New Orleans

I haven’t set foot in New Orleans since I was 7 years old. My family and I packed into a car…it’s been a while so I don’t remember what make of car…in June of ’63 and we made the cross country trek from the Crescent City to the City of Angels (there was a breakdown...intriguing for me, harrowing for my elders…somewhere in the expansive wilds of Texas but otherwise the trip went well.)

I lived in New Orleans…my mother grew up there…for only a few years and my memories are sporadic but some of them are still powerful.

I remember the pungently sweet aroma of my grandfather’s cigars and his easygoing smile…I remember seeing JFK in a motorcade…I remember being the valedictorian of my preschool class but refusing to give the little speech they wanted me to give…I remember the bats that sometimes hung out at night in the park down the street from our apartment…I remember catching a rubber frog from a pretty lady riding on a Mardi Gras float on the street I could see from the balcony of our apartment…I remember wanting to be a fireman…or the conductor on the streetcar that went down Napoleon Avenue.

Most of my mother’s family moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles when I was child. My grandfather died when I was child. I never had occasion to return to the city.

And still watching New Orleans battered by Hurricane Katrina and submerged by the rising waters and broken levees left in her wake leaves me with a strange melancholy…seeing streets I barely remember walking clogged with brackish water, the rubble of people’s lives, and the desperate living and the forlorn dead inspiring an illogical sense of personal loss.

Both the best and worst angels of human behavior have been on display during the first few days of the catastrophe…from New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama…people rise to their glory or choose less noble roads and actions depending on their own personal spirits, demons, desperations, needs, and impulses. I have no right to sit in judgment of any of them…I’m not there…so I won’t.

New Orleans is not my hometown…I grew up in Los Angeles and my mother still lives there and so that’s what I think of as my childhood hometown, the place that sheltered and sustained me as I grew from child to man…but I still feel a profound and personal sadness witnessing her current travails. I’d imagine that a lot of other people in this country feel much the same even if they’ve never set foot in the “Big Easy”.

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If you want to help:

American Red Cross

Second Harvest

Operation Blessing