This young woman is a friend of my daughter. She lived in New Orleans with her boyfriend, until he died of a brain tumor a few years ago. I believe ‘he’ refers to her dead lover.
Now she is studying in Ireland and watching on television the destruction of her former home.
These comments are from her online blog and I thought they were powerful and sorrowful enough to share.
I think the ‘he’ in her piece refers to her dead lover.
Please read her third from last paragraph.
Her post follows….
Current mood: crushed
yesterday, on the news, i saw my old street.
‘i used to walk down that way to get diet coke… and that’s the zoo… well, was the zoo.’
thank someone they got out in time (my family that is).
but they’ve lost everything.
and here i am, watching it all on the news… because i have electricity, and water, and food, and stuff, and there’s no poisonous snakes tickling my toes, and there’s not a dead body twitching in the wires outside my window.
and that used to be a zoo there.
and that used to be a circle k … he won 40 bucks on a scratch ticket there.
they won’t be able to go back for weeks, months even. it’s not because their home is gone, but it’s that the road to their home is gone … their city is gone. imagine waking up, and where you grew up … it’s gone. an atlantis of jazz returning to its maker.
it’s not just me; everyone knows someone that knows someone that knows someone. i’m just me, and just one person. but i had a lockbox of memories there, and now, they’ve no streetsigns.
thank someone that they decided to evacuate … he was always a stubborn bastard, thinking he could ride the storm.
and i hear some cocky fuck in a foreign accent judging the people that didn’t leave, “the people who decided not to evacuate are now having to be rescued…” maybe he doesn’t know what new orleans is like in the summer. that as soon as the sun goes down, everyone goes to their porches, hangs out of their screen doors because they can’t afford air conditioning or a car or food sometimes. they talk. that’s their life, chatting and sitting and singing along to god’s awful song. maybe he doesn’t know what it’s like to know that you have to leave to save your life … but for the life of you, you can’t leave because you’ve no car. if you had a car, you wouldn’t have money for gasoline. you can’t even afford a ticket on the streetcar. how are you supposed to evacuate when half of your city is poverty, and half of your city works the swamps for oil getting paid a miniscule fraction of what it’s worth. how do you evacuate when you’ve never left nawlins because your pa never made enough money to buy a bus ticket for all five of ya.
and he sits and judges the likes of them. i suppose it’s easy in his posh little office in england where the rain stops to think, and there’s not a lake knocking at his front door.
but i’m just another angry american, and what can i say? i like that i am.
thank someone.
