beautiful day, overall, especially the evening.
Morning was spent getting myself up early because I was being paged by the little guy. Got ourselves up and going, walked the dog with my son in tow, got him off to preschool and did some relaxation, some library browsing, and purchased a gift for the boy in my son's class whose birthday party we missed due to our Passover absence. I got back to his preschool early and peeked into his classroom to find him paying full attention to a favorite dinosaur book his teacher was reading to the class.
We went from there to the car and surfed the grocery store aisles in his favorite fire truck shopping cart. The little guy has so charmed a security guard at the store that she once went out into the parking lot to find the fire truck cart for him, since he was putting on his best pout. We didn't see her today, but we found the cart at the store entrance and went on from there.
Got home, unloaded the groceries, built a new train layout with the Fisher-Price GeoTrax sets my parents keep getting for him, vegged out in the house for a bit, and then we hopped back into the car to cross the bridge to Algiers and to our friend Justin's house, where his wife would do phase two of my son's testing for a Montessori charter program. Phase one occurred on Sunday morning, when we ventured across the river to Justine's testing partner's house to test the little guy's vocabulary and verbal skills. I recalled being in the next room listening to him with this lady, and at one point, he ventured that "his daddy picked his nose". I was relieved that he didn't go on about how he'd been squishing buckmoth caterpillars recently - didn't want anyone in a position to evaluate him psychologically to start going on about how cruelty to animals is one of the first signs of a budding serial killer. Boys just do this stuff sometimes.
One afternoon, my brother and his buddies were up in his room, quiet for almost fifteen minutes. Too quiet. They soon came clambering down the steps, and my mother overheard one boy say excitedly that "they could have electrocuted themselves!" My father's computer repair kit tweezers and my brother's desk lamp, sans light bulb but still plugged in, were being used to electrocute live ants - grab with tweezers, stick in hot socket.
I dare anyone to tell me, and tell me straight, that young girls will come up with similar schemes. And if so, what are the odds?
My son's predilection with squishing caterpillars comes from three sources, I think. One: he saw another kid do it and decided to give it a try. Two: he overheard everyone's disgust at having these little creatures roam around. For those not in the know, buckmoth caterpillars look fuzzy, but their fuzz carries a powerfully poisonous sting. Dog parkers have to steer their dogs around those areas, there are warning signs at the Parenting Center of caterpillars having been seen dropping from the tree in the outdoor playground there, and those doing gardening work have to do so carefully. And Three: squishing them in just the right way gives way to a satisfying crunch and to the possible spectacle of seeing orange guts spewing from the things like toothpaste from a tube. This last one has put my son off squishing the creatures for a while, however, because the last time he did it, the guts went spewing all over his shoe. Moooooooommmmmmmyyyyyyyyy! he yelled in horror. No stings from the guts, just the icky realization he'd gottten them all over his Thomas the Tank Engine sneakers. He treads a bit more carefully now.
He did fine with Justine's testing, though I think he was a bit distracted because he doesn't normally go into Justin's house to be quizzed on how well he knows his numbers and letters, and how well he grasps basic computation concepts. He was much more enthusiastic about playing with the Labrador on the premises, kibitzing in his way with the Canadian workers, who had returned for another helping stint with the tree service Justin operates, and greeting Justin himself with much joy and gusto once the man returned home. We all sat down to dinner, Monday's red beans and rice, with a little sausage on the side, and then Justine and I talked over a little beer and a touch of dessert.
We had talked earlier about what it means to be back in the area at this time. She had just returned with Justin from a short trip to North Carolina, and she loved it. Somehow, the conversation wended its way towards places to go in the event of a need to permanently evacuate New Orleans and its environs, and I was reminded of another talk I'd had with Dan's and my neighbors a few days ago about this very subject. Our neighbors, born and raised in the Midwest, didn't want to go back there, much as their families have been trying to urge them to return and make homes for themselves up there. They'd move out of the country first, the way things are going politically, one of our neighbors said. I did speculate that New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, which we'd visited last summer, wouldn't be half bad, relocation-wise, except for the cold cold COLD weather they can get in those parts.
Worse comes to worse, I told Justine tonight, we'd look a bit more into getting a house outside Baton Rouge, God forbid. Talk about really starting our lives over again, socially. Talking about having a backup plan for permanently leaving this area is pretty damned frightening, too. At least if this were Israel, the only barrier to permanent settlement of a disputed area would be mainly political. Here it would really come down to life and death.
So what could possibly be worth dying for? Justin, Justine, their Labrador, and my son and I took a walk on the West Bank levee after dinner. The sun was slowly setting over the Central Business District across the river, a large cargo ship was passing by, some Carnival float dens were on the other side of the levee from the river's action, and my son was running ahead of us all, giddy with every step, slightly overtired, and mesmerized by the passing ship and the Coast Guard helicopter that hovered overhead. He was so mad when we had to turn back, but his eyes lit up when he saw a man on a nearby bench playing his guitar in the twilit dusk. He wanted to play the guitar himself, I know. He danced on the sidewalk a little and clambered up on the bench next to the guitar player, bobbing his head to a beat within himself - a beat possibly combined with the one the guitar player was strumming to. I loved seeing him this happy with being in a place, feeling his pain when we had to leave the place, the moment, all of it behind for home and sleep.
I made my choice to come here for love of a place, most of all. I really want to share that love with my son, and deep down, I would love for him to develop his own version of this love himself. I am constantly het up by the ephemerality of our chosen home, however, and no amount of just sharing the love will make a difference unless action is taken to keep this place from washing away.
Yeah, I could die here - but my son must live. There lies the dilemma. It's why I don't blame others for flying this coop. And it's why I still struggle inwardly a bit. Which is why there is a lot of strength in keeping up with the everyday. Got to keep pushing along - get the kid in school, keep us all fed well, walk the dog, and sustain and strengthen the family relationships, and the friendships.
Morning was spent getting myself up early because I was being paged by the little guy. Got ourselves up and going, walked the dog with my son in tow, got him off to preschool and did some relaxation, some library browsing, and purchased a gift for the boy in my son's class whose birthday party we missed due to our Passover absence. I got back to his preschool early and peeked into his classroom to find him paying full attention to a favorite dinosaur book his teacher was reading to the class.
We went from there to the car and surfed the grocery store aisles in his favorite fire truck shopping cart. The little guy has so charmed a security guard at the store that she once went out into the parking lot to find the fire truck cart for him, since he was putting on his best pout. We didn't see her today, but we found the cart at the store entrance and went on from there.
Got home, unloaded the groceries, built a new train layout with the Fisher-Price GeoTrax sets my parents keep getting for him, vegged out in the house for a bit, and then we hopped back into the car to cross the bridge to Algiers and to our friend Justin's house, where his wife would do phase two of my son's testing for a Montessori charter program. Phase one occurred on Sunday morning, when we ventured across the river to Justine's testing partner's house to test the little guy's vocabulary and verbal skills. I recalled being in the next room listening to him with this lady, and at one point, he ventured that "his daddy picked his nose". I was relieved that he didn't go on about how he'd been squishing buckmoth caterpillars recently - didn't want anyone in a position to evaluate him psychologically to start going on about how cruelty to animals is one of the first signs of a budding serial killer. Boys just do this stuff sometimes.
One afternoon, my brother and his buddies were up in his room, quiet for almost fifteen minutes. Too quiet. They soon came clambering down the steps, and my mother overheard one boy say excitedly that "they could have electrocuted themselves!" My father's computer repair kit tweezers and my brother's desk lamp, sans light bulb but still plugged in, were being used to electrocute live ants - grab with tweezers, stick in hot socket.
I dare anyone to tell me, and tell me straight, that young girls will come up with similar schemes. And if so, what are the odds?
My son's predilection with squishing caterpillars comes from three sources, I think. One: he saw another kid do it and decided to give it a try. Two: he overheard everyone's disgust at having these little creatures roam around. For those not in the know, buckmoth caterpillars look fuzzy, but their fuzz carries a powerfully poisonous sting. Dog parkers have to steer their dogs around those areas, there are warning signs at the Parenting Center of caterpillars having been seen dropping from the tree in the outdoor playground there, and those doing gardening work have to do so carefully. And Three: squishing them in just the right way gives way to a satisfying crunch and to the possible spectacle of seeing orange guts spewing from the things like toothpaste from a tube. This last one has put my son off squishing the creatures for a while, however, because the last time he did it, the guts went spewing all over his shoe. Moooooooommmmmmmyyyyyyyyy! he yelled in horror. No stings from the guts, just the icky realization he'd gottten them all over his Thomas the Tank Engine sneakers. He treads a bit more carefully now.
