We have been waking up with Groundhog Day Syndrome for a long time now, dragging ourselves out of bed with a sense of dread that the clock has stopped, the calendar pages don’t turn, and nothing is changing.
We’re Bill Murray. We’re Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. We’re trapped in an Escher print, walking down steps that actually lead up, down straight paths that lead us full circle.
Okay, for the four of you still reading, I’ll stop with the cultural metaphors. You get the point. I get the point. We all get the point.
The point is: it’s fourteen days until January.
Wait until January, people in New Orleans say. You hear it all the time. Things will get better in January.
It’s our mantra of hope, optimism, faith. Or maybe delusion.
Maybe because we’ve been Saints fans for so long that we are willing to buy futures when the market is flat. So eager to accept promises we don’t really believe.
It’s always been “wait until next year,” and we buy our season tickets and jerseys with the name and number of our new star player—the guy who’s going to take us all the way!—and, like Charlie Brown, we keep running to kick the football and Lucy pulls it away.
Again and again. Wait until next year.
But there is merit to the current theory of an impending turn of events for the positive, empirical evidence to shore it up. For New Orleans, that is; the Saints, I’m afraid, are a lost cause, and they don’t make levees big enough to plug that breach.
But January holds the promise of a sound that has been missing from our city for too long: the music of children. Lots of children.
Sure, there has been a refreshing repopulation of the little critters in recent weeks as schools opened and families trickled home, but the playgrounds still look pretty desolate and there’s hardly ever a line for sugar cones at the Creole Creamery.
But there are legions of rug rats coming home this week or next or next, when the school semesters elsewhere end and the holidays are over.
True, my son Jack’s nursery school class will have only twelve of the original twenty kids who were enrolled last September, but I guess that’s a decent rate of return. A start.
And I think it will grow. The kid quotient goes up by at least three today.
My family is coming home.
This is wonderful news from a personal standpoint, but I am also filled with anxiety about this, and immeasurable . . . I guess I can say it: doubt.
Is it safe? Will they pick up on the air of despondency that seems to have engulfed three quarters of the adult population here? Will they be upset that they don’t have a blue roof like everyone else?
These are the questions that nag me.
But I think my friend the barber Aidan Gill summed it up best: “A time will come when someone asks you, ‘What were you doing about it?’ You can’t tell them, ‘I was just watching it. I was just an innocent bystander.’ Let me tell you something: there are no innocent bystanders in this.”
My own call to arms has been that either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem and it’s time we become part of the problem because the solution, whatever it’s been up to now, ain’t workin’.
So I’m Charlie Brown now. New Orleans is Lucy. And I’m gonna kick that ball a country mile.
Come January, everything will get better. If not, we wait for February 2.
That’s Groundhog Day.