Wow, almost a year. That's difficult to believe. And I know people are still suffering and trying to rebuild their lives and their city.
I'm going to share the essay I wrote for the book I promote in my tagline. Lots of people were involved, and it's still for sale, BTW. This essay can't touch luckydog's, though, damn; I'm still crying.
I always believed that you could not mourn that which you have never had. The drowning of New Orleans proved me wrong.
Even as I mourned for the people who had lost so much - real tangible losses of life and homes and community - I knew that I also was mourning my own more ethereal loss, the sudden absence of something that I might have known. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, something special was gone, and now I would not have the opportunity to experience its magic.
It felt selfish. It felt a bit ridiculous, perhaps. But while those who have lost everything were and are the first concern, I, along with people throughout the globe, knew that we'd lost something whether or not we had spent time in the city. We shared the loss of a place that its Mayor Roy Nagin accurately described as "so unique (that) when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up."
It was the city of Mardi Gras and riverboats and food so indescribably delicious that it made Scarlett O'Hara loosen her stays. It was the city of voodoo and Marie Laveau and Anne Rice's vampires. It was the city of saints and "A Christmas Memory" and wonderful, wonderful music. It was a city grounded in the realities of life that nonetheless gave us a window to the unreal, sometimes the surreal. It was a city where authenticity met imagination. It was special.
I know it will be special again. I have to believe that its people will rebuild and rejuvenate and re-create. Something will arise from the floodwaters that filled the city, but it never will be quite the same place they knew nor exactly the one I dreamed of visiting.
The closest I came to visiting New Orleans came in my senior year of college. The Penn State Lady Lions basketball team was, we believed, Final Four-bound. And the Final Four was scheduled in fabulous New Orleans. We - me, my boyfriend of the era and two friends - were most decidedly going to the Big Easy. There would be basketball; there would be jazz; there would be Bourbon Street. There would be - for a group of college students - everything to make the weekend perfect despite a 20-hour drive.
We wanted to see cities of the dead. We wanted to hear the Zydeco. We wanted to taste the gumbo. We wanted to immerse ourselves in the culture that was N'Awlins, even if our perception of that culture was based only on what we had read, what we had heard and a mediocre movie with Dennis Quaid.
The Lady Lions didn't make it to New Orleans that year, and neither did we. Three of us decided that in our disappointment we would make a consolation trip to Ontario. I often have regretted that we didn't make the Gulf Coast trip anyway and, of course, that was never truer than in the days following Hurricane Katrina. Visiting Toronto took us out of the country, but it was not nearly so exotic and foreign to us as the Big Easy.
Nonetheless, the appeal of New Orleans lies with its uniquely American story - a blend of cultures that influenced a nation. It offers a little lagniappe to the stuffy Puritans we usually credit with giving the nation its character. Its mix of French, Spanish, African, Creole and all other comers gave the city and surrounding region a flavor as unique and distinctive as its natives' accent.
If New England symbolizes our work ethic in the national story and the mythic West our sense of adventure, then in the same way New Orleans captures our joie de vivre. Fortunately for all of us, it was a city and region of great generosity. It gave us all jazz and blues and jambalaya and broiled catfish.
It also allowed us to see its darker side: a sense of humor displayed in naming its most famous drink for the city's worst enemy - the Hurricane - and a touch of the macabre seen in the masquerades that mark its most famous holiday.
It was a place that knew its bright lights cast many shadows, and it long has been recognized as a place of spirits. The geography that forces the area to house its dead in vaults above the ground seems to let ghosts tap persistently at the consciousness of the living. Too many souls were added to their number in the wake of Katrina - in New Orleans and in the surrounding Gulf Coast - and I cried for them. A few times, I found myself uncharacteristically screaming to the heavens in rage and grief and some raw emotion I couldn't quite name.
I hope those souls heard me cry out. I hope that my voice joined their chorus in keening for an unimaginable loss: a city's near destruction that long had been predictable and nonetheless shocked us all.
Most of all, I hope that when its dead buried, the city can turn from the graves and strike up the joyous tunes for which New Orleans funerals are famous - those sounds that celebrate life and resurrection in the face of the ultimate personal disaster. It is those beautiful, boisterous funerals that embody the spirit of a city that knows there is no permanence to death.
So I mourn New Orleans, but I also find myself straining to hear those rising notes of hope. And yeah, you know it; I'd like to be in that number.