He did fine with Justine's testing, though I think he was a bit distracted because he doesn't normally go into Justin's house to be quizzed on how well he knows his numbers and letters, and how well he grasps basic computation concepts. He was much more enthusiastic about playing with the Labrador on the premises, kibitzing in his way with the Canadian workers, who had returned for another helping stint with the tree service Justin operates, and greeting Justin himself with much joy and gusto once the man returned home. We all sat down to dinner, Monday's red beans and rice, with a little sausage on the side, and then Justine and I talked over a little beer and a touch of dessert.
We had talked earlier about what it means to be back in the area at this time. She had just returned with Justin from a short trip to North Carolina, and she loved it. Somehow, the conversation wended its way towards places to go in the event of a need to permanently evacuate New Orleans and its environs, and I was reminded of another talk I'd had with Dan's and my neighbors a few days ago about this very subject. Our neighbors, born and raised in the Midwest, didn't want to go back there, much as their families have been trying to urge them to return and make homes for themselves up there. They'd move out of the country first, the way things are going politically, one of our neighbors said. I did speculate that New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, which we'd visited last summer, wouldn't be half bad, relocation-wise, except for the cold cold COLD weather they can get in those parts.
Worse comes to worse, I told Justine tonight, we'd look a bit more into getting a house outside Baton Rouge, God forbid. Talk about really starting our lives over again, socially. Talking about having a backup plan for permanently leaving this area is pretty damned frightening, too. At least if this were Israel, the only barrier to permanent settlement of a disputed area would be mainly political. Here it would really come down to life and death.
So what could possibly be worth dying for? Justin, Justine, their Labrador, and my son and I took a walk on the West Bank levee after dinner. The sun was slowly setting over the Central Business District across the river, a large cargo ship was passing by, some Carnival float dens were on the other side of the levee from the river's action, and my son was running ahead of us all, giddy with every step, slightly overtired, and mesmerized by the passing ship and the Coast Guard helicopter that hovered overhead. He was so mad when we had to turn back, but his eyes lit up when he saw a man on a nearby bench playing his guitar in the twilit dusk. He wanted to play the guitar himself, I know. He danced on the sidewalk a little and clambered up on the bench next to the guitar player, bobbing his head to a beat within himself - a beat possibly combined with the one the guitar player was strumming to. I loved seeing him this happy with being in a place, feeling his pain when we had to leave the place, the moment, all of it behind for home and sleep.
I made my choice to come here for love of a place, most of all. I really want to share that love with my son, and deep down, I would love for him to develop his own version of this love himself. I am constantly het up by the ephemerality of our chosen home, however, and no amount of just sharing the love will make a difference unless action is taken to keep this place from washing away.
Yeah, I could die here - but my son must live. There lies the dilemma. It's why I don't blame others for flying this coop. And it's why I still struggle inwardly a bit. Which is why there is a lot of strength in keeping up with the everyday. Got to keep pushing along - get the kid in school, keep us all fed well, walk the dog, and sustain and strengthen the family relationships, and the friendships.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
It is a weekend of much celebration, of new beginnings, of acknowledging the craziness around us, reveling in it a little, and moving on from there. These are the things that this city is known for, that people come from all over the world to get a taste of. For those of us who live here, these have become the rhythms of our life.
Some of these rhythms have been organized specially by a group or groups - like, say, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, or the one that is going on this weekend, the French Quarter Fest. And sometimes, it is the welcoming of something that is a bit of an organized imposition - the Super Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Bayou Classic, local, state, and federal elections. This just happens to be a weekend when so many of these things coincide.
One year, the Super Bowl (Patriots-Packers, before the days of Tom Brady and them) coincided with the Krewe du Vieux parade running through the Quarter. Cheeseheads and Pats fans mingled with paradegoers and the usual partying flotsam and jetsam running in and out of the bars and restaurants. I was lucky to be able to call for a cab that night, since trying to hail one from off the street was an impossibility. I never felt threatened by the crowds - this town prides itself on manageable chaos.
A true testament to that credo is the French Quarter Festival, which has been going on for a number of years now. Loads of local bands play various stages on the riverfront and in the Quarter. The usual Quarter nuttiness mingles once again with the music in the streets with much abandon, an issue that is normally one of hot contention among city lawmakers and year-round street performers. Strange to think that a city known for its music tries repeatedly to regulate said music off its streets on a regular basis, but there it is. All the more unusual that FQF events are free to the public, with money needed only for food and tchotchkes.
Yep, people sure know how to party down here. Even the primary voting yesterday occasioned a flurry, a deluge, a forest of campaign signs on that corrugated plastic stuck in every neutral ground, loads of decoration lauding each and every single candidate for mayor, for city council, for assessors' positions, for sheriff, for clerk of criminal court, which must have amounted to close to fifty names on thousands of signs. If Dan and I had been awake enough to do it, I would have grabbed them all and done a Frank Gehry number with them.
Gehry, shortly before the design and execution of buildings such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, created some fantastic and very comfortable furniture out of laminated pieces of corrugated cardboard, hundreds of them all stuck together and then cut into the shape of chairs, tables, ottomans. Campaign furniture would have been a kick - plus it wouldn't have disintegrated on exposure to moisture like Gehry's furniture. Nothing like a nice dais for mayoral candidate Sonja "Lady" DeDais, maybe. Or it could be just a good excuse to tell a candidate to SIT ON IT.
In a festive mood, after having been one of two candidates who kept their heads above the fray, for better or worse, Ray Nagin in his "phase two" speech pulled out a small keychain and professed that others were making money off his recent foot-in-mouth comments. In these parts, a fellow here has been making money off a keychain named a "Cajun in Your Pocket" - push the buttons on the keychain and a Cajun yell sounds off, another button yields the phrase "I love you like a pig loves corn" in a Cajun-cadenced voice, and other buttons yield other Cajun phrases. Well, the same fellow has apparently come up with the "Mayor in Your Pocket", and Nagin played it last night, two recordings of him saying some things. I noticed the "Chocolate City" quote was conspicuously absent, but I figured Nagin wouldn't touch that button with a ten-foot pole. As it is, his position versus his runoff opponent, Mitch Landrieu, is somewhat tenuous, considering Landrieu's connections as lieutenant governor, his family's political legacy on the local and national levels (his father, Moon Landrieu, as a former New Orleans mayor, and his sister's position as a US senator for Louisiana), and the fact that Landrieu has been able to attract all sorts of support from all facets of New Orleans' culture and classes. Edie and I saw him just after the election at a crawfish boil fundraiser for a local public elementary and middle school. He could just as easily have slept in after the primaries, since he had worked his tail off from a late start in the campaigning to get where he was. And yet, there he was, celebrating at a public school crawfish boil. More power to him, I say.
Of course, much is being made of there not having been an incumbent mayor voted out of office in New Orleans for sixty years, and in that respect, the odds are in Nagin's favor. However, the whole "Bulworth" style of speaking his mind and departing from a script ain't working well for this man, I don't think. Get rid of that "Mayor in Your Pocket", your honor. There are way too many shirts and bumper stickers making fun of you as it is.
Speaking of bumper stickers, some good ones recently:
My Body's Not a Temple, It's An Amusement Park!
Hug a Musician; They Never Get to Dance
Make Groceries, Not War
That last one is a true twist on an old New Orleans expression. "Making groceries" is simply an expression for grocery shopping down here.
Next festival stop? The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which promises to be a zoo this year. We are already planning a strategy as to which stages to avoid due to anticipated critical crowd mass (big names this year include Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, and just enough world renowned performers to make one stage out of the ten-plus on the Fair Grounds effectively dead for a day, since the big-name acts won't be on until the end of the day; it all adds up to the perfect recipe for people who want to see those acts camping out at a stage from the beginning of the day until the bitter end), which acts we think my in-laws would love to see when they come to visit for the second weekend, and which ones we know are good that we haven't seen in four years. Add my son and his needs to the mix, and yeah, we need to plan for this big time. Maybe we can petition the Joint Chiefs to make use of the Pentagon for this purpose. Our tax dollars at work...
