One more day in Paradise
This is a familiar refrain in New Orleans – it started raining Friday night and didn’t stop. We set up the umbrellas and plastic gazebo because we decided that rain wasn’t going to stop us from having our Release Party – I mean rain? Water? That is our metaphor, right? We put our shrimp boots on and carried tables, food, and drink out to the bayou and people came carrying more food, more drink, more grievances to burn and wishes to wish.
Five minutes into it, the rain broke for the first time in over 48 hours and a rainbow, no, a double rainbow, appeared across the eastern horizon vivid in all its true colors.
People came with smiles on their faces even if they had heavy hearts and one by one they unloaded their burdens onto a piece of paper that I packed into my pockets while we ate jambalaya, gumbo, flan, red velvet cupcakes, barbecued chicken, potato salad, noodle kugel, Italian fig cookies, greens, fresh tomato salsa. While we ate our own good home made fare, President Obama was dining on fried shrimp poboys not but a few blocks away at the Parkway Bakery & Tavern.
Tin sat in his Prince chair and all the young cougars surrounded, wanting to spoon feed him.
My pocket was bulging from grievances, sadness, sorrow, anger, hurt, and humiliation that people had come to burn so we did a little dance, did a little chant, and we released the bad and made way for the good.
My 8 year old neighbor made a sign for all the tables that said 5 years Katrina – with words like distrucoin (sic), rescue, glass, water, stormes (sic), trama (sic), broken, roofs, weather, evacuatoin (sic), forcast (sic), branches, katirina (sic), New Orleans.
Sitting on my neighbor’s white padded deck chair that he bought in anticipation of having a yacht one day to put it on, I looked up at the fast moving clouds and saw stars twinkling way far in the darkest part of the sky (my neighbor was sitting nearby and he said in a low voice “I used to come out here after Katrina while I was working on the house and just stare up like that, it helped ground my day,”) – meanwhile, my friends grabbed their guitars and I closed my eyes and listened to the music having this warm sense of being around my loved ones and thought to myself: “One more day in Paradise.”
