For the first time, I’ve brought my computer outside with me
for blogging purposes. It occurs to me
what a loud instrument this is, as the beeps and dings go off that signify my
computer booting up, and then an episode of New Girl starts up immediately—the
one I was in the middle of watching last night on Hulu before passing out from
the exhaustion of the week. I get hooked
into that drama for a minute or two before returning to the task at hand. This
is why I don’t bring my laptop outside with me, I think. Of course, there is also a car alarm going
off somewhere behind me.
All this noise seems inordinately loud for a Saturday
morning, but maybe I’m just used to blogging at night and not at 10 a.m…
Our deck was powerwashed yesterday, and so the only thing covering
it now is pollen. The chairs and grill
sit on the lawn, forsaken for the time being, and only the table and some
planting pots sit at the edge of the wooden slats. The air around me is cool and crisp, as
befits the new spring days. The nights
have been hot, and it has been hard to wake up in the mornings due to the
stuffiness of my bedroom and my poor allergy-prone nose, which is why I have
slept 11 or 12 hours a night this week. So in being out here I am simultaneously
trying to wake up and to write out a much-overdue blog post.
It is overdue only in my mind, of course, as classes are
done and blogging is no longer a required part of my week. Yet, when I was in
New Orleans last week, all I could think about was committing to paper all of
the crazy adventures I was having. Most
of them were not “crazy” in the way you would expect a trip to New Orleans to
bring forth; but there were surprises, big and small, nonetheless.
There was the restaurant I went to, an old haunt I used to
love called La Madeleine, which served up a mean tomato soup. It had been remade into a fifties-style soda
shop called Stanley’s. This place advertised,
appropriately, a sandwich called “The Stella” on the back of the servers’ t-shirts,
though I didn’t try it—I was there for the cherry limeade and chicken and gator
gumbo, with a lump of potato salad dropped in the middle of it.
There was the palm reader in Jackson Square
who told me I am going to have three children (three!) and that I wanted to be
a doctor when growing up (I wanted to be
a bus driver, actually). I silently scoffed at these tidbits of information. But she also told me I'd live til at least 96, outlasting my grandfather. She told me I've had my heart broken twice. She told me I worry too much about my body, that I think I can't have kids but I really can. "You've lost one man, one woman," she told me, when I've been writing about my grandparents all semester long. "The woman was like you," she said.
She looked around the square, at the mix of tourists and other fortune tellers and said, "You are one of us, not like everyone else. She was this way, too." She told me this, and I wanted to believe it.
"Are you sure about the kids?" I asked her.
"The girl is like you, too," she said. "Fighting with her is like fighting with yourself. You can't win." This feels true, somehow, though the reality of it doesn't exist yet. I think of my mother in New York and how we fight, the way we each fought with my grandmother, the way all the women in our family fight. Dirty, lowdown fighting. It fits.
She drew a few tarot cards, including the Devil Card, and told me, "Don't blame me. This is your card." I laughed, knowing she was probably right. "You have three sides," she said. "There is the very sweet side and the bitch." Anyone who knows me at all would already be nodding in agreement; I've always held it as a strength to be able to show either side, as needed. To not let myself be trodden upon at some moments, then to come back with a fierce generosity in others. It is a personality quirk, I guess.
"But at your heart, you are a family woman," she concluded. "You give a lot to them, though you don't get back as much in return as you give." She looked at my left palm and saw heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in my family line (all true, of course) but that in 3-5 years--no more illnesses. I prayed she was right about that one.
*
The beignets in Jackson Square were the same as ever, and the
jazz at Preservation Hall, too, though I gave away my last beignet to a
homeless man on the street begging for scraps.
As for the jazz, it fired me up, as usual. Half the fun was witnessing the man from
Provincetown, Cape Cod—who I chatted with in line for a half an hour beforehand—at
his first Pres Hall show, whooping and hollering and exclaiming to his wife, “That
tuba player in the back is far underappreciated. Far underappreciated.” The
woman standing in front of me, probably in her late twenties or early thirties,
swayed with drunkenness during “When the Saints Go Marching In,” splashing her
drink everywhere and narrowly missing my feet and purse. (Drinks are not served there, but one is
allowed to bring them in from Pat O’Brien’s pub, next door.) While I was hardly nostalgic for this kind of
behavior in a grown-ass adult, it felt strangely familiar to me, after enduring
three years of such things here as a student over a decade ago.
