Scribbling Mama

Writing Again

2007-07-12T11:28:00.000-05:00

I haven't done this in a while. But I've decided to reclaim this blog and start writing again. Actually, I've been doing a lot of writing. Fiction, if you can believe it. I hardly can. I feel rather guilty about it. But I can't seem to convince myself anymore that I am a scholar, someone who studies literature but never creates it. Seems I have reached this saturation point with all of the stories I have read, taught, and written about. It's time to write my own. In fact, I'm starting to see the writing I am doing as coming right out of all of those 19th-century women's stories. I have been teaching The Awakening fairly regularly since the storm, and my female students get all worked up by it, as do I. It is one of those books that we can't seem to let go of, which is probably why we all teach it and read it over and over again. It has become one of those ubiquitous books. Many of my students say they have read it two or three times already in other classes. Invariably, though, a student (usually an older one, and always female) says that the book still resonates today. Women are still struggling with the issues it raises. When I first read it as an undergrad, I couldn't exaclty relate to Edna, but I had this sense of foreshadowing, like this is what being a mom could be like. But it all seemed so remote, like this was how women in 1899 suffered. Surely women today suffered, but probably in different ways. Turns out, I have realized, not so different. So when I read the book again a year or so ago, I read it with new eyes. Edna made sense. And lately, she has really made sense. Of course, if she had had therapy and maybe antidepressants, she probably wouldn't have had to commit suicide. She also could have been spared that fate by the chance to get an education, to develop her talents, etc. Yet, the underlying problem, the fact that having children changes your life and opportunities forever, if you are a woman, has not changed. And this is what I find myself exploring in my writing these days.

Mothering Amid the Chaos

2006-04-07T14:22:00.000-05:00

I have been wanting to write about what it is like to be a mom in post-Katrina New Orleans. There is a lot of talk about how few families have come back and how the city is not fit for little kids. A colleague of mine who had a baby two months after Katrina did not come back because she didn’t want her daughter exposed to the hazards here. I certainly understood her fears. I wasn’t sure myself that I wanted to bring my daughter back here. It is getting better, but I still worry sometimes about the long-term effects of growing up in a disaster zone.

Everyday as we drive past downtown on our way home, my daughter points out the “big white thing” and asks what it is. When I tell her, she invariably responds, “I love Superdomes!” Of course, the rest of us can never hear that word again without recalling the unspeakable suffering that occurred there. Her innocence of all things Katrina is both soothing and poignant. Thank God she has no idea what happened there. But one day she will.

I am eternally grateful that I didn’t have to actively protect her from the images on CNN. In fact, I barely saw them myself in those early post-K days because I was so preoccupied with trying to care for her and figure out where the hell we were going to go. And then when we got to my mother’s, she didn’t have cable. So I listened to NPR and read the Washington Post, two news outlets that sheltered us both from the hysteria.

Because my daughter is only two and a half, I haven’t had to do much explaining about the past. But I do have to explain what she sees all around her. Everywhere we go we see men repairing roofs or work crews with bulldozers collecting debris. I told her a few times that a big storm came through while we were gone and that now people have to fix the buildings and homes. When we were still in our apartment, we were living in the midst of a construction zone. The day we came home to the sound of men hacking away at the roof above our heads, she was terrified and clung to me like a baby gibbon, so I gathered her up and ran out of the building with debris falling all around us.

While we were still living in the apartment in Metairie, I spent all of our free time when she wasn’t in school looking for un-hurricane-touched areas of the city to take her. We looked for a safe playground that wasn’t shadowed by a burned-out house and that had safe swings and slides. I cringed as we drove past brick buildings that were half rubble, massive piles of debris, uprooted trees, or other obvious signs of destruction. I wasn’t sure how to name these things that she wanted to know about. “What’s that?” she would ask. And I would answer, “That house is broken. They need to fix that, don’t they?”

