Do You Know What It Means to Love New Orleans?
I do indeed, having lived there for a couple of years in the early '90s.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32555-do-you-know-what-it-means-to-love-new-orleans
I sat in the garden on Thursday under the shade of my wide-brim hat, picked beans and tomatoes with my gnarled old gloves, listened to the bees ignoring me, smelled the earth, felt the sun on my skin, paused in that basic splendor, and thought of New Orleans. Ten years ago Friday, a storm half the size of Texas hit that old blues town in the teeth, and the ocean rose, and the sky fell, and the jazz stopped in jangled discordance, and everyone ran for their lives.
And the people were abandoned. It took George W. Bush and his mob of hapless brigands days simply to get water to dying citizens in one of the most important and iconic cities on the continent. Why? Because the people were Black, and poor? Because Bush and his people were incompetent beyond the bounds of useful language? Because greedy people plundered the levee budget to the tune of nine figures to "fund" the Iraq war prior to the storm? Yes, in my humble opinion, on all three counts....
So I sit in my garden, girded by dirt and green and growth, I smell life ... and I think of New Orleans. Ten years ago, the sea rose up and did damage the likes of which we've never seen. People were scattered to the wind, the Lower 9th Ward was subsumed and then devoured by developers, fast after the buck to be plucked from the wreckage left behind by good people in flight. Wreckage upon wreckage.
I remember Katrina. But I also remember "Acknowledgement." I remember "Kind of Blue." I remember "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." I remember the blues, and jazz, and the long river that raised them both like a pair of talented, fussy children in a Louisiana port city that smells like life.
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