Book of the Night Club

I always thought California was supposed to sink into the sea

Not New Orleans.

It’s just so strange, watching the news and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose everything material that you have. In thinking about it, I suppose it wouldn’t really matter, as long as those I loved were okay. In a bizarre way, sometimes I think it might be a refreshing way to start over.

But the thing is, where to start in New Orleans? From what I understand, New Orleans has pretty much effectively vanished, swallowed by the water from the broken levees. They city is being abandoned, and nobody can really say when anyone will be able to return. All that history, gone forever. Because it will never be the same again, it will never really be New Orleans. Much of the French Quarter escaped flooding, it’s true, but the real New Orleans was more than that.

If you lose your house, you can rebuild. But what if you lose your city? I can only imagine the sheer number of people who not only lost their homes, but possibly their entire livelihood, as a result of this disaster. I try to think of what people have lost when I hear about the rampant looting, but I still seethe when I see or read about it.

I know someone online who had to leave some of her pets behind because there wasn’t room enough for all of them in her car. She has no idea how they are or if they’re still alive. A friend of my mother’s took her son down to Tulane for his freshman year of college. As they prepared to move him into the dorms on Saturday, he was told they were being evacuated to Mississippi until Katrina passed. He went to Houston instead to ride out the storm, and I don’t know what he did after that.

I’ve never been to New Orleans, although I’d always planned to go. I loved the whole gothic mystery that enveloped it, and reveled in reading about the lingering spirits of old New Orleans and listening to Cajun music. But I never went; I talked about it, but nothing more. My husband, who isn’t particularly well traveled in the U.S., wanted to go, too, but we always put it off.

“It’s not like it’s going anywhere,” we’d tell ourselves.

Guess we were wrong.