Almost ten years ago, at a local Spanish food place, I spied a sign up on the wall that I had to have. Friends of ours in New York never failed to comment on it:
AFTER THREE DAYS, GUESTS ARE LIKE FISH THEY STINK
We are beyond that doubtful guest, Katrina, and we are still cleaning up after her, but Lord knows, we need a break. We're on the cusp of a possibly different political future, and a new hurricane season. How best to bolster our confidence down here than with a bit of Festing?
Not FESTERING, folks.
Some of these rhythms have been organized specially by a group or groups - like, say, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, or the one that is going on this weekend, the French Quarter Fest. And sometimes, it is the welcoming of something that is a bit of an organized imposition - the Super Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Bayou Classic, local, state, and federal elections. This just happens to be a weekend when so many of these things coincide.
One year, the Super Bowl (Patriots-Packers, before the days of Tom Brady and them) coincided with the Krewe du Vieux parade running through the Quarter. Cheeseheads and Pats fans mingled with paradegoers and the usual partying flotsam and jetsam running in and out of the bars and restaurants. I was lucky to be able to call for a cab that night, since trying to hail one from off the street was an impossibility. I never felt threatened by the crowds - this town prides itself on manageable chaos.
A true testament to that credo is the French Quarter Festival, which has been going on for a number of years now. Loads of local bands play various stages on the riverfront and in the Quarter. The usual Quarter nuttiness mingles once again with the music in the streets with much abandon, an issue that is normally one of hot contention among city lawmakers and year-round street performers. Strange to think that a city known for its music tries repeatedly to regulate said music off its streets on a regular basis, but there it is. All the more unusual that FQF events are free to the public, with money needed only for food and tchotchkes.
Yep, people sure know how to party down here. Even the primary voting yesterday occasioned a flurry, a deluge, a forest of campaign signs on that corrugated plastic stuck in every neutral ground, loads of decoration lauding each and every single candidate for mayor, for city council, for assessors' positions, for sheriff, for clerk of criminal court, which must have amounted to close to fifty names on thousands of signs. If Dan and I had been awake enough to do it, I would have grabbed them all and done a Frank Gehry number with them.
Gehry, shortly before the design and execution of buildings such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, created some fantastic and very comfortable furniture out of laminated pieces of corrugated cardboard, hundreds of them all stuck together and then cut into the shape of chairs, tables, ottomans. Campaign furniture would have been a kick - plus it wouldn't have disintegrated on exposure to moisture like Gehry's furniture. Nothing like a nice dais for mayoral candidate Sonja "Lady" DeDais, maybe. Or it could be just a good excuse to tell a candidate to SIT ON IT.
In a festive mood, after having been one of two candidates who kept their heads above the fray, for better or worse, Ray Nagin in his "phase two" speech pulled out a small keychain and professed that others were making money off his recent foot-in-mouth comments. In these parts, a fellow here has been making money off a keychain named a "Cajun in Your Pocket" - push the buttons on the keychain and a Cajun yell sounds off, another button yields the phrase "I love you like a pig loves corn" in a Cajun-cadenced voice, and other buttons yield other Cajun phrases. Well, the same fellow has apparently come up with the "Mayor in Your Pocket", and Nagin played it last night, two recordings of him saying some things. I noticed the "Chocolate City" quote was conspicuously absent, but I figured Nagin wouldn't touch that button with a ten-foot pole. As it is, his position versus his runoff opponent, Mitch Landrieu, is somewhat tenuous, considering Landrieu's connections as lieutenant governor, his family's political legacy on the local and national levels (his father, Moon Landrieu, as a former New Orleans mayor, and his sister's position as a US senator for Louisiana), and the fact that Landrieu has been able to attract all sorts of support from all facets of New Orleans' culture and classes. Edie and I saw him just after the election at a crawfish boil fundraiser for a local public elementary and middle school. He could just as easily have slept in after the primaries, since he had worked his tail off from a late start in the campaigning to get where he was. And yet, there he was, celebrating at a public school crawfish boil. More power to him, I say.
Of course, much is being made of there not having been an incumbent mayor voted out of office in New Orleans for sixty years, and in that respect, the odds are in Nagin's favor. However, the whole "Bulworth" style of speaking his mind and departing from a script ain't working well for this man, I don't think. Get rid of that "Mayor in Your Pocket", your honor. There are way too many shirts and bumper stickers making fun of you as it is.
Speaking of bumper stickers, some good ones recently:
My Body's Not a Temple, It's An Amusement Park!
Hug a Musician; They Never Get to Dance
Make Groceries, Not War
That last one is a true twist on an old New Orleans expression. "Making groceries" is simply an expression for grocery shopping down here.
Next festival stop? The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which promises to be a zoo this year. We are already planning a strategy as to which stages to avoid due to anticipated critical crowd mass (big names this year include Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, and just enough world renowned performers to make one stage out of the ten-plus on the Fair Grounds effectively dead for a day, since the big-name acts won't be on until the end of the day; it all adds up to the perfect recipe for people who want to see those acts camping out at a stage from the beginning of the day until the bitter end), which acts we think my in-laws would love to see when they come to visit for the second weekend, and which ones we know are good that we haven't seen in four years. Add my son and his needs to the mix, and yeah, we need to plan for this big time. Maybe we can petition the Joint Chiefs to make use of the Pentagon for this purpose. Our tax dollars at work...
Almost ten years ago, at a local Spanish food place, I spied a sign up on the wall that I had to have. Friends of ours in New York never failed to comment on it:
AFTER THREE DAYS, GUESTS ARE LIKE FISH THEY STINK
We are beyond that doubtful guest, Katrina, and we are still cleaning up after her, but Lord knows, we need a break. We're on the cusp of a possibly different political future, and a new hurricane season. How best to bolster our confidence down here than with a bit of Festing?
Not FESTERING, folks.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
FOOD, deuxieme etage (part deux)
So, as I was saying...
I grabbed those excess uneaten crawfish from the ex-boss' birthday boil and didn't get around to crawfish pie-in' them until the day before we were slated to go back to New York to visit family and friends for Passover. I peeled the suckers, whipped up the roux, added the veggies and rolled up some pie dough and cooked up enough for a couple of armies only to place most of them in the freezer for consumption apres Pesach. They beckon to me longingly whenever I open the freezer door to get something else out. Two more days, little pies...
It's times such as these I am grateful for the existence of places such as the Kosher Cajun Deli and Grocery in Metairie. Passover shopping went a little by the wayside this year, as we are still unpacking some and, well, I must face it, I was also a bit of a lazy bum. The Kosher Cajun was actually open yesterday, when I did my shopping and had lunch there, and today, keeping the kosher for Passover mid-holiday shopping fires burning. The selection was all right, considering it was mid-holiday, and my son and I sat down to a nice lunch of hamburger with the fixings, minus the bun, some pickle slices, and a piece of matzah. As I told my friend Edie when her daughter complained about her made-from-scratch Passover brownies, I've learned over time to expect only so much from Passover food. It's a time of affliction, folks...be grateful that God and tradition didn't mandate eight days of fasting. It's times like these, though, that one realizes how pervasive bread and yeast and products that look like they rise when cooked have become in our food culture as a nation...forget the two challah loaves one is supposed to have every Shabbat.
No wonder my husband wants to be an honorary Sephardic Jew when this time of year comes around - Sephardim can eat more stuff!
We made our way to New York for my grandparents' seder nights and got to see a good amount of my family in the process. For twenty-three years now I have been co-leading the seders with my grandfather, so Passover in New York is a requirement. Now that we are down south, Passover is an absolute, on pain of death requirement because everyone has to see my son and give him gifts such as a toy Home Depot brand chainsaw, additions to his Fisher-Price train set, sets of Hot Wheels cars and other tchotchkes. I would have loved to see the TSA screener's face when he/she saw the outline of the chainsaw in my bag on my return trip. My parents' sense of humor is quite bizarre.
Another funny committed by my family? My father and grandmother go shopping in a gourmet kosher grocery store on Long Island, and my father stands there at the meat counter exclaiming over the size of the lamb chops there. "They look like pork! They're thick just like pork chops!", my father says, loud enough for most of the store to hear. An orthodox Jewish fellow nearby overhears him and says, "You came to the wrong place, buddy." Oh, well. At least they came back with some fantastic cranberry granola snack mix.
