Remember

Yes, OK, I know what day it is. I'm just trying not to think about it. The last week has been very hard, not sleeping, black moods. I was disgusted by the faux cable news hysteria about Hurricane Irene. They were positively slavering at the thought of another Katrina, and when it didn't materialize, they pretended like it had anyway. Revolting.

I go on vacation in two days. Right now doesn't feel like I can hold on that long.

Things We Lost in the Flood

It has been almost six years now since Katrina, but I still keep remembering things I once owned and loved, that I lost to Katrina. My house was totally flooded and destroyed. It is a bit of a shock to realize, over and over again, Oh yes, I once lost everything I ever owned. Or to think, Hey, where's that thing I ... oh yeah. Katrina. Sometimes I forget for a while, and then I remmber again. That is unpleasant.

Still, I count myself lucky -- damned lucky -- that all I lost were things. Well, and my job. But I got that back.

But so I don't keep forgetting things and then remembering things I lost again, like a senile old person, I'm going to start keeping a list here of the Things We Lost to the Flood. So I can check it and then maybe I won't keep remember/forgetting.

• All the letters my friend Rebecca sent me while we were in college. We had a rather unusual epistolatory friendship. Those might once have been important historical documents. Completely destroyed.



• A small flat stone my Dad gave me from the bank of the River Thames last time we visited London. It was juts a stone, but my Dad gave it to me, and I kept it from the time I was twelve until I was forty. Washed away.



• The Dear Jane letter my college semi-boyfriend wrote me when I was in the process of crashing and burning out of New College. Twenty pages, front and pack, of narcissistic self-justification. Still, I can't blame him, it was a wildly dysfunctional relationship. I still think of him fondly. That's why I kept it. No paper survived of course.



• The gray flannel cape my Mom had custom-made for me for my twenty-first birthday. Trying to salvage any of the clothes that had sat in that water was unthinkable.



• A wedding ring quilt that my grandmother had made. She is long dead so there won't be anymore quilts.

These are the kinds of things whose loss really hurts, not the random books and DVDs and furniture. Things which were one of a kind, which were particular to me and my life. Irrepalacble things. I have plenty of things now, but I don't have many irreplacable things, things which take a lifetime to accumulate, and twenty-four hours to be completely obliterated. There are many others. I'll add to the list as I remember them.

Anniversary

I was aware of it, of course, but I didn't really feel it, until I walked into Barnes & Noble after work, and in a pile on the very front table were dozens of copies of that book, that graphic novel A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge by Josh Neufeld. And I suddenly realized, really realized, Oh, my god, this is it. This is the anniversary of Katrina. Four years ago today.

I hadn't really wanted to think about it. I certainly hadn't planned on memorializing it. Now here it was smacking me in the face.

I picked up the book -- it fell open to a page where a woman, a survivor, finds her cat crying with a broken leg after the storm. I absolutely cannot stand to read or see about animals being hurt or suffering. Certainly not in that context.

The gates of memory opened. The anguish and the horror flooded over me. I remembered what it felt like in baton rouge those days.

Goddamn it! I planned to get through this day without crying. That's why I had tuned it all out. i had to go hide in the bathroom for a while.

I bought the book -- but i don't know if I'll ever be able to read it. I haven't read any of the Katrina books, except 1 Dead in Attic -- I was able to read it because I had already read many of the columns online or in the paper, and it was salted witha liberal dose of gallows humor. But the rest are just ... too ... upsetting.

I've written about this before, how useless I think it is to drag up all that grief and rage that will never be resolved. But sometimes you don't drag it up. It drags you down. Like today.

Lights Out is Scary

This morning, Weekend Edition ran a story about a guy who wants to make an energy-saving gesture by convincing his hometown, San Francisco, to turn out the lights for one night: Lights Out San Francisco.

Pre-K, I used to be all for this kind of thing, but now, this idea makes me tense. Fires up my POKSS (Post-Katrina Stress Syndrome). I was here in the early days after the re-opening, when three-quarters of the city was still dark, and it was frickin SCARY. In the devastated neighborhoods. I'm talking pitch black, can't see your hand in front of your face DARK. Dark like the most howling wilderness, in the heart of the city. This is when there was no electricity at all, so no porch lights, no street lights, no traffic lights, no storefront signs, NOTHING. And quiet. No air condotioners, no radios, no cars, no buzzing streetlights. No crickets chirping, even, cause they were all dead.

Man! I don't care to repeat that experience! Next year the guy's trying to take this idea national. I think this will be a fun time for intact cities. But I don't think New Orleans will embrace it.

