HURRICANE HANGOVER
Guest Blogger Becky

Most people I know are sick of thinking, or talking, or hearing about the hurricanes.

In fact, just a couple of short weeks after Katrina, a conversation with a friend went like this:

Him: “I wonder how much longer I’m going to have to hear about the hurricane?”

Me, thinking he was offering a not-so-subtle hint, and making note of his preference: “Probably not much longer.”

I quickly excused myself from the conversation to save us both. The friend in question has his own problems, to be fair: liver transplant, lack of money, and the myriad difficulties that come from being gay and born in the mid-west.

Plus, he doesn’t live in southern Louisiana.

And proximity definitely counts.

You might wonder why I don’t just put this out of my mind, stop obsessing, concentrate on life at hand, pull myself up by my boot-straps, accentuate the positive. And, sure, oftentimes it’s easy to push aside the reality of horrors in the world, as I’ve managed to do with the earthquake in Pakistan, the reality of the worst president ever, and my turning 50 next year.

But proximity definitely counts.

I recently read an article by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, whose proximity also plagues his mind:

1 Dead in Attic

My wife questions the wisdom of my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability and I suspect she is right.

Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.

That's advice I wish I could follow, but I can't. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.

I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn't inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.

In some cases, there's no interpretation needed. There's one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: "1 dead in attic."



That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.

It's spray-painted there on the front of the house and it probably will remain spray-painted there for weeks, months, maybe years, a perpetual reminder of the untimely passing of a citizen, a resident, a New Orleanian.

One of us.

And

But there's something I've discovered about the 8th Ward in this strange exercise of mine: Apparently, a lot of Mardi Gras Indians are from there. Or were from there; I'm not sure what the proper terminology is.

On several desolate streets that I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven't bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb -- what's the point, really? -- but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.



The colors of these displays is startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.

So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after the fallout. I don't know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.

They haunt me, almost as much as the spray paint on the front of a house that says 1 Dead in Attic. They look like ghosts hanging there. They are reminders of something. Something very New Orleans.

Do these memorials mean these guys -- the Indians -- are coming back? I mean, they have to, don't they? Where else could they do what they do?

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