the last couple of days have been pretty hard on me. it feels like life has been killing me for the last year an inch at a time. i have been trying so hard to look at the larger picture, and not to deal with the "small stuff" that is everyday life. things have just piled up and piled up, and i have less and less ability to throw off these downers and go on. finally, today, i just put my head down on my desk and cried for an hour in the dark. i just couldn't go another inch more.
and just in the middle of it, a gift of flowers was brought to me, a gift from a fellow teacher who is battling cancer. things suddenly go back to where they need to be. here i am whining over my woes, and i am reminded that life can and will get worse. diane has had a great attitude and during all of her chemo and radiation, she has managed to safe house 20 dogs, deal with her water and well going out and car problems. plus having nothing good come back after her surgery was done.
i blew my nose, got in my car and went home and fixed myself some lunch. my son hugged me and then i turned on the television to watch the news and see the devastation that is new orleans and the gulf coast of mississippi. two summers ago austin played in a weeklong baseball tournament in biloxi/gulfport mississippi, which apparently just isn't there anymore. we joked about the "redneck riviera" and how tacky and rundown it was. now i am sure that anyone would wish all of it back in the face of what has happened. bay st. louis and pass christian are no longer there either. one day gwen and i went down there to look around, and it was quaint and quiet. we went to a gift shop there, and drove around and looked at the old houses there. while in gulfport i visited the george ohr pottery museum which was located a couple of blocks off of the beach. i am sure it is gone, along with all of ohr's pottery. the day i went there, they had had no electricity for a week and the museum was closed. however, because it was my last day in biloxi, and i really wanted to see the pottery, they said that i could come down for free. there was no a/c there, but it was wondrous looking at his work. ohr was the "mad potter of biloxi" and i guess he sort of embodied a lot of what the people there have...earthiness, moxy, determination. they were real people, and he was too. the pottery being lost is a sad thing, but it is just pottery, and lucky to have survived as long as it did. ohr's work was not appreciated in his lifetime. i guess it goes to show that nothing is permanent, not things, not people. in this case, the people lost are what is most devastating. just now they said that at least 40 people are known dead in biloxi, with surely more to follow.
biloxi and gulfport. i went to the home of jefferson davis one day and toured it by myself. i don't know if it has survived. we ate at a tacky place that had a giant crayfish on the roof and shopped in a place where the door was a giant shark's mouth. i went to a casino, the first one i had ever been to, and i won $145, which i used to pay for our hotel room and trip to new orleans. all of these places likely are just flat gone. they were all on the beach, on the gulf, just like the rundown hotel we were staying in. i am reminded that we had our own personal homeless couple, shaggy and scooby-doo. they slept each night under the pilons that held up the hotel off the ground. when we were there you couldn't swim in the water because there was some type of chemical contamination on the beach and in the water. the whole place was sort of old and decadent and tacky and sunny. it is just a pile of matchsticks now. even then there were the concrete steps left from hurricane camille in 1969. steps that led to nowhere, steps that led up to the ghosts of houses. the trees that surrounded those previous houses were all that remained, along with the steps, of what once was. i wonder if they have even survived this catastrophe.
i am glad now that i took austin to new orleans. we stayed downtown and didn't get to spend a whole lot of time. i took him to jackson square, to bourbon street, to eat muffalettas at central grocery, to have beignets and chickory coffee at cafe du monde. we walked the t-shirt stores, and the old jax brewery. we parked along the levee and it was unbelievably hot and humid. we rode the street car line from bourbon street all the way up st. charles avenue through the garden district and back from the turnaround at the end. i was reminded then of having years ago taken the street car to a hotel to catch a ride to the airport. it was christmas time and hot as blazes. i didn't know much about streetcars and just stood along the line with my suitcase. when the streetcar came, it went right past me another block. i wasn't where it would stop. boy, did i feel dumb. a bunch of construction workers working on a library spotted me and hooted and hollered. i was glad to get out of new orleans then. to paraphrase mark twain a bit, the hottest summer i ever spent was a winter in new orleans. i couldn't imagine it could be 80 degrees in december.
and now it is all gone. and the whole entire town needs to be evacuated. there is no food, water, electricity. there is 80% of the town underwater. thousands are still trapped in their homes, on roofs, trapped in attics. there is looting, and the superdome is overcrowded with refugees who are to go to the houston astrodome if they can find a way to get them out. the superdome had part of the roof blown off and there is no air conditioning or toilets. there is no food, no gas, no way to get to people and no way to get them out short of walking through the water. people who left before the hurricane have nothing to go back to, no place to go to, and no money or gas to get them anywhere. my brother has friends in new orleans, but he doesn't know what has happened to them. it is hard to watch all of this stuff having been there. you would have to have no heart to watch it and not be affected.
so, nothing in my life compares to what could be worse. i needed a dose of reality today, and i got it. right now it feels like the end of the world, understandably so. no one could imagine an entire huge city, one that has survived so many hundreds of years, would have to be entirely evacuated. where will these people go? who and what will happen to them? how can you rebuild an entire huge city? i guess that these are the times that try men's souls. as people loot and steal and shoot each other and act like animals, they are balanced by those who have raced south to help, those who have given to those in need, those who have shared. this is the worst natural disaster in the history of the country. what we are truly made of may truly come to light in the next few weeks as the country reacts and responds.
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