New Orleans Bound
S, N and I are driving to New Orleans tomorrow to check it out and see if we can go home yet. The Can isn’t letting anyone in for two months but S and I could stay at T’s house till the Can reopens. Meanwhile, L is back and he says the first day Max rolled in a dog carcass on the bayou and that was his welcome home. He’s bitter without having had a lot of damage – just bitter about how his world has been disrupted and how it seems overwhelming to get the city back up and running. “I can’t even find a fucking sandwich” was his complaint on his way to teach a remote class for UNO.
Meanwhile today is N&V’s 13th wedding anniversary – and the rest of us in full cowboy regalia went to All Good with P to eat dinner and afterwards went on stage to do some W original tunes (Do Not Enter, I Care About You, Cowboy and Cowgirl, Hey Zeus) – the staff came out to cheer us on. Sent G an email and he wrote back “love you to the moon” – this is the kind of connection you don’t get in California – ever – it won’t happen – and we sent G an architectural book because he lost everything in the flood. Mold is crawling up the sides of his house – his Landcruiser is rusted in the front yard with a note from someone saying they’d buy it off of him just as is. But he threw the complete works of Louis I Kahn into the yard when he found his library water damaged.
Was thinking about the Dylan Thomas quote heard yesterday – my heart is under your hammer – and thinking about A’s notes today about her woes with G, and about S’s woes with M, and L’s woes with K, and all of the woes combined. We are all actors, strutting and fretting across the stage. And the band played on in L’s words.
Right now I feel tempted to tuck and run – save my sanity – spare my heart – learn another way of life – unhinged – I have no room in this life to spread my wings and bask in the glory of the day.
But NO bound we are, to see for ourselves the devastation and restoration progress and to see if it is fit for us to return. Some cosmic joke played on the best city in this country. As if it weren’t precious before, now made more so by coloring the green brown, letting the sky shine through the missing trees, dead carcasses littering the ground, the silence that is not serene, the parties postponed.