We got to see lots of family and friends on this visit, and we saw most of them at Shabbat services at our old synagogue. We even had lunch with one of the families we knew when we lived in the area and attended synagogue functions regularly - all because I ordered Passover candy from one of their kids before we moved and had to pick it up. We talked of New Orleans and of goings-on in their neck of the woods over matzah and cold cuts, and then we went to a local park we used to frequent and ran into more people we knew there, as my son demonstrated, hands-on, to those assembled around the water fountain how it can be turned into a sprinkler. From there, we went to my grandparents' for dinner and made it an early night.
I missed seeing a good friend of mine in all this, however - she is exiled from New Orleans and living in Astoria now with a primo job. We talked over the phone before my trip up north of catastrophes and their revisitations. "Picture, if you will," I told her, "a channel on TV that broadcasts pictures of the 9-11 sites and their destruction from every conceivable angle 24-7, with interruptions in the form of relief postings and pertinent phone numbers. Replace the WTC, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA, with pictures of the levee breaches' aftermath and multiply it by three, and that's what we have going down here."
Her beef was with the release of the recordings of the distress calls to the 911 operators from the WTC during the attacks. "Give me some good ol' Louisiana political scandal!" she said.
If we're not careful, there just might be the beginnings of one this Saturday, when the first of the post-Katrina city elections occurs. Us yutzes have missed the boat, however, at least for Saturday's election. I myself will be able to vote in the runoff on May 20, and there will definitely be a runoff. If I were voting for mayor in the primary, however, it would be for either Boulet or Landrieu. They seem to be concerned first and foremost with getting this city back on its feet, minus the axe-grinding most of the other candidates seem to have demonstrated towards each other and state and federal government. Watching the first of the nationally broadcast debates kind of bore this out, to me. When Rob Couhig bulldogs his way through the debates, Peggy Wilson stutters her way through answers to questions she is clearly unprepared for. Ray Nagin gets a burr up his butt for thinking a candidate's line of questioning to another candidate is a set-up that is meant to make him look foolish, and the Reverend Watson implies (and apparently said outright in the following debate) that Nagin's embarrassment is really the wrath of God being visited upon him. Ron Forman gets a great deal of support himself, but I think he has stepped on too many toes as a developer in the private sector - visit www.saveaudubonpark.org to see what I mean.
The part that nearly brought me to tears, however, was when Norman Robinson asked, with the wrath of God clearly channeled through his voice, what each candidate would say to prospective and returning residents about the safety of living in the flooded areas when even now, bodies are being found in houses slated for demolition, in many cases by returning family members. Would candidates recommend relying on levee protection once again in these areas? Wilson was called on first to answer, and she evaded the question, causing me to want to reach through to that studio and slap her upside the head. The last thing that is needed in this election is the same ol' political bull. Yes, there's still going to be a certain amount of it, but that, too, could be put to better use than to deny what's going on around here.
This is still going on when it comes to big issues here, such as child care. Once again, I can only direct everyone to the Gambit website for more info, since they seem to be the only ones consistently addressing what everyone else doesn't want to fully acknowledge:
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2006-04-18/news_feat.php
Since Katrina and its aftermath, almost 80-some-odd % of the child care options that once existed are gone, and it kicks some New Orleans recovery prospects right in the teeth. Those who think women don't wield much in the way of political or economic power ought to try on the effective elimination of half of a prospective workforce for size. If there aren't any child care options, and soon, this city will be reaping that whirlwind for sure...
And there ends my rant for the day.
As we drove around New York in our rented car, Dan and I realized we had grown accustomed to the place, to mangle My Fair Lady and Rex Harrison a bit. I'd recommend to any new New Yorkers to give the place some time, some good care and feeding, and get to meeting some people and making connections, and it will all grow on you. We were on the verge of living a New York life for sure. Then again, we were probably caught up in the euphoria that comes with visiting a place that hasn't changed much in the few months since we left, and is not going through the same sort of turmoil we've been in the middle of.
We encountered a returning New Orleanian on our flight back home who was craving a good pot of gumbo on his return, but whose favorite hot sausage place in the Ninth Ward had succumbed to the floods. He asked us where good hot sausage could be had now, and all I could think of was someplace on the road to Picayune, MS, that may or may not exist anymore. Dan mentioned a place in the CBD the fellow had heard of and tried, and they both let out a hearty "MMMMMMmmmmmm" at the thought of the sausage.
Being Jewish, and carrying around some lessons gleaned from a people with a history of exile, all I've got to say is this, and I mean it in ways aside from the culinary:
If you feed them, they will come.
So, as I was saying...
I grabbed those excess uneaten crawfish from the ex-boss' birthday boil and didn't get around to crawfish pie-in' them until the day before we were slated to go back to New York to visit family and friends for Passover. I peeled the suckers, whipped up the roux, added the veggies and rolled up some pie dough and cooked up enough for a couple of armies only to place most of them in the freezer for consumption apres Pesach. They beckon to me longingly whenever I open the freezer door to get something else out. Two more days, little pies...
It's times such as these I am grateful for the existence of places such as the Kosher Cajun Deli and Grocery in Metairie. Passover shopping went a little by the wayside this year, as we are still unpacking some and, well, I must face it, I was also a bit of a lazy bum. The Kosher Cajun was actually open yesterday, when I did my shopping and had lunch there, and today, keeping the kosher for Passover mid-holiday shopping fires burning. The selection was all right, considering it was mid-holiday, and my son and I sat down to a nice lunch of hamburger with the fixings, minus the bun, some pickle slices, and a piece of matzah. As I told my friend Edie when her daughter complained about her made-from-scratch Passover brownies, I've learned over time to expect only so much from Passover food. It's a time of affliction, folks...be grateful that God and tradition didn't mandate eight days of fasting. It's times like these, though, that one realizes how pervasive bread and yeast and products that look like they rise when cooked have become in our food culture as a nation...forget the two challah loaves one is supposed to have every Shabbat.
No wonder my husband wants to be an honorary Sephardic Jew when this time of year comes around - Sephardim can eat more stuff!
We made our way to New York for my grandparents' seder nights and got to see a good amount of my family in the process. For twenty-three years now I have been co-leading the seders with my grandfather, so Passover in New York is a requirement. Now that we are down south, Passover is an absolute, on pain of death requirement because everyone has to see my son and give him gifts such as a toy Home Depot brand chainsaw, additions to his Fisher-Price train set, sets of Hot Wheels cars and other tchotchkes. I would have loved to see the TSA screener's face when he/she saw the outline of the chainsaw in my bag on my return trip. My parents' sense of humor is quite bizarre.
Another funny committed by my family? My father and grandmother go shopping in a gourmet kosher grocery store on Long Island, and my father stands there at the meat counter exclaiming over the size of the lamb chops there. "They look like pork! They're thick just like pork chops!", my father says, loud enough for most of the store to hear. An orthodox Jewish fellow nearby overhears him and says, "You came to the wrong place, buddy." Oh, well. At least they came back with some fantastic cranberry granola snack mix.
We got to see lots of family and friends on this visit, and we saw most of them at Shabbat services at our old synagogue. We even had lunch with one of the families we knew when we lived in the area and attended synagogue functions regularly - all because I ordered Passover candy from one of their kids before we moved and had to pick it up. We talked of New Orleans and of goings-on in their neck of the woods over matzah and cold cuts, and then we went to a local park we used to frequent and ran into more people we knew there, as my son demonstrated, hands-on, to those assembled around the water fountain how it can be turned into a sprinkler. From there, we went to my grandparents' for dinner and made it an early night.
I missed seeing a good friend of mine in all this, however - she is exiled from New Orleans and living in Astoria now with a primo job. We talked over the phone before my trip up north of catastrophes and their revisitations. "Picture, if you will," I told her, "a channel on TV that broadcasts pictures of the 9-11 sites and their destruction from every conceivable angle 24-7, with interruptions in the form of relief postings and pertinent phone numbers. Replace the WTC, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA, with pictures of the levee breaches' aftermath and multiply it by three, and that's what we have going down here."
Her beef was with the release of the recordings of the distress calls to the 911 operators from the WTC during the attacks. "Give me some good ol' Louisiana political scandal!" she said.
