the state of things
Ma always said “if you don’t have something nice to say…” Actually, I don’t really remember my ma ever saying that. But clearly someone’s did. Point being, I’m going to keep my trap shut about school for a while. The long and the short of it is that I had a horrid week at school—meetings and more meetings. It’s an incredibly sad and uncomfortable place to be these days. The only bright spots were seeing my friends again and catching up with the odd stray student who’d wander in (not that the students are odd—or not all of them, at least). My heart has indeed been broken.
But tomorrow is the grand re-opening. I’m looking forward to seeing my girls and teaching some poetry (finally). Who knows what’s going to happen with Drama? I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. But every time I think about teaching Drama, I’m reminded of the actual drama teacher—a young woman who lost her home, whose entire family lost their homes—a teacher that all the girls love.
Right now I have Wilma on the brain. Or more specifically, Punta Gorda. As too often has been the case in the past two months, I’m utterly without words to articulate how sad I am that Wilma seems to be on her way to Charlotte County. Yesterday, I dug around in my dirty laundry until I could find my Celtic Ray t-shirt. It is a Hurricane Charley leftover and says, “We Never Closed. We Never Will.”
I’ve emailed the Celtic Ray and Julie and said my door is open to anyone who needs shelter.
Jason left last night for his road trip to Boston. He didn’t get twenty minutes out of the city before he hit a pile of debris on the highway and blew a tire. An NOPD and NYPD officer stopped and helped him put on the spare. He spent four hours trying to find a place to buy a tire and eventually just continued on his way on the spare. Made it all the way to Knoxville, but at 50MPH, it took him all night and into the morning. When I talked to him at 3pm, he was still waiting in the garage. Poor thing.
On Friday night, we drove out to the airport to pick up the car (a white mini-van I’ve nicknamed Great White) and had our first encounter with some of the worst damage. To get to the highway from our house, we had to pass neighborhoods of houses with waterlines over my head. The transition between “saved” neighborhoods and destroyed neighborhoods is almost a distinct line. Drive down Jefferson Avenue and pass block after block of green grass in the median (“neutral ground” in New Orleans lingo), the occasional blue tarp, abandoned refrigerators, and cars that look newly washed. And then suddenly, the grass is brown—if there’s any left, the trees stripped of leaves, the neutral ground is covered in trash and debris and white powder like snow from crushed sheetrock. Cars, parked in the neutral ground a good two feet off of street level, are grey or green or camel-colored from the water—some have distinct water lines on the doors, others are clouded all the way to the roof. And some are flattened.
This morning I woke up and wandered from Uptown coffee shop to coffee shop like Mary looking for an inn, trying to find one that didn’t have a line out the door. It’s such a weird bubble out here. By no means does it look or feel “normal,” as a whole, but in tiny bite-sized places you can start to feel like things may be “normal” soon.
But there’s so much abnormality. It takes a half an hour to get through the grocery lines some times. Even in the places where the traffic lights are out uptown, there are never snarls—just not enough people out and about. One of the weirdest, saddest things I’ve noticed is the swell of anger, the people—mostly couples—fighting. Last night around 1am, I heard a couple shrieking at each other down the street. Doors slamming. The woman crying. This is the second time I’ve heard a fight down the street, but I am not even sure if it was the same couple both times. Today I went to the FEMA office to talk about my denied application, and the couple sitting next to me with one of their elderly mothers started yelling at each other and the woman started crying and then she yelled at the old woman and her husband dragged her outside so “everyone wouldn’t know their business.” At the grocery store. In restaurants. Bars. In the bars, people get drunker. It used to be that you had to go to the Quarter to see more than one or two stumbling drunks in a night. Now they’re everywhere.
As I said in an earlier post, there are a lot of people who see things through a different lens. Who see all the good. And I have my moments, too. But then I find myself feeling guilty for my moments of “normality.” The fact that my classroom is just as I left it in August. The restaurants that are opening. The garbagemen who took away half (but only half) of the trash outside my house (and also took the trashcans themselves). The occasional mail delivery. In the confines of my apartment, it is easy to believe that everything is A-OK (with the exception of the swarms of fruitflies). I spent last night in blissful escapism, fending off the aching loneliness from Jason being gone, watching TiVo and cooking an entire bunch of asparagus and eating it all myself. But it was still 330am before I could fall asleep.
Today, I decided to face the demons. After a quick coffee at an as-yet-undiscovered new coffee shop, I hopped into my car and started the drive. I retraced our route to the highway on-ramp, this time in broad daylight, and then kept driving. Down Carrolton to City Park and then further on toward UNO. Just a few blocks off Carrolton, the road became nearly impassable—ruts and rubbish and dirt. Remembering Jason’s flat and that I had no spare, I turned around. Grateful, actually, for the excuse not to continue on. This isn’t the 9th Ward or Lakeview or St. Bernard Parish, we’re talking about now, places I barely know and rarely haunt. These are my routes. Angelo Brocato’s, where we get cannolis and coffee. Kanpai, the all-u-can-eat Sushi buffet. The route to Jazz Fest and the Art Museum. The route I took every day to grad school. The coffee shop I lived in while getting my Master’s. I brought my camera along, but couldn’t bring myself to take very many pictures. In fact, I only got out of the car once, in the parking lot of Rock N Bowl. There were so many people out—wearing dust masks or gas masks, loading armfuls of debris into dumpsters or pick-up trucks—it was a gorgeous sunny October day. You can check out the pictures here. I doubt I’ll be taking very many more. Newspapers and magazines and internet sites do a good enough job of documenting the state of things.