In the three days I spent here this month, I saw more adults
teetering of the edge of sobriety than I would have liked and yet, as one
hardly sees this kind of permissive go-ahead elsewhere in the States, at least
as far as grown adults are concerned, there is something kind of intriguing
about a place that in its very nature invites this sort of freedom to do what you
please and damn the consequences.
What is it about
New Orleans?
Though I’m a two-drink maximum kind of girl, most days, this
city captured me, too, in other ways. Yes,
I finally ordered a Hurricane on my last night there, about an hour before my
bus was scheduled to depart, and yet it was another kind of hurricane entirely
that caught me on this trip.
It was my first time visiting since Katrina.
Imagine me in the darkened theater, at a larger-than-life
IMAX feature called “Hurricane on the Bayou,” struggling to keep my sobs in for
thirty whole minutes. (It didn’t work.) The film was a tasteful documentary, set just before Katrina, and it was about a girl
who was doing a project for school about hurricanes and interviewing local
people who’d been through the last big
rager that had hit New Orleans. But during
the course of the film, the real thing hits, and the city is evacuated.
I saw real scenes, in enormous pixillated detail, of people
fleeing their homes or refusing to flee their homes, waiting for rescue, being
rescued. I saw the little girl who was
narrating part of the film waiting for days to hear from her grandparents, to
know if they were alive. It hit home,
after losing my own grandfather so recently.
But it also hit home, to be sitting there
in my old city, albeit among other tourists, and watching the devastation it had
faced all those years ago, knowing that some things still remain to be fixed—people’s
lives included. In some ways, Katrina
wasn’t real for me until this moment in the theater, surrounded by other tourists
who were politely taking it all in like the detached history lesson it was, for
them—in this moment, when the home I had seen destroyed on the TV screen all
those summers ago synched up with the real thing, rooted in this place in all
its gigantic IMAX terror.
Yeah, I pretty much lost it.
*
Now this is me we’re talking about—I’d even written an essay
for my thesis four or so years ago about watching this tragedy unfold in my
former home, about the scenes posted all over CNN, and how it made me feel
numb, confused, resentful. How the media—though
it did focus our attention there and help us to know the real atrocities that
were going on in the city during that storm—sometimes seemed to be exploiting a
terrible situation for the sake of its own viewership stats. It was hard to watch. It was hard to know what I was feeling. I wanted to help my city, but I was a broke
grad student and did not know how else to help other than donating money I didn’t
have. The best I could do was tell
people when they asked what an amazing place it was, one-of-a-kind. Tell them why it should definitely be
rebuilt. No questions asked. The best I could do was write about it, so
that other people might see in New Orleans what I saw, not a wreck of a town
but all the joy it had always brought people.
That's what Ernest Gaines did, what a host of local writers and lovers of this place did, too, I guess. That's the only power we have as writers, sometimes.
That's what Ernest Gaines did, what a host of local writers and lovers of this place did, too, I guess. That's the only power we have as writers, sometimes.
In the April 2013 Jazz Fest guide, I read about Aaron
Neville, whose wife was lost in the years after the storm, and of others who
fought bravely through these tragedies in ‘05, but who were unable to fend off
the devastation done to their hearts and their minds, to their culture and their
way of life, in the years following.
These past few years have been the darkest years for the people of New Orleans,
indeed. But when I am there, in person,
in the parts of town I used to frequent as a student, I realize that this IMAX
film is the only sadness I see all week.
How does this city do it?
I hear the strains of jazz music everywhere—in the
background of this film, along the river’s edge where the riverboats gather to
bring the tourists out on dinnertime tours, in the park where the lone trumpeter
plays the riffs of “Little Liza Jane,”
in my own mind for four or five days after this trip. Four or five days of jazz music going solely in
one’s head is a long time, when one is surrounded in actuality by the strains
of rap and pop. But the jazz refused to
leave me for a little while.
What is it about New Orleans? I know it
is, at least in part, their music that has brought them back. The musicians’ village that was created after
Katrina, and the many programs created by Harry Connick Jr. and Trombone
Shorty, among others, to being musicians back, to help them find their
livelihood again, to teach high schoolers the roots and techniques of jazz so
that the lifeblood of this city is not lost, can never be lost.
It is their music—that and the knowledge that seems to be
written on every person’s face, even those who have had hard times and have
hard times still—that has kept them going.
This knowledge is a kind of secret to living a good life, the joy that
comes in living well and knowing how to make other people smile—strangers,
even, who are merely passing through, traveling from lands as foreign to the
concept of joy for its own sake as New York City.
No comments:
Post a Comment