bastille day

i need to go backwards.

i'm sitting in the dining room of our sweet hotel in new orleans (the frenchman, on frenchman street- i highly, highly recommend it), drinking coffee and trying to at least write a little before chris is done getting ready and we head out for beignets at cafe du monde. i don't care if its touristy and predictable of us, i won't leave this town until i have eaten beignets and drunk cafe au lait at cafe du monde. i hear barack obama's voice on TV talking about the surge. i turned on the TV for the first time since chris arrived in the states this morning and george bush's face was all over every station, talking about the economy and gas prices and laughing when he said every reporter's name. i wonder if the reporters will miss him a little bit, the banter and the lightheartedness in the face of all this disaster.

speaking of bush, this is the first time i've been in new orleans since katrina happened. i came here a few times as a child with my parents but i don't remember it being this beautiful, this eccentric, this delicate, this outrageous, this sweet, this interesting and this complicated. and though i think the storm has a large part in creating such a sense of awe in me, such a sense of respect and curiosity about every street we walk down and every person we pass, i think that its actually despite the storm that it remains as such. shingles remain left off roofs, window panes haven't been put back in some houses and office buildings, and as you drive off the 10 and enter new orleans you can see katrina on every street. but from what i can tell in my narrow perspective here on frenchman street, new orleans is for the most part as new orleans has always been. you can't walk anywhere without hearing live music nearby, there are drag queens welcoming you into bars on bourbon street, moms walk leisurely down the street, plastic cup with skinny straw in hand, as their kids run ahead. i see katrina in the bumper stickers that say "nero fiddled as rome fell/ bush played guitar as new orleans flooded" and in the t-shirts being sold in chochsky shops that refer to new orleans being "still swinging" or "still the best city in the south" and in the ineffable feeling of this being a city whose fever is breaking. i remember the discussion after katrina about whether we should invest in new orleans again or not, knowing that a storm like this would probably come along again, and since the infastructure of the city is flawed it was bound to happen. this is an aside, something that most of you probably know, but katrina affected me infinitely more than any other disaster in my lifetime ever has- more than 9/11. i had been living in new york for a few months and found it extremely difficult to do anything but watch the news alone in my apartment. i went out to bars and found myself lecturing or crying to perfect strangers about what had happened and what should have happened and i found myself infuriated that people were able to get dressed and go to work, that they still wanted to get dressed up and go out drinking. it lasted for about two weeks and it was one of the darkest times in my life.

chris is ready to go. i need beignets. i also want to write about birmingham and how it was sort of this homecoming for me, it was this first and this final reckoning with it, like birmingham finally wiggled its way into its final place in my heart. maybe that couldn't happen until i had shared it with chris or until he at least had a sense of what it looked like and what it meant. this all needs to come later but i can't really say when. we leave for austin in a few hours and spend two nights there, so hopefully at some point i can steal away with this computer and type out some more day old memories.

new orleans has more soul than any city i have ever been to in any country in the world, and the notion that "we" would somehow not rebuild it is, thankfully, laughable now. it wasn't ever up to us. it was up to this old man with purple hair named ronnie who played the saxophone in a bar near our hotel last night and who told me i should be a newscaster and wear outfits that were attractive but not too sexy, and that i should shake my ass as i point to the thunderstorm coming from the west. maybe something from ann taylor would be appropriate, he said.

oh, and no one here gives a shit about bastille day.