Thanks to all of you who have encouraged me to keep blogging. I will, for now. I have to be honest, I thought the “journey home” would be over by now. But it’s not. Home is more than four walls or even a city. Coming back here was just the beginning.
But tomorrow is the grand re-opening. I’m looking forward to seeing my girls and teaching some poetry (finally). Who knows what’s going to happen with Drama? I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. But every time I think about teaching Drama, I’m reminded of the actual drama teacher—a young woman who lost her home, whose entire family lost their homes—a teacher that all the girls love.
Right now I have Wilma on the brain. Or more specifically, Punta Gorda. As too often has been the case in the past two months, I’m utterly without words to articulate how sad I am that Wilma seems to be on her way to Charlotte County. Yesterday, I dug around in my dirty laundry until I could find my Celtic Ray t-shirt. It is a Hurricane Charley leftover and says, “We Never Closed. We Never Will.”
I’ve emailed the Celtic Ray and Julie and said my door is open to anyone who needs shelter.
Jason left last night for his road trip to Boston. He didn’t get twenty minutes out of the city before he hit a pile of debris on the highway and blew a tire. An NOPD and NYPD officer stopped and helped him put on the spare. He spent four hours trying to find a place to buy a tire and eventually just continued on his way on the spare. Made it all the way to Knoxville, but at 50MPH, it took him all night and into the morning. When I talked to him at 3pm, he was still waiting in the garage. Poor thing.
On Friday night, we drove out to the airport to pick up the car (a white mini-van I’ve nicknamed Great White) and had our first encounter with some of the worst damage. To get to the highway from our house, we had to pass neighborhoods of houses with waterlines over my head. The transition between “saved” neighborhoods and destroyed neighborhoods is almost a distinct line. Drive down Jefferson Avenue and pass block after block of green grass in the median (“neutral ground” in New Orleans lingo), the occasional blue tarp, abandoned refrigerators, and cars that look newly washed. And then suddenly, the grass is brown—if there’s any left, the trees stripped of leaves, the neutral ground is covered in trash and debris and white powder like snow from crushed sheetrock. Cars, parked in the neutral ground a good two feet off of street level, are grey or green or camel-colored from the water—some have distinct water lines on the doors, others are clouded all the way to the roof. And some are flattened.
This morning I woke up and wandered from Uptown coffee shop to coffee shop like Mary looking for an inn, trying to find one that didn’t have a line out the door. It’s such a weird bubble out here. By no means does it look or feel “normal,” as a whole, but in tiny bite-sized places you can start to feel like things may be “normal” soon.
But there’s so much abnormality. It takes a half an hour to get through the grocery lines some times. Even in the places where the traffic lights are out uptown, there are never snarls—just not enough people out and about. One of the weirdest, saddest things I’ve noticed is the swell of anger, the people—mostly couples—fighting. Last night around 1am, I heard a couple shrieking at each other down the street. Doors slamming. The woman crying. This is the second time I’ve heard a fight down the street, but I am not even sure if it was the same couple both times. Today I went to the FEMA office to talk about my denied application, and the couple sitting next to me with one of their elderly mothers started yelling at each other and the woman started crying and then she yelled at the old woman and her husband dragged her outside so “everyone wouldn’t know their business.” At the grocery store. In restaurants. Bars. In the bars, people get drunker. It used to be that you had to go to the Quarter to see more than one or two stumbling drunks in a night. Now they’re everywhere.
As I said in an earlier post, there are a lot of people who see things through a different lens. Who see all the good. And I have my moments, too. But then I find myself feeling guilty for my moments of “normality.” The fact that my classroom is just as I left it in August. The restaurants that are opening. The garbagemen who took away half (but only half) of the trash outside my house (and also took the trashcans themselves). The occasional mail delivery. In the confines of my apartment, it is easy to believe that everything is A-OK (with the exception of the swarms of fruitflies). I spent last night in blissful escapism, fending off the aching loneliness from Jason being gone, watching TiVo and cooking an entire bunch of asparagus and eating it all myself. But it was still 330am before I could fall asleep.
Today, I decided to face the demons. After a quick coffee at an as-yet-undiscovered new coffee shop, I hopped into my car and started the drive. I retraced our route to the highway on-ramp, this time in broad daylight, and then kept driving. Down Carrolton to City Park and then further on toward UNO. Just a few blocks off Carrolton, the road became nearly impassable—ruts and rubbish and dirt. Remembering Jason’s flat and that I had no spare, I turned around. Grateful, actually, for the excuse not to continue on. This isn’t the 9th Ward or Lakeview or St. Bernard Parish, we’re talking about now, places I barely know and rarely haunt. These are my routes. Angelo Brocato’s, where we get cannolis and coffee. Kanpai, the all-u-can-eat Sushi buffet. The route to Jazz Fest and the Art Museum. The route I took every day to grad school. The coffee shop I lived in while getting my Master’s. I brought my camera along, but couldn’t bring myself to take very many pictures. In fact, I only got out of the car once, in the parking lot of Rock N Bowl. There were so many people out—wearing dust masks or gas masks, loading armfuls of debris into dumpsters or pick-up trucks—it was a gorgeous sunny October day. You can check out the pictures here. I doubt I’ll be taking very many more. Newspapers and magazines and internet sites do a good enough job of documenting the state of things.
Thanks to all of you who have encouraged me to keep blogging. I will, for now. I have to be honest, I thought the “journey home” would be over by now. But it’s not. Home is more than four walls or even a city. Coming back here was just the beginning.
posted by M at 4:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home