If we're not careful, there just might be the beginnings of one this Saturday, when the first of the post-Katrina city elections occurs. Us yutzes have missed the boat, however, at least for Saturday's election. I myself will be able to vote in the runoff on May 20, and there will definitely be a runoff. If I were voting for mayor in the primary, however, it would be for either Boulet or Landrieu. They seem to be concerned first and foremost with getting this city back on its feet, minus the axe-grinding most of the other candidates seem to have demonstrated towards each other and state and federal government. Watching the first of the nationally broadcast debates kind of bore this out, to me. When Rob Couhig bulldogs his way through the debates, Peggy Wilson stutters her way through answers to questions she is clearly unprepared for. Ray Nagin gets a burr up his butt for thinking a candidate's line of questioning to another candidate is a set-up that is meant to make him look foolish, and the Reverend Watson implies (and apparently said outright in the following debate) that Nagin's embarrassment is really the wrath of God being visited upon him. Ron Forman gets a great deal of support himself, but I think he has stepped on too many toes as a developer in the private sector - visit www.saveaudubonpark.org to see what I mean.
The part that nearly brought me to tears, however, was when Norman Robinson asked, with the wrath of God clearly channeled through his voice, what each candidate would say to prospective and returning residents about the safety of living in the flooded areas when even now, bodies are being found in houses slated for demolition, in many cases by returning family members. Would candidates recommend relying on levee protection once again in these areas? Wilson was called on first to answer, and she evaded the question, causing me to want to reach through to that studio and slap her upside the head. The last thing that is needed in this election is the same ol' political bull. Yes, there's still going to be a certain amount of it, but that, too, could be put to better use than to deny what's going on around here.
This is still going on when it comes to big issues here, such as child care. Once again, I can only direct everyone to the Gambit website for more info, since they seem to be the only ones consistently addressing what everyone else doesn't want to fully acknowledge:
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2006-04-18/news_feat.php
Since Katrina and its aftermath, almost 80-some-odd % of the child care options that once existed are gone, and it kicks some New Orleans recovery prospects right in the teeth. Those who think women don't wield much in the way of political or economic power ought to try on the effective elimination of half of a prospective workforce for size. If there aren't any child care options, and soon, this city will be reaping that whirlwind for sure...
And there ends my rant for the day.
As we drove around New York in our rented car, Dan and I realized we had grown accustomed to the place, to mangle My Fair Lady and Rex Harrison a bit. I'd recommend to any new New Yorkers to give the place some time, some good care and feeding, and get to meeting some people and making connections, and it will all grow on you. We were on the verge of living a New York life for sure. Then again, we were probably caught up in the euphoria that comes with visiting a place that hasn't changed much in the few months since we left, and is not going through the same sort of turmoil we've been in the middle of.
We encountered a returning New Orleanian on our flight back home who was craving a good pot of gumbo on his return, but whose favorite hot sausage place in the Ninth Ward had succumbed to the floods. He asked us where good hot sausage could be had now, and all I could think of was someplace on the road to Picayune, MS, that may or may not exist anymore. Dan mentioned a place in the CBD the fellow had heard of and tried, and they both let out a hearty "MMMMMMmmmmmm" at the thought of the sausage.
Being Jewish, and carrying around some lessons gleaned from a people with a history of exile, all I've got to say is this, and I mean it in ways aside from the culinary:
If you feed them, they will come.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Yep, it's been a while. And the theme for the past week or so that I haven't been posting seems to have been FOOD.
Went to Russell's Marina Grill in the West End, right in the heart of one of the devastated areas. Lakeview's destruction surrounded the restaurant, but it was good to see the place packed to the gills for breakfast, just like before the storm. Don't know what possessed me to pick the place as our breakfast-out destination that morning, but there we were, waiting on a table. I pulled out the copy of Mark Kurlansky's Salt I'd checked out from the library and immediately sparked a conversation with a woman who turned out to be the curator of the Southern Food Museum here in the city (www.southernfood.org). Took a look at their website later on and found that they are collecting Katrina stories relating to food - cookin' in disastrous times, food you miss now that you're exiled from the area, food that pulled you through, anything related to food. Check it out when you get a chance, y'all.
Later on, we went out to the West Bank of the Mississippi to a new friend's home to celebrate my ex-boss's birthday over boiled crawfish, ribs, loads of snack food, and a chicken cooked with an unopened can of beer up its rear (I kid you not - the fact that it was unopened, however, was a mistake). Once again, we had leftover crawfish to take home (yeah, like we were crying about it...), along with garlic bread and some brussels sprouts that Dan just had to try, since it was our first time having them boiled with the crawfish, spices and all. I declined on that one myself; being the guinea pig for this family's first-ever attempt at a crawfish boil was more than enough adventure. Of our new friends, Mom the animal lover couldn't take watching the live crawfish being boiled, but she would eat them gladly. Dad, however, was cooking the little mudbugs and correcting the seasoning with gusto, but he didn't enjoy a single bite of his creation, since he harbored a lifelong distaste for any and all seafood. Their little girl was inhaling the crawfish that were peeled for her, and my son was tentatively tasting the corn and balking at its spiciness...he's been averse to the spicy stuff for the past few months now. My ex-boss dug in with both hands, grabbing for the larger crawfish first, as is her right as the birthday girl, but we enjoyed the feast with no beer, since she'd given it up for Lent. Stranger food preferences have rarely been witnessed by my own eyes, I'll tell you that...
Part of the conversation involved food in the scheme of evacuation. My ex-boss commented on her weight gain of fifteen pounds while in exile from New Orleans, because so many people insisted on feeding her and the folks with whom she evacuated. The table full of snacks we were noshing on while we were waiting for the crawfish to finish brought back the food memories from the evacuation...and then, after finishing up the second batch of boiled crawfish as best we could, we all went our separate ways, mostly over the Huey P. Long bridge to avoid the filming of a Denzel Washington movie they were doing near the Crescent City Connection that was guaranteed to tie up traffic. I wouldn't have wanted to see a load of fake explosions anyway, since there are loads of real ones occurring in our lives here almost every day.
For instance, our cantor of nearly five years is leaving. That bomb was dropped on the congregation shortly before Dan and I left for a family visit up north for Passover. There has been a load of speculation since as to his reasons for leaving, as there will be when a leader of any capacity moves onward. He'd just bought a house in the Broadmoor area of the city almost a year before the storm, all of his possessions were flooded out, he and his wife are raising a ten month old son, and the storm coincided with the retirement of one rabbi from the synagogue and the arrival of a new one. Stressful situation? Add the loss of his wife's university teaching job to the equation, and it would all be enough to tip anyone over the edge. Wherever he and his family go, I wish them all well. There will unfortunately be large numbers of people here who will think this person is abandoning them at a time of need - but this is someone who is clearly in need of help in the form of a fresh start. Once again, in this case, as I have seen in some other local families in transition to other places, there are other people to consider in the equation aside from himself. I could go on about the whole ministering part of a cantorial position being a tough one to negotiate - after all, more congregations are expecting cantors to be rabbis who sing. Folks in a congregation also need to recognize burnout when they see it.
Yet another bomb to report? Try the mayoral debate being broadcast on national TV, with local anchor Norman Robinson and CNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews doing the mediating. Now the rest of the country - indeed, the rest of the world - can see what we are going through tomorrow night, April 17. Truly an historic event in the making. No doubt the Nielsen ratings will be posted the following morning in the local paper. Stay tuned and hold on to your horses...
More on food in my next post. It's getting late for me.
Went to Russell's Marina Grill in the West End, right in the heart of one of the devastated areas. Lakeview's destruction surrounded the restaurant, but it was good to see the place packed to the gills for breakfast, just like before the storm. Don't know what possessed me to pick the place as our breakfast-out destination that morning, but there we were, waiting on a table. I pulled out the copy of Mark Kurlansky's Salt I'd checked out from the library and immediately sparked a conversation with a woman who turned out to be the curator of the Southern Food Museum here in the city (www.southernfood.org). Took a look at their website later on and found that they are collecting Katrina stories relating to food - cookin' in disastrous times, food you miss now that you're exiled from the area, food that pulled you through, anything related to food. Check it out when you get a chance, y'all.