Happy Talk in the Ruins

I've noticed lately, since I've been back, that a lot of the Nolablogers that I read regularly are angry. Really angry. They have just had it with the crime, the incompetence, with the pumps that don't work, with the Corpse, the Road Home to Nowhere, Hizzoner C. Ray, Gov. Maw Maw, Dr. Flakely, the Recovery School District, the lameitude of the Picayune, just the whole stinking pile of hot bayou mess that is "the recovery."

And who can blame them? It is a mess. These things are bad. It is not going as well as it should. I don't blame them.

But for myself, I am coming from a different place. I just got back to town after two years away. And I feel good.

My husband and I are very happy. We are living together again, in our old stomping ground, the uptown Magazine Street corridor, where I have lived since high school. We are happy to have our old jobs back, more or less. I feel quite fortunate to have had gradaute school to keep my mind and spirit busy in the painful post-K years, and then to have the job I have, helping the recovery with a library in the flooded neighborhoods. My husband sings in the car on the way to work.

And speaking as someone who has spent the better part of the time away, who only came home to gut my house or visit family, I can say, things are better. Things are way better. Hey, the streetlights are working! The water is running! (In most places.) Magazine Street is open! Many beloved businesses are operating again. Vegetation is blooming. Rebuilding and recovery is all but complete in some neighborhoods, booming in others. In Mid-City, where my library branch is, it seems like every house is being renovated. People are even rebuilding in the Lower Nine. The search tags are painted over.

I've been away, so I see it with fresh eyes. But for those who have been here for the last two years, I know how hard it seems, how far there is to go. It just grinds you down, living in the recovery, the constant parade of bad news. I've seen it in my own family. Last year I had to have my Mom come and spend part of August in Baton Rouge, just to get away, because the one-year anniversary had brought her so low.

I'm sure I'll get there myself at some point.

But thst's the nature of the beast. Recovery. A long, grueling process. I remember hearing around the anniversary last year that people were still living in tent cities in Kobe, Japan five years after the big earthquake there.

It's a long grueling process. So if some people are angry and burned out, it's OK to step away for a while. I want to say to any of my fellow bloggers and citizens, that if you need to stop blogging for a while, or take a less demanding, more lucrative job, or go on vacation, or move to the Northshore, it's OK. I'm here. Other newbs are here. We can take up the fight. New people are moving into the city all the time -- I see it every day at my library. College students, Teach for America teachers, young professionals. I've heard several stories of volunteers who came down to help with cleanup, and loved New Orleans so much, they moved here. An amazing development. New people who are optimistic and ready to put their shoulders to the wheel.

This long haul is a relay race. No one has to do it alone. And I'm ready for my leg.

Greensburg

I really feel for those people in Greensburg, Kansas. I know exactly what they are going through. To have your town, your home, your livelihood wiped away in an instant. To not know if your house is intact or destroyed. If your friends and neighbors are living or dead.

FEMA trailers. Insurance adjusters crawling around. The Red Cross. Meals Ready to Eat.

Welcome to the Long Road Home, Greensburg.

In the news today ...

Unbelievable!

New Orleans got defective flood pumps - U.S. Life - MSNBC.com

The piece says the suspect pumps have not bee used yet, so they don't even know how bad it's going to be.

I'm supposed to come back to this?

March on!

Somewhat out of the loop up here in Baton Rouge, I was enormously heartened to hear about the anti-crime march on City Hall. I think it will really have an effect. Angry people marching in the streets is really the only thing that inspires fat-cat politicos to action; it scares them, as it damn well should. And I absolutely LOVE the fact that Nagin was not permitted to speak at the rally!

And on a related topic, I feel I have to express my complete disgust at the anti-march stance taken by my former co-worker Jeffrey over at Library Chronicles. Jeffrey, I am appalled. You accuse the marchers of being Yuppies, of being crypto-fascists implicity endorsing the advent of a police state, of being racially insensitive because they are upset that it was a a white woman and mother, Helen Hill, who was murdered. But it is her family and friends who organized the march -- how should they not be upset? They are trying to do something, trying to effect change, address the issue. How can you censure them for that? At least they are trying something -- whereas you consistently sit back, criticize, belittle, and offer absolutely nothing in the way of constructive alternatives or options.

That is no longer good enough. Bitching and brick-throwing no longer cut it. Jeffrey, I used to read you every day, but as of today I am removing you from my blogroll. You are too negative. I feel you are now part of the problem, not the solution. You're certainly entitled to your opinion. But I don't have to read it.