In a recent issue of her school’s newsletter, an article about helping kids through disasters advised parents to focus on signs of rebuilding and rebirth. The idea is to help kids see that things can be fixed—to make them feel that we have control over our environment, I guess, which helps them feel secure. It makes sense. It took me a while to make that turn away from despairing over the destruction towards seeing signs of hope and renewal. And I still go back and forth. But in the mind of a small child, who doesn’t yet understand the concept of destruction and death, rebirth is a given, once you point it out. We talk about the men laying bricks or fixing traffic lights or re-roofing houses. She wants to know where all the cars are going on the freeway and I tell her they are going to work or school. So many of them are pick-up trucks with ladders and other equipment or bucket trucks from the electrical company or furniture delivery trucks. So we talk about all of that too.

How much of the city’s incessant process of rebuilding is she aware of? It is looking like it’s going to take years. It will be part of the world she grows up in. I hope we can create a better world than the one the hurricane washed away.

It's Just Stuff, Right?

2006-04-01T15:04:00.000-06:00

What was once considered a once-every-hundred-year event, namely a storm that could top the levees and flood New Orleans, is now, according to today’s paper, believed to be a once-every-25-years event. At least that’s what the experts are saying now about a Category 3 hurricane. Of course, Katrina, which was a Category 3, was not supposed to breach the levees, but it did because of their poor design and construction. Now the Army Corps of Engineers is recalculating not only how high the levees need to be, but they are also considering how frequently big storms will hit the area. Maybe it’s global warming, or maybe it’s what a hurricane specialist called a heightened period of hurricane activity in the Gulf, which is (only) supposed to last for another 15 to 20 years. But either way, the new odds suddenly look a lot higher.

The news in the paper hasn’t been real upbeat lately. There has been a lot of concern about how the levees are being fixed and whether the repairs will be sufficient for the next hurricane season, especially considering the system-wide deficiencies that have come to light. Everyone has been waiting on the new FEMA flood maps to see, basically, how low we have sunk since 1984 when the last maps were drawn. The release date for the maps has been pushed back quite a few times, and now we know why—the news is so much worse than anybody (except the scientists who study this stuff) thought. Now they won’t release the maps until Congress will guarantee about six billion dollars more (on top of the 3.9 billion, which was the total price tag to fix the levees just a few days ago) to make all of the levees high enough to keep this sinking region from flooding in a 100-year storm. If we can’t get the money, then all bets are off. We’ll all have to build our homes on mile-high stilts.

The good news out of all of this is that most of New Orleans (except the suburban sprawl in Eastern New Orleans, which was inundated by Katrina) is not affected by these new estimates. They are fixing the levees that broke last time and so, presumably, we’ll be okay. The worst news to me was the idea that another Katrina could occur within 25 years, and that estimates about hurricane activity in the Gulf keep getting more alarming. Before Katrina, our fears about being washed away were fairly vague. Now, however, they are real. It is no longer a remote possibility but part of our lived experience. That it could happen again seems everyday more and more likely. The unthinkable is just part of our lives now.

For some reason, I find myself more willing now to live with that threat. Maybe I’d rather face the devil I know, so to speak. He has shown himself and we know how to get out of his way if (and when) he comes again. But it is, of course, also unsettling to be building a new castle—with new stuff—on what is essentially sand.

Lately we have started accumulating new stuff in earnest. There are the new bookcases with glass doors and the antique French settee and two actual oil paintings. They were all purchased for a steal at a local consignment store, but they are special pieces. That’s what we have decided to buy now that we have the chance to start over. Before we had a house full of stuff that was tolerable but nothing special. You know how it happens. Over the years you pick up stuff as the need arises. It’s usually cheap and fits the immediate purpose. Before long it’s just taking up space. After a while you don’t even notice it much anymore. You look around one day and think, what is all this crap? And you move it out to the garage or give it to Goodwill or just live with it. That’s how we felt about most of our stuff that perished in the flood. We hardly even knew it was gone—except we didn’t have anyplace to sit down or put a drink or lay our heads. So now that we have the chance to start all over, we’d like to accumulate things that we actually choose, stuff that we want to have around us for the long haul. But what if there is no long haul? What if we’ve just bought a bunch of new things that this time we’ll actually miss?

All of this sounds pretty crazy, really—all of this stuff that we accumulate. It is just stuff. In the grand scheme of things, we kept telling ourselves after we lost it all, it really didn’t matter. So here we are now collecting more things to replace the old. I can be cavalier about it all. But I also have to think about all of the people who didn’t have insurance and who really can’t start the whole capitalist, materialist thing all over. Insurance is an amazing thing. It’s as expensive as hell here right now. But we couldn’t live here without it.

And I think about the minister I read about who was helping evacuees in Houston or Atlanta somewhere as they tried to put their lives back together. They had Red Cross debit cards and he lamented the fact that they were all going out to Walmart and coming home with a bunch of cheap stuff, buying new things, anything, just because they could. They didn’t really need all of the little gadgets and knick-knacks they were wasting their free money on. But maybe it’s built into our psyche to buy in times of distress. I ran into a friend at the consignment store that we have been frequently lately. “Isn’t this place great?” she said. “I love to come here. Buying new things is the only thing that makes me feel better these days.” It’s the silver lining to this tragedy that so many people from this area are experiencing. With insurance checks in the bank, it’s time to shop!

On a more serious note, though, it’s not just about stuff for us anymore. The other day during an afternoon with the kids at the zoo, a friend and I were talking about how much we love it here. I told her that this is the best house and neighborhood I have lived in since I was a kid. After years of wandering from Midwestern college towns to bland Southern suburbs, with too little income to purchase or furnish a place that I could really call “home,” we are now somewhere that we hope will be our home for a long time. She said she and her husband had always felt the same way about their home in Uptown, that this was it for them. But now it’s hard to say that because you don’t know how long it all will be here. We joked about how we hoped we could at least get a few more good years out of this place. I’d really hate to lose it all before we even had the chance to settle in and make some memories, to really feel at peace for a while after so much wandering and waiting for a place to call home.

A New Community

2006-03-23T13:47:00.000-06:00

I ventured out of my office today and walked across campus, something I rarely do. What I found strengthened my desire to stay in New Orleans. First of all, it is a beautiful breezy, sunny day. Then I also saw a sign that says “Criminology has moved to ED 226,” with ED 266 crossed out and “Houston” written in; a group of Indian men playing a game of cricket; a sign for the UNO Greens announcing a showing of the film “Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices”; and students of every race and ethnicity imaginable. There truly is no place like UNO right now.

In my composition class, we are discussing what kinds of communities New Orleans should be rebuilding, and the subject of who lives in these communities has inevitably come up, with most students saying they want to live around people just like them. We’ve been reading about “New Urbanism,” a design philosophy that stresses walkable, compact neighborhoods and diverse populations. The questions is, can you design the kind of “community” you want? Can you engineer diversity?

Universities do it, and with good reason. As I told them, I much prefer the diverse classrooms at UNO over the homogonous student body at the Big Ten university I was trained at. I love hearing from a student about how the Vietnamese community he grew up in that was destroyed by Katrina is being rebuilt; or how a student who lived in predominately white Chalmette went to school in the predominately African-American Ninth Ward; or a student of Middle Eastern descent who owns gas stations in black neighborhoods. This is part of what I love about my job and what I love about living in New Orleans.

After living in the white-flight suburb of Slidell for five years and yearning to go back to the comfortable but bland Midwest, I am quite happy now to be living in the heart of New Orleans, in an area called the Irish Channel, where Irish immigrant laborers settled around the turn of the last century and which is today characterized by a broad spectrum of incomes, races, and household types. Suddenly, I find we are living in precisely the kind of neighborhood the New Urbanists are trying (and often failing) to manufacture: it is traditional, diverse, walkable, and close-knit.

We moved into our new hosue last Friday, and within a couple of hours we had met five of our new neighbors. The whole five weeks we lived in Lakeview before the storm, we met only the two older sisters who lived next door. There the houses had alleys behind them and you drove up and parked your car and walked in the back door. We never had the chance to run into people, and many likely never even knew we were there. But here the houses are close together, everyone parks on the street (the homes were built before cars became the norm), and when you step out on your front porch you are immediately part of the neighborhood. People work in the little gardens in front of their stoops and hang out on their porches. It feels like Mayberry, but with a difference. There are gay and interracial couples as well as families with small kids. A block away are low-income apartments. The diversity of the neighborhood is typified by the kinds of shops on Magazine, a busy commercial street that runs through our neighborhood. Just one block away, nestled next to each other in the same building, are a tattoo parlor and a store that sells rare chandeliers. An A&P and a Walgreens sit next to a row of funky vintage clothing stores, coffee shops, and a wine bar.

I have never lived in a neighborhood or a city like this. And while I feel like I haven’t had a whole lot of agency in choosing where to live--we stayed in the region because we couldn’t find better jobs, and we chose this house because it was the best we could afford—I am happy with where we have landed. We fee like we are finally “home.” And there is even a sweet, affectionate kitty that looks a lot like a smaller, fluffier version of Jasper, who lives next door but makes frequent visits over to our yard and even inside the house.

Of course, we still have plenty of anxiety about the future of the city as hurricane season approaches. We are waiting for the next calamity to hit us. My husband and I have both had dreams about the house burning down. We will never again take our home and our community for granted. And we both feel as if we have finally found a home that we couldn’t stand to lose. I can sense us developing the kind of fierce attachment to place that is motivating so many New Orleanians to rescue their flooded neighborhoods. I think I finally know what is driving the passion to rebuild this city.

For Better or For Worse

2006-03-12T13:39:00.000-06:00

Last night was one of those magical New Orleans evenings. A rocking Cajun band, couples swirling around the dance floor, the moon shining over the bayou, food and drink flowing freely, and a beautiful bride and groom who brought people from all over the country to share their love for each other and this city.

The ceremony took place on a wide pedestrian bridge that spans Bayou St. John near City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art. My darling daughter was the flower girl and walked down the aisle, smiling and holding the hand of the ring bearer, a sweet little boy holding out his hand and announcing, “It’s raining.” (A few drops did not spoil the event, thankfully.) Her dress with blue flowers was a little too big and his pin-stripe suit was a little too small. They looked perfect together. And it was a miracle to me that they performed their job so beautifully, with a crowd of people on either side, standing and watching their every move. My shy little girl was beaming, and I had tears in my eyes.

Of course, she got a little restless during the ceremony, so my attention was a bit distracted. But it was a lovely tribute to the couple’s relationship and to the city’s recent hardships. The prayer included a plea for federal help, and a moment of silence was observed for those who lost their lives in the hurricane.

Beginning with that moment of silence, the evening got me thinking about so many people who are gone from New Orleans. In addition to the hundreds who died, thousands have moved away, most never to return. I have already mentioned our dear friends who have ended up in the D. C. area. But there are also many friends and colleagues who, it is becoming clear, will not come back. As I walk the halls of the Liberal Arts building on campus, I see the familiar names on office doors, and it is hard to believe they aren’t just sitting inside. From the outside of the building you even can see right through the windows into their offices, which look just as they left them back in August. In one, a book lays open, face-down on the desk, as if the owner will be right back to pick it up and start reading where she left off.

Last night was a reminder of our pre-Katrina lives because it brought together many old friends who have moved away, but all of them in the past year or so before the storm. I have often wondered what it must be like for those who got out before all hell broke loose. I know about ten people who happened to move on to greener pastures in the past two years. One of them told me she felt terribly guilty for leaving, a kind of survivor’s guilt. She had never planned to move away from New Orleans, but she had recently met a wonderful man and decided to join him in his home in Kentucky. Another colleague and his family decided to leave New Orleans because they didn’t want to raise their daughter here. They returned to the New Mexico desert, and he left academia. Certainly they have been thanking their lucky stars. Or do they credit their fortune to premonition?

Our friends who got married last night moved to Boston last Spring. Shortly after Katrina, they decided they would go ahead with their plans to get married back in New Orleans. Apparently, many were concerned about their choice. But they pulled it off beautifully, despite having to choose a new location as well as a new hotel when sites that were planning to re-open in time were not going to be ready. This was the first event since Katrina for the historical Pitot House, where the reception was held. It is a lovely Creole home with balconies, a front garden, and a large side-yard for the tent and tables and dance floor. It was a gorgeous evening, all captured by a photographer from the newspaper (who said he was more used to photographing dead people, a reference to his work during the aftermath of Katrina) and an artist who set up his easel and painted a large canvas with many of the evening’s elements: the bridge, the balconies, the moon, the bride’s long, flowing gown, even a little girl in a dress with a blue bow (our daughter).

Waiting in line for the bathroom, I heard one of the guests from California say that someone she told about her upcoming trip to New Orleans was shocked, as if she were making a trek into a war zone or a wasteland. I suppose this is the image much of the world still has of us. But everything last night contradicted such a picture. There was not a single reminder of the destruction. The fence had been repaired and the storm debris was long-gone. But underlying everything was this sense that what we were doing was momentous, not just for the couple but for the city as well. People from the surrounding neighborhoods came out to watch the ceremony on the bridge and the short second-line procession to the Pitot House. I’m sure they enjoyed the music emanating across the bayou, glad to see that another sign of life had returned. For now is again the time to celebrate and consecrate. A wedding is a beautiful beginning, and all of the New Orleanians there must have felt the promise it held for all for of us. For better or for worse, we are committing ourselves to this city. After years of flirting with New Orleans, I am finally ready to take the plunge.

A Successful Mardi Gras

2006-03-01T13:09:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, when we had dinner with a colleague and his family, he said he sensed a kind of strange euphoria in post-Katrina New Orleans. My husband and I had no idea what he was talking about. We still felt only confusion and despair. Now I think I know what he meant. It is the energy that made us want to settle in New Orleans again and that was on display for the whole world over the past few days.

The euphoria (he could think of no better word to describe it) that my colleague was trying to explain to us was a feeling of community spirit. It is as if everyone has returned from exile and is happy to be home, as battered as it is. Even having to wait at the post office every afternoon for his mail, he said, has become a neighborly activity rather than a nuisance. People are connecting in new ways as we all are suffering the same inconveniences and heartaches. More than that, though, everyone is relieved to find that New Orleans is still alive. Every small sign of renewal (another fast food restaurant re-opens, a magazine arrives in the mail, a street is cleared of debris, a traffic light is hooked up) is a sign of hope that New Orleans is rising from the ashes. And that is exactly what Mardi Gras was this year, a sure sign that the city and its heritage will live on.

There was some attempt to stir up a controversy on the cable news shows about whether or not New Orleans should have parades this year. And there was a lot of hand-wringing in the Times-Picayune from locals who wanted to make sure the national media didn’t just focus on Bourbon Street and wanted to let the world know that our spirit will not die. And it seems that, at least partially, the story did get out, finally, that Mardi Gras is not all “Girls Gone Wild.” The wildness in the French Quarter is conducted almost entirely by tourists, not locals. People who live here congregate along St. Charles Ave. and build seats on top of ladders for their little ones and put up tents for their families. Sure, people get drunk and occasionally a little out of control, especially as the parades extend into the evenings. But if you go earlier in the day and find a spot near the front to hoist up your kid so she can wave to the passing floats and catch some beads, well, there’s nothing like it.

This year, the parades and parties all had a Katrina theme, whether overtly or subtly. Waterlines were visible on floats. The paucity of marching bands reminded everyone of the school kids dispersed throughout the country. And the t-shirts with “Save NOLA” or “Willy Nagin and the Chocolate Factory” were out in force. Yesterday, as the whole city seemed to be in costume, blue tarps (used to cover damaged roofs) were the material of choice for hats and even jackets and gowns. One of the most popular costumes was the blind levee inspector, complete with walking stick.

A friend of ours told us a couple of months ago that Mardi Gras would be a watershed moment for New Orleans. If a shooting happened during a parade, the national media would write its obituary. But if the tourists came and spent enough money and the coverage was positive, the city could be on its way to recovery. All indications are that it was a successful Mardi Gras. I know my daughter, in her ballerina costume and beads, thought it was.

For a while there it did seem as if we were all hanging on by a thread. But the momentum is building. Parts of the city are definitely lagging behind. However, if you go to Uptown, where we are buying our new house, you can almost forget there was a Katrina. It is a lovely part of the city, the heart of New Orleans now, and it is definitely still beating.

It is strange how we have lived in the area for six years but never really felt like New Orleanians until now. I wear my “Save NOLA” t-shirt proudly. And I am ready to embrace life in the city. There was so much about pre-Katrina New Orleans that made it difficult for us to commit to this city. But now that the slate has been wiped clean, so to speak, there is so much promise. We want to be part of what makes this a better city than it was. Suddenly we are optimists, after so many months of death and destruction. Spring truly is around the corner. (But so is hurricane season. Shhh.)

Who Wants a "Normal" Childhood?

2006-02-22T12:19:00.000-06:00

My darling daughter surprised us by busting out the whole ABC song the other day. All of a sudden, she knows the alphabet. It is one of the those moments when you are thrilled and amazed at what your offspring is capable of. And, I have to say, it was a bit of a relief to have such positive evidence that she is growing and learning, even flourishing, in the midst of all the post-Katrina chaos.

One of our main concerns as we struggled with our decision about whether to stay or move away was what would be the best environment for her to grow up in. Of course, it seems obvious that life in a small Midwestern city would be healthier and safer. The schools are better, crime is lower, the environment is cleaner, and natural disasters are infrequent and more isolated. Plus, life is pretty damn “normal” up there compared to down here, and isn’t that what any parent wants for his/her child? But maybe “normal” is not what she needs most.

Right now she is falling in love with Mardi Gras. We have been to two parades, and she is hankering for more, which she will get this weekend. The parades start Thursday and don’t end until Fat Tuesday. Every time someone walks up to her and hands her a stuffed animal or throws a string of glittering beads from the top of a passing float, we get caught up in the magic of the moment. The whole bead-begging mania seemed pretty pointless to me before, but now the three of us glory in the whole event—the horses, the drums and horns, and the bright colors (but not so much the pre-pubescent girls thrusting their hips in tiny skirts).

New Orleans’ racial diversity (and tension), art and music and parades, architecture, and history, all make this such a unique place. I grew up feeling like I was not really a native of any particular place or culture. But my daughter could grow up as part of an authentic culture here. Is that enough of a benefit to risk her experiencing another hurricane? Of course, the thing about hurricanes is that you have the chance to get out of their way. So I don’t fear for our lives. But I do worry about my daughter having to experience all of this as an older child.

Right now, at two years old, she has been remarkably unaware of the turmoil. The seven-week evacuation and separation from her father was the hard part. Since we have been back together, and especially since she has been back in school, she is a happy little girl. She has never asked about the house or the cats, although she has missed one special friend. (And so do I. Her mom was fast becoming a very dear friend, and their absence is one of the saddest parts of this whole thing to me. They have since moved on to the D.C. area.) But she is making new friends and adapting quite well to the post-Katrina environment.

Although I have worried about her seeing so much destruction, what she seems to notice most are the rebuilding efforts. She is fascinated by all of the construction equipment we encounter every time we hit the road and the men she sees laying bricks or repairing roofs. Although I sometimes say, “women can fix things too,” when she talks about all of the “men working,” we very rarely see women in the work crews. Nevertheless, I hope she will one day be proud of her residency here and the fact that she was part of the rebirth of this one-of-kind city.

Mommyblogging

2006-02-15T13:11:00.000-06:00

I just read an interesting article on “mommybloggers” at Austinmama.com. Marrit Ingman addresses the issue of whether women should write (and publish) their thoughts and experiences as mothers. While writing can be therapy and help process the amazingly complex life mothers lead, blogging is also about community. And the community of women writing thoughtfully about motherhood out there is vibrant and empowering. It is wonderful to see so many women connecting and feeling emboldened in their analyses of how we raise children and how we treat mothers. What is the quote from Socrates? “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And why would motherhood be any less worthy of examination than any other life? It has been the most widely lived experience, but, sadly, the least examined. The time has come to look carefully and closely, and you simply can’t do that unless you take the time and care to craft the language to convey what you find. To say that mothers shouldn’t write about their experiences is to say they shouldn’t think or look. You might as well say they shouldn’t breathe.

A New Home

2006-02-15T12:19:00.000-06:00

I’m not quite sure how to say this, or how to explain it, but my family and I are buying a house—in New Orleans. It is a huge relief to have the weight of a decision off our shoulders. The limbo was killing us. And in a few quick hours on Monday, everything just fell into place and there we were, making a bid on a house and deciding to stay, despite the risk of another Katrina.

After months of going back and forth, sometimes changing our mind