Later on, we went out to the West Bank of the Mississippi to a new friend's home to celebrate my ex-boss's birthday over boiled crawfish, ribs, loads of snack food, and a chicken cooked with an unopened can of beer up its rear (I kid you not - the fact that it was unopened, however, was a mistake). Once again, we had leftover crawfish to take home (yeah, like we were crying about it...), along with garlic bread and some brussels sprouts that Dan just had to try, since it was our first time having them boiled with the crawfish, spices and all. I declined on that one myself; being the guinea pig for this family's first-ever attempt at a crawfish boil was more than enough adventure. Of our new friends, Mom the animal lover couldn't take watching the live crawfish being boiled, but she would eat them gladly. Dad, however, was cooking the little mudbugs and correcting the seasoning with gusto, but he didn't enjoy a single bite of his creation, since he harbored a lifelong distaste for any and all seafood. Their little girl was inhaling the crawfish that were peeled for her, and my son was tentatively tasting the corn and balking at its spiciness...he's been averse to the spicy stuff for the past few months now. My ex-boss dug in with both hands, grabbing for the larger crawfish first, as is her right as the birthday girl, but we enjoyed the feast with no beer, since she'd given it up for Lent. Stranger food preferences have rarely been witnessed by my own eyes, I'll tell you that...
Part of the conversation involved food in the scheme of evacuation. My ex-boss commented on her weight gain of fifteen pounds while in exile from New Orleans, because so many people insisted on feeding her and the folks with whom she evacuated. The table full of snacks we were noshing on while we were waiting for the crawfish to finish brought back the food memories from the evacuation...and then, after finishing up the second batch of boiled crawfish as best we could, we all went our separate ways, mostly over the Huey P. Long bridge to avoid the filming of a Denzel Washington movie they were doing near the Crescent City Connection that was guaranteed to tie up traffic. I wouldn't have wanted to see a load of fake explosions anyway, since there are loads of real ones occurring in our lives here almost every day.
For instance, our cantor of nearly five years is leaving. That bomb was dropped on the congregation shortly before Dan and I left for a family visit up north for Passover. There has been a load of speculation since as to his reasons for leaving, as there will be when a leader of any capacity moves onward. He'd just bought a house in the Broadmoor area of the city almost a year before the storm, all of his possessions were flooded out, he and his wife are raising a ten month old son, and the storm coincided with the retirement of one rabbi from the synagogue and the arrival of a new one. Stressful situation? Add the loss of his wife's university teaching job to the equation, and it would all be enough to tip anyone over the edge. Wherever he and his family go, I wish them all well. There will unfortunately be large numbers of people here who will think this person is abandoning them at a time of need - but this is someone who is clearly in need of help in the form of a fresh start. Once again, in this case, as I have seen in some other local families in transition to other places, there are other people to consider in the equation aside from himself. I could go on about the whole ministering part of a cantorial position being a tough one to negotiate - after all, more congregations are expecting cantors to be rabbis who sing. Folks in a congregation also need to recognize burnout when they see it.
Yet another bomb to report? Try the mayoral debate being broadcast on national TV, with local anchor Norman Robinson and CNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews doing the mediating. Now the rest of the country - indeed, the rest of the world - can see what we are going through tomorrow night, April 17. Truly an historic event in the making. No doubt the Nielsen ratings will be posted the following morning in the local paper. Stay tuned and hold on to your horses...
More on food in my next post. It's getting late for me.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Some more recent bumperstickers:
Bush Is A Natural Disaster
I'm Qualified to Run FEMA
Rebuilding New Orleans One Beer At A Time
I think that last one might have inspired a recent Ronnie Virgets short story I read, in which one character proclaims in a bar that he buys Dixie beer to help with New Orleans' recovery. Hell of a way to help - foot the recovery bills and say goodbye to sobriety in the process.
My husband was flipping through the channels last night, did a double take in that process, and switched back to ESPN. He thought Stephen A. Smith was interviewing local mayoral candidate Mitch Landrieu, but it turned out to be Cal Ripken instead. This city has thoroughly permeated our consciousness, for sure - and it needs no beer to help it along.
I have also had to reevaluate my child's imagination in light of some of the books I have been reading to him lately. I checked out Pete Seeger's Abiyoyo from the library, and its sequel, Abiyoyo Returns, since the little guy began singing the song after watching an episode of Between the Lions in which the first of the two stories was featured. The first story is about a boy and his father who are kicked out of the town in which they live for, respectively, playing the ukulele too much and for playing too many prankish magic tricks on people. When the giant Abiyoyo threatens the town one morning, though, father and son use their skills to save the town and make the giant disappear.
Driving to pick up Dan from the airport yesterday, my son took one good look at all the cars under the highway overpasses and asked me about them. I told him they had all been flooded out and were waiting to be taken away, and he said the cure for the flooding was a small dam (or, as he said, "a small DAM!!!!!!!"). That came from the second Abiyoyo story, which more of the people around here need to read.
In the second one, it is thirty years after Abiyoyo has disappeared, and the town is threatened once again - by natural disaster. The surrounding forests are no more, and the waters overflow and flood the town regularly in the rainy seasons. The people decide a dam must be built to preserve their home, but they run into a large boulder in the building process that cannot be moved...until the granddaughter of the magician in the first story comes up with the idea to resurrect Abiyoyo, treat him well, get him to move the boulder, and then make him disappear again. However, things don't go as planned. What follows after the giant is resurrected and fed and the boulder is moved is that the giant cannot be made to disappear. What does one do with a hungry, gross giant?
Well, if we go by what is happening here and now, we try to vanquish it with all the offensive tools in our arsenal. We get it to move away, or we run from it ourselves. We refuse to feed it, we blame someone else for its presence, chide others for neglecting its upkeep, and beseech others to deal with it. Sometimes we think that throwing money at a problem as large as a giant will help it go away, except that there are a large number of ways in which such money can be spent once it is out of our hands, and not all of those ways are wise.
It's what makes this mayoral race such a mess. New Orleans has become a microcosm of what is wrong with the United States and its de facto and de jure worlds. Inequality still reigns. Business opportunities have been squandered in some cases to keep the status quo intact (in the case of this city, it's fantasy, quasi-stereotypical regional freakishness and elegant decay over industry and job opportunities that don't involve tourism). Questions of whether or not this place should still exist hang above us like a suspended ton of bricks. Even the recent proposed legislation concerning illegal immigrants in this country who are largely from south of the border affects this area - a large number of the folks doing the brute recovery work are Mexican, legal or illegal.
Heck, there are a large number of folks from north of the border who are helping, too. Justin had to say goodbye to a large crew of Quebecois who were aiding him in his tree business a few weeks ago. They were all camped out in his house and in a FEMA trailer on his property, filling it all up with their soap operatic stories of families located far away, of young fellas let loose in a loose town around Mardi Gras, of guys who were encountering New Orleans food and accents for the first time, of the profound culture shock on their psyches. Not to mention the craziness these guys had to go through every time they went back across the border for one reason or another and had to deal with US customs folks on the way back. We have become a nation that relies on our customs officers to do our dirty work for us, and they take our reliance and wield that power in ways that ought to be countered by a behavioral manual...except that that manual would probably take up several libraries.
Oh, boy did I digress...
Anyway, since the folks in the town can't make Abiyoyo the giant disappear, the magician's granddaughter decides that kindness, good care and feeding of Abiyoyo will no longer make him a danger - and she is right. It also helps bring the people of the town closer together, since they all need to keep cooking their best recipes for the giant, singing and sharing their songs for him and themselves, and working with him as their helper to replant the forests that once surrounded the town. What doesn't kill us all makes us stronger, I guess. It supposedly helps bring us a little closer, too, which I find a bit difficult sometimes taking care of a three year old full-time.
What brought me closer to other moms in New York was the neighborhood I was in, the people of the synagogue I attended regularly, the camaraderie with other moms as we all picked up and dropped off our kids at the preschool class they attended. Here, it's a curbside pick up and drop off of the kids - quick and easy for the parents. The attachment to a local synagogue and to Jewish ritual is not as strong here. And my son is an inbetween kid, in a way - he's too young for us to congregate and commiserate with Jewish parents of kids his own age here, and the people active in the synagogue that are my husband's and my age have kids who are younger than the little guy, who is breaking out of the baby and early toddler development stages.
I have also run into the parents who are taking advantage of places such as the Parenting Center while they are in the process of relocating to another state. Not conducive to forming playdates and playgroups, I'll tell you. The impulse with some of the folks who are staying here towards those who are leaving is to say "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out," but that denies the other factors that go into a person's decision to stay here or go...and any parent who doesn't consider the well-being of their child and the need to support that well-being financially and through community resources is kidding themselves. Some may find that things here are okay in that regard. I am among the ones who are on the fence. I've found good resources for my son, but finding a way to keep mama happy in all this is tough. I wish those folks who are relocating permanently well.