OK, so who is this asshole Alan Richman who peforms a virtual second Katrina on the restauarants of New Orleans in the current GQ? It's Online here:

YES, WE’RE OPEN

He mercilessly disses everyone from Galatoire's to Jaque-Imo's, and casts doubt on the whole idea of rebuilding the city at all, even while surveying the devastation of Gentilly as he eats a po-boy from Zimmer's Seafood. Unbelievable! He also characterizes pre-Katrina New Orleans as a joyless theme park, while making the usual inaccurate outsider's errors, such as assuming the people stumbling still-drunk and blinking from the Bourbon Street bars in the morning are locals, not touristas (or contractors as the case may be now.)

It is just a horrible, horrible culinary poison-pen hatchet job. A sample:

I think people either take to the city or they do not. They buy into the romance, or they abhor the decadence. I know where I stand.
New Orleans was always a three-day stubble of a city, and now, courtesy of Katrina, it’s more like five. The situation is worse, of course, in the devastated areas, where the floodwaters and the winds did their work. I know we are supposed to salvage what’s left of the city, but what exactly is it that we’re trying to cherish and preserve? I hope it’s not the French Quarter, which has evolved into a illogical mix of characterless housing, elegant antiques stores, and scuzzy bars, a destination for tourists seeking the worst possible experience. The entertainment values are only marginally superior to those of Tijuana, Mexico.

What's so infuriating about it is that this Richman is obviously the kind of smug East Coast hipster who ought to get New Orleans, but he doesn't. Doesn't have a freakin' clue. Thinks he does, but man, does he not.

New Orleans, unique among Soujthern cities, was never much for mealy-mouthed nicey-niceness, but for once I have to follow the moonlight-and-magnolias line: If you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all.

Thanks to the AV Club's Hater for the heads-up.

Still Truckin'

I have updated my GA Journal. I am beginning to learn how to give formal instructional sessions, which is a huge part of academic librarianship these days.

In other news, I have been reading Nola.com a lot lately, and am upset and frightened by the horrendous crime wave that is occurring in New Orleans lately. It is like the bad old days of 1994, when the yearly murder rate stood above 400, and New Orleans was undisputably the "Murder Capital of the United States." But with the population of the city so much less now than it was then -- less than 200,000 people by last count -- I would say it's actually, objectively worse. I am concerned about my parents down there, and my husband, still living in one of the devastated areas. For myself, I'm glad I'm in Baton Rouge right now.

Hopefully the recet dismissal of revolving-door judge Elloie will put some brakes on the crime spree. His was just another example of the lack of leadership that has plagued the city throughout the recovery effort.

I really struggle with the idea of returning to New Orleans after I finish my degree. There are good reasons to return, and just as good ones to "shake the dust of [that] crummy little town off my feet" and never, never return. The good reasons are: my family is there; all my friends are there; making a difference by contributing to the rebuilding, and; it is home after all.

The bad reasons are: why go to all this struggle and sacrifice just to go creeping back to my old life; the recovery is not going well; News Orleans will never be what it was; it is still lacking in economic and professional opportunity, and; it is a crummy little town after all.

I love New Orleans, don't ever say I don't. I love it with all my heart. Seeing the city ruined, the people scattered, has been a nightmare, a kind of living death. I grieve for the dead and for the city ruined. But having lost everything, I want to create a good, new life for myself and my husband now. That is why I am in school after all, trying to better myself, trying to take something positive out of this horiffic catastrophe. And I suspect I can do a better job of that somewhere else, than in ruined, staggering, broken New Orleans.

It kills me to say that. N.O. loyalists would call me a traitor, a weakling, and they might be right. I greatly admire people like Mark Folse -- expatriates who've come home and are struggling to rebuild their hometown. But as heroic as that is -- they didn't live it. They didn't flee with the clothes on their back and live a gypsy's life for months while the city lay submerged and off-limits. They don't wake from dreams of drowning in their own house, struggling to climb the attic ladder as the cold lakewater sucks at their legs and thighs. They don't know who lived in the houses with the numbers in the search tags.

You know, I'm just tired. I want it all to be over. When I graduate, I want to get a good job where I can put to use all the things I'm learning in library school, buy a nice house, and live in a community where I can shop and go to the movies and run errands without it being a major operation. I want a future.

It's almost a year still until I graduate. A year from now, I might find those things in New Orleans. But i don't know, I don't know. A fresh start -- is that so much to ask?