Funny how fast it can happen, when it happens: Change.
Sunday was killer hot but by Monday I was bundled up in two sweaters, a jacket and a scarf. Forget the Panama hat; it would have blown away. The temperature had plummeted twenty degrees to a daytime high of 62 degrees and a nighttime of 40.
One evening I took the St. Charles streetcar to Tulane (TOO-lane) University to see Joan Didion read from her work. I like Didion. I'm a fan of her sharp, concise writing.
After a long-winded intro by an English professor, Joan Didion entered center-stage through a set of heavy, dusty, old-fashioned curtains. The audience welcomed her with a standing ovation worthy of the petite rock star of the literary world she is. Didion ignored the applause and got right to the task at hand. She read from The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband at their dinner table.
She read of the fire she built in the living room that evening, of the Scotch she poured for him and the salad she tossed. She paused in her reading and then continued to relate their brief conversation and how she noticed John's hand raised in the air as his head slumped forward, and how she thought he was making a joke she didn't like. It was moving to hear the writing from her lips and in a voice that sounded both strong and exhausted.
She confirmed that as the book sat stacked in warehouses waiting for delivery, her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, also died.
Walking the neighborhoods of New Orleans, listening to Joan Didion read and taking a disaster tour had me wondering how or if we are linked to each other.
I was struck by the irony of Vanessa Redgrave, having recently lost her own daughter, set to perform the play version of this work at St. John's Cathedral in New York in October of 2009. I thought of how courageous and compelled these women were to put their sorrow into their art, perhaps because there was nothing else to be done. And now, tragically, they had become: Linked.
The shrimpers of the Louisiana coast are known as able-bodied, independent people born of families long tied to fishing. The sea is what they know and they know it well. Today, in the swampland and bayous, white shrimp boats languished half-sunk and rotten, scattered like abandoned toys. I saw these boat carcasses from the window of a tour bus. I was on the Hurricane Katrina Tour. A journey that would take us through the neighborhoods of Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, St. Bernard's Parish and the Ninth Ward. We'd see breached levees. We'd drive by devastated homes, public schools, shopping malls and restaurants. We'd see neighborhoods that had become virtual ghost towns.
The coastal wetlands are eroding at a rate of 16,000 to 20,000 acres every year. These same marshes provide natural protection from the damage of storm surges.
New Orleans' industries have a combined domestic economic impact of $140 billion every year. We eat the shrimp and oysters, our cars run on the oil, and we use the steel, rubber and coffee that arrive through New Orleans' ports. Nearly $4 billion of FEMA aid designated to help the region sat, unspent, three and a half years after Katrina.
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