Living inside the Katrina Bubble and never getting out, one tends to be consumed by the bad stuff; at least that’s how it seems when all anyone talks about is crime and trash and politics and insurance companies and No Road Home and progress seems just to slog along in the day-to-day. It’s practically insufferable unless you set your iPod on “Motown’s Greatest Hits” and just keep telling yourself: Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.
Of course, then you wind up not paying attention and driving into a pothole and busting up your front end and now you’re more pissed off than before you started thinking all those happy thoughts—Ice cream! Kittens! New Britney photos!—in the first place, so this method comes with a surgeon general’s warning.
I find the best way to get an optimistic sense of recovery around here is to leave town, go observe life somewhere else, and then come back.
When you’ve been outside the Katrina Zone for even just a short while, you can get a fresh perspective, and when you come back, you tend to notice more changes, improvements; the brown caterpillar slowly—very slowly—morphing into the colorful butterfly.
Even if I haven’t been out of the city for a while, I ask friends who have just returned from vacation or a business trip (or rehab) what they noticed when they got back, and most of the time they actually come up with some positive stuff that confirms my purely anecdotal theory.
That’s why this past Saturday was such a grand experience for me. Without leaving town or setting out on a contrived mission to look for signs of recovery (and cranking up the Supremes), things jumped out at me all day long. The butterfly spreads her wings.
That morning, I was driving down Prytania Street and noticed a line outside the Bluebird Cafe and I know there’s probably always a line there on weekends because it’s such a popular breakfast spot, but everyone looked happy to be there, chatting with strangers around them, and it looked like the Bluebird of old.
Shortly after that, I passed the old familiar sight of movie trucks and trailers and lights and there were scads of self-important young people rushing around with headsets and clipboards, and this is a welcome sight—at least to anyone who can muster enough civic spirit to prioritize the city’s long-term economic recovery over his own personal parking hassles, and I am aware that not everyone can.
Minutes later, I passed by Mother’s on Poydras, and again, there was a line down the block. Not long after that, I drove past Port of Call on Esplanade, and same thing. Customers, lots of customers, waiting to get in for lunch.
These three sights compounded to lift my spirits. Commerce! Activity! A living, breathing community!
Continuing about on my errands, I dropped off a friend at the airport and had assured him that he’d get to his plane in no time because there was never anyone at the airport. But in fact, the cars dropping folks off at curbside were two deep all the way down the concourse level.
Of course, these cars represent people leaving town—arrivals are downstairs—but presumably the great majority of them came from somewhere else to visit or are from here and will return. It looked almost like the airport of old.
Down in the Central Business District and the Quarter, there were pedestrians all over the place, some of them showing off the visiting 49ers colors, and outside Anne Rice’s old house in the Garden District (it’s been years since she lived there) the crowds still gather to gawk, take pictures, and search for ghosts.
The weather Saturday was, as you know, profoundly clear and crisp, and Sunpie Barnes was singing about Creole tomatoes on WWOZ when I got stuck in traffic because there was a caravan of Mardi Gras floats bouncing up Rampart Street behind tractors, headed for who-knows-where and who-knows-what, but obviously somebody was having a big party somewhere with all these strange and beautiful indigenous means of transportation.
Saturday evening, a friend of mine went to Brennan’s to eat, but they told him it would be an hour’s wait so they went to Galatoire’s instead. At the Galactic gig at the Maple Leaf, David Letterman showed up in the crowd and Paul Shaffer sat in with the band. Over at Rock n’ Bowl, Jimmy Buffett showed up at the Sonny Landreth gig and joined in for a few numbers, and, funny: it’s December, when, even before Katrina, there wasn’t usually that much going on around here.
There seemed to be people everywhere, a city—what’s left of it, at least—jumping and alive.
At Tipitina’s that night, Lusher, my kids’ elementary school, held its annual winter fund-raiser. The music for this event is generally supplied by the school’s jazz orchestra, which is positively phenomenal. They are young members of the true cultural elite—the very future of this city’s musical heritage.
Music is also supplied by the parents of students who happen to be professional musicians, of which there are plenty. There are Iguanas and Imagination Movers and members of $1,000 Car and various jazz singers and more and it was crazy to see the mothers of my kids’ classmates, women who generally look pretty frazzled and hurried just like me when I drop off my kids at school in the morning, suddenly wearing cocktail dresses and singing torch songs and transformed and what is it about this town that everyone is an artist of one kind or another? Everybody’s got something happening on the side.
Last year, the fund-raiser seemed to be a somewhat forced affair, held a few weeks after the school reopened in January and muddied by the still-humid aura of shock and uncertainty.
But Saturday night, it was a rocking affair, and I realized it felt that way because now, fifteen months into this thing, everyone who showed up to support the school—although we are mixed incomes and religions and ethnic backgrounds and philosophies—all had one thing in common: We’re here. And we’re likely staying. And by our very presence, we’re obviously committed to making this a better community for ourselves and our children.
Some of the folks I knew and some I didn’t, but I looked around the room at people laughing and dancing and living here in the center of the universe because, in case you haven’t heard, that’s still what New Orleans is.
Like my travel theory above, this opinion is based purely on anecdotal evidence. But wheeling all over town Saturday with the windows down and WWOZ rolling out one New Orleans chestnut after another, I couldn’t imagine anywhere else in the world I’d rather be. When we’ve got our game face on (insert appropriate Saints metaphor here), there is no place like it in the world.
Now, I realize that at that very minute I was having a golden moment, other people all over this town, this region, were staring at hollowed-out houses with glassed-over eyes and their hands on their hips, wondering how they’ll ever find their way back to peace of mind.
I know there is plenty of bad stuff out there. Good and plenty, to be sure. But I didn’t see any of it Saturday, and maybe it’s good not to see it every now and then, to get away, whether by airplane or simply by cranking up the radio.
It’s the ever-present and always alluring possibility of this type of near-rapturous experience that I had Saturday that makes people want to be here, I guess.
I swear, if some loathsome creature had accosted me and axed me where I got my shoes, I could have transported myself to a dream state where you could almost believe that the things that have happened here were all just a bad dream and in fact, life is groovy.
But despite the insistence of some to the contrary, we live in a reality-based world and what happened happened and that’s that, but it is mighty damn refreshing once in a while to feel as if we’re crawling out of the hole.
Even with a flattened landscape and so many challenges ahead of us, I don’t remember a single person on Saturday asking me how I made out in the flood, and if that’s not a change for the better, then I don’t know what is.