Part of what makes it tough is that before I moved up to New York and had my son, my identity was largely tied up in my job and my synagogue friends. Now I am having to reassess my identity, since most of my synagogue friends are much older than I and my time revolves around the job of raising a three year old. Meeting people here outside of it all has become tougher. I really need it too, because I need to dissect this city and its trials and travails outside of the three year old psyche.
Okay, I guess I'm not immune to the impulse to vanquish a giant. I guess I, too, have to find some way to live with the big ol' thing called full-time motherhood, too. Maybe I should have chosen a less interesting city, I don't know. It's all a constant struggle, and I can't help feeling less than adequate to the task. Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve to be here, that I don't deserve to have such a great kid for a son, that I should be more patient all the time with him and myself. It's just so hard sometimes.
From what I read in the papers, this whole city is finding life hard, too. When a review of the movie Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, comes with a caveat that the plot might be too close to home for Katrina survivors and their kids, you know you're living on a different planet. Edie, who advised me on my first day back that if I manage to get one thing done every day, that I've won a small battle, was amazed the other day at the things I'd been able to accomplish since Dan and I had returned. A recent radio interview of an author ended with the interviewer asking the author about short stories she could recommend, since a large number of people who are trying to get by here have exhibited an inability to concentrate. Edie's daughter exclaimed recently that she had finally been able to make it through an entire novel after the storm. Everyone needs a goal to make it through here, no matter how small.
Maybe my goal ought to be After Passover, for right now.
After Passover, I can work on my son's pre-K charter school application.
After Passover, I can work on applying to Tulane for grad school.
After Passover, I can start interviewing potential sitters for much needed kiddie hiatuses for Dan and I.
After Passover, this house will be fully unpacked.
But until then, I will just do what I can. Live with the giant some. As most of this city is trying to do.
Bush Is A Natural Disaster
I'm Qualified to Run FEMA
Rebuilding New Orleans One Beer At A Time
I think that last one might have inspired a recent Ronnie Virgets short story I read, in which one character proclaims in a bar that he buys Dixie beer to help with New Orleans' recovery. Hell of a way to help - foot the recovery bills and say goodbye to sobriety in the process.
My husband was flipping through the channels last night, did a double take in that process, and switched back to ESPN. He thought Stephen A. Smith was interviewing local mayoral candidate Mitch Landrieu, but it turned out to be Cal Ripken instead. This city has thoroughly permeated our consciousness, for sure - and it needs no beer to help it along.
I have also had to reevaluate my child's imagination in light of some of the books I have been reading to him lately. I checked out Pete Seeger's Abiyoyo from the library, and its sequel, Abiyoyo Returns, since the little guy began singing the song after watching an episode of Between the Lions in which the first of the two stories was featured. The first story is about a boy and his father who are kicked out of the town in which they live for, respectively, playing the ukulele too much and for playing too many prankish magic tricks on people. When the giant Abiyoyo threatens the town one morning, though, father and son use their skills to save the town and make the giant disappear.
Driving to pick up Dan from the airport yesterday, my son took one good look at all the cars under the highway overpasses and asked me about them. I told him they had all been flooded out and were waiting to be taken away, and he said the cure for the flooding was a small dam (or, as he said, "a small DAM!!!!!!!"). That came from the second Abiyoyo story, which more of the people around here need to read.
In the second one, it is thirty years after Abiyoyo has disappeared, and the town is threatened once again - by natural disaster. The surrounding forests are no more, and the waters overflow and flood the town regularly in the rainy seasons. The people decide a dam must be built to preserve their home, but they run into a large boulder in the building process that cannot be moved...until the granddaughter of the magician in the first story comes up with the idea to resurrect Abiyoyo, treat him well, get him to move the boulder, and then make him disappear again. However, things don't go as planned. What follows after the giant is resurrected and fed and the boulder is moved is that the giant cannot be made to disappear. What does one do with a hungry, gross giant?
Well, if we go by what is happening here and now, we try to vanquish it with all the offensive tools in our arsenal. We get it to move away, or we run from it ourselves. We refuse to feed it, we blame someone else for its presence, chide others for neglecting its upkeep, and beseech others to deal with it. Sometimes we think that throwing money at a problem as large as a giant will help it go away, except that there are a large number of ways in which such money can be spent once it is out of our hands, and not all of those ways are wise.
It's what makes this mayoral race such a mess. New Orleans has become a microcosm of what is wrong with the United States and its de facto and de jure worlds. Inequality still reigns. Business opportunities have been squandered in some cases to keep the status quo intact (in the case of this city, it's fantasy, quasi-stereotypical regional freakishness and elegant decay over industry and job opportunities that don't involve tourism). Questions of whether or not this place should still exist hang above us like a suspended ton of bricks. Even the recent proposed legislation concerning illegal immigrants in this country who are largely from south of the border affects this area - a large number of the folks doing the brute recovery work are Mexican, legal or illegal.
Heck, there are a large number of folks from north of the border who are helping, too. Justin had to say goodbye to a large crew of Quebecois who were aiding him in his tree business a few weeks ago. They were all camped out in his house and in a FEMA trailer on his property, filling it all up with their soap operatic stories of families located far away, of young fellas let loose in a loose town around Mardi Gras, of guys who were encountering New Orleans food and accents for the first time, of the profound culture shock on their psyches. Not to mention the craziness these guys had to go through every time they went back across the border for one reason or another and had to deal with US customs folks on the way back. We have become a nation that relies on our customs officers to do our dirty work for us, and they take our reliance and wield that power in ways that ought to be countered by a behavioral manual...except that that manual would probably take up several libraries.
Oh, boy did I digress...
Anyway, since the folks in the town can't make Abiyoyo the giant disappear, the magician's granddaughter decides that kindness, good care and feeding of Abiyoyo will no longer make him a danger - and she is right. It also helps bring the people of the town closer together, since they all need to keep cooking their best recipes for the giant, singing and sharing their songs for him and themselves, and working with him as their helper to replant the forests that once surrounded the town. What doesn't kill us all makes us stronger, I guess. It supposedly helps bring us a little closer, too, which I find a bit difficult sometimes taking care of a three year old full-time.
What brought me closer to other moms in New York was the neighborhood I was in, the people of the synagogue I attended regularly, the camaraderie with other moms as we all picked up and dropped off our kids at the preschool class they attended. Here, it's a curbside pick up and drop off of the kids - quick and easy for the parents. The attachment to a local synagogue and to Jewish ritual is not as strong here. And my son is an inbetween kid, in a way - he's too young for us to congregate and commiserate with Jewish parents of kids his own age here, and the people active in the synagogue that are my husband's and my age have kids who are younger than the little guy, who is breaking out of the baby and early toddler development stages.
I have also run into the parents who are taking advantage of places such as the Parenting Center while they are in the process of relocating to another state. Not conducive to forming playdates and playgroups, I'll tell you. The impulse with some of the folks who are staying here towards those who are leaving is to say "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out," but that denies the other factors that go into a person's decision to stay here or go...and any parent who doesn't consider the well-being of their child and the need to support that well-being financially and through community resources is kidding themselves. Some may find that things here are okay in that regard. I am among the ones who are on the fence. I've found good resources for my son, but finding a way to keep mama happy in all this is tough. I wish those folks who are relocating permanently well.
Part of what makes it tough is that before I moved up to New York and had my son, my identity was largely tied up in my job and my synagogue friends. Now I am having to reassess my identity, since most of my synagogue friends are much older than I and my time revolves around the job of raising a three year old. Meeting people here outside of it all has become tougher. I really need it too, because I need to dissect this city and its trials and travails outside of the three year old psyche.
Okay, I guess I'm not immune to the impulse to vanquish a giant. I guess I, too, have to find some way to live with the big ol' thing called full-time motherhood, too. Maybe I should have chosen a less interesting city, I don't know. It's all a constant struggle, and I can't help feeling less than adequate to the task. Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve to be here, that I don't deserve to have such a great kid for a son, that I should be more patient all the time with him and myself. It's just so hard sometimes.
From what I read in the papers, this whole city is finding life hard, too. When a review of the movie Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, comes with a caveat that the plot might be too close to home for Katrina survivors and their kids, you know you're living on a different planet. Edie, who advised me on my first day back that if I manage to get one thing done every day, that I've won a small battle, was amazed the other day at the things I'd been able to accomplish since Dan and I had returned. A recent radio interview of an author ended with the interviewer asking the author about short stories she could recommend, since a large number of people who are trying to get by here have exhibited an inability to concentrate. Edie's daughter exclaimed recently that she had finally been able to make it through an entire novel after the storm. Everyone needs a goal to make it through here, no matter how small.
Maybe my goal ought to be After Passover, for right now.
After Passover, I can work on my son's pre-K charter school application.
After Passover, I can work on applying to Tulane for grad school.
After Passover, I can start interviewing potential sitters for much needed kiddie hiatuses for Dan and I.
After Passover, this house will be fully unpacked.
But until then, I will just do what I can. Live with the giant some. As most of this city is trying to do.
Monday, April 03, 2006
All I can do right now is supply this link:
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/news_feat.php
What we have here is a fantastic explanation of why recovery in Louisiana and along the Gulf coast is fast becoming a dirty word, in more ways than one. Especially here in this city, which seems to have been left to rot in hell by the feds, among others.
On the one hand, we get what we elect, and one could argue that on a local and state level, these kinds of scenarios were a long time coming. On the other hand.... ENOUGH ALREADY. So we elected a real schmo for president of this country. Some folks have been talking censure of Dubya, but nobody wants to go out and do it for fear of having the political bomb blow in their faces. If New Orleanians weren't scattered about the country so widely and liberally, maybe this could constitute a Katrina march on Washington. Then again, maybe the Katrina diaspora is in Bush's best interests: divide and conquer. Make people so worried about where their next meal is coming from, about their increased taxes and bills and how they will be paid, about where they will be living tomorrow, and perhaps they will be less inclined to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Anyhoo, don't just read my rant. Read about it in the Gambit article link. Tell me what you think.
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/news_feat.php
What we have here is a fantastic explanation of why recovery in Louisiana and along the Gulf coast is fast becoming a dirty word, in more ways than one. Especially here in this city, which seems to have been left to rot in hell by the feds, among others.
On the one hand, we get what we elect, and one could argue that on a local and state level, these kinds of scenarios were a long time coming. On the other hand.... ENOUGH ALREADY. So we elected a real schmo for president of this country. Some folks have been talking censure of Dubya, but nobody wants to go out and do it for fear of having the political bomb blow in their faces. If New Orleanians weren't scattered about the country so widely and liberally, maybe this could constitute a Katrina march on Washington. Then again, maybe the Katrina diaspora is in Bush's best interests: divide and conquer. Make people so worried about where their next meal is coming from, about their increased taxes and bills and how they will be paid, about where they will be living tomorrow, and perhaps they will be less inclined to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Anyhoo, don't just read my rant. Read about it in the Gambit article link. Tell me what you think.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
I live in a town in which the first subscription magazine of ours to make it through the snail mail morass here was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The famous postal motto should now read, "Hell and high water will seriously impede mail delivery, but pictures of mostly naked women will make it through the appointed rounds."
I live in a city in which the artificial atmosphere of a local zoo exhibit was ripped to shreds by storm winds ... but you can still see the anteaters, macaws, and jaguars among the ruined bamboo remains. The howler monkey family even looked exhausted. Then again, maybe it was just their two young kids running and jumping all over the monkey parents and the exhibit.
And I now know that my son has absorbed the recovery efforts of this city into his imaginary play.
Okay, we don't live in a vacuum. My son is in preschool with children of families who are trying to rebuild, so I'm sure he's heard about those efforts. We unfortunately had to inform a parent of a child in his class that we could not attend the child's birthday party in Lakeview, since we would be out of town then. And of course there's that lovely levee breach tour we went on with Edie, and all the houses around with blue roofs and debris piles.
A mom we met who had relocated uptown after the destruction of her Lakeview home was grateful for the presence of Audubon Park, since the shotgun house she was in now didn't have much of a yard, and it was tough telling her two year old to wait for her at the debris pile in front of the house before moving down the street with her.
But what we do have here are wonderful restaurants, still, and my husband and I went out with our friends to a great one last night, and left our son with a sitter. When we left, the little guy and the sitter were playing some games with the empty boxes left over from unpacking. I kissed him good bye inbetween his escapes from the boxes and Dan and I headed out.
We were wined and dined at Restaurant August, and I haven't had a meal like that since our favorite Creole and Cajun restaurant in Donaldsonville, outside of Baton Rouge, closed up to all except those staying at the B & B in which the restaurant was located. Hard to say what the best part was - the crawfish appetizer? The duck main course? The chocolate cake and accompanying liqueur for dessert? The deep-fried bread pudding of Dan's I tasted? The true nightcap was waiting for us when we got home.
The sitter said he was his amiable self. He enjoyed playing with the boxes so much, she went ahead and made a larger one into a house with a doorway and windows. He played with it in another room for a while, and when she went in to check on him, the house was crushed in a bit. She asked him what had happened, and he said the house was flooded.
I was so stunned, I called Dan up from the foot of the stairs, where he still lingered, so that he could hear this. It's moments like these that make me glad I'm married. I can verify the insanity and share it at the same time.
Dan and I listened further, and not without some giggles, to the rest of the sitter's tale. She repeated to him what she told me about the flooded house, and then amended her story with the tidbit of information that he began to gut the house he had said was flooded. It was at this that Dan and I just laughed, loud and long. We'd been drinking a little, but not too much. The absurdity of how our son had absorbed the atmosphere of this place was frighteningly funny.
The frightening part, of course, is what else has he absorbed of the post-storm circumstances here? None of us may never fully know, including him.
I live in a city in which the artificial atmosphere of a local zoo exhibit was ripped to shreds by storm winds ... but you can still see the anteaters, macaws, and jaguars among the ruined bamboo remains. The howler monkey family even looked exhausted. Then again, maybe it was just their two young kids running and jumping all over the monkey parents and the exhibit.
And I now know that my son has absorbed the recovery efforts of this city into his imaginary play.
Okay, we don't live in a vacuum. My son is in preschool with children of families who are trying to rebuild, so I'm sure he's heard about those efforts. We unfortunately had to inform a parent of a child in his class that we could not attend the child's birthday party in Lakeview, since we would be out of town then. And of course there's that lovely levee breach tour we went on with Edie, and all the houses around with blue roofs and debris piles.
A mom we met who had relocated uptown after the destruction of her Lakeview home was grateful for the presence of Audubon Park, since the shotgun house she was in now didn't have much of a yard, and it was tough telling her two year old to wait for her at the debris pile in front of the house before moving down the street with her.
But what we do have here are wonderful restaurants, still, and my husband and I went out with our friends to a great one last night, and left our son with a sitter. When we left, the little guy and the sitter were playing some games with the empty boxes left over from unpacking. I kissed him good bye inbetween his escapes from the boxes and Dan and I headed out.
We were wined and dined at Restaurant August, and I haven't had a meal like that since our favorite Creole and Cajun restaurant in Donaldsonville, outside of Baton Rouge, closed up to all except those staying at the B & B in which the restaurant was located. Hard to say what the best part was - the crawfish appetizer? The duck main course? The chocolate cake and accompanying liqueur for dessert? The deep-fried bread pudding of Dan's I tasted? The true nightcap was waiting for us when we got home.
The sitter said he was his amiable self. He enjoyed playing with the boxes so much, she went ahead and made a larger one into a house with a doorway and windows. He played with it in another room for a while, and when she went in to check on him, the house was crushed in a bit. She asked him what had happened, and he said the house was flooded.
I was so stunned, I called Dan up from the foot of the stairs, where he still lingered, so that he could hear this. It's moments like these that make me glad I'm married. I can verify the insanity and share it at the same time.
Dan and I listened further, and not without some giggles, to the rest of the sitter's tale. She repeated to him what she told me about the flooded house, and then amended her story with the tidbit of information that he began to gut the house he had said was flooded. It was at this that Dan and I just laughed, loud and long. We'd been drinking a little, but not too much. The absurdity of how our son had absorbed the atmosphere of this place was frighteningly funny.
The frightening part, of course, is what else has he absorbed of the post-storm circumstances here? None of us may never fully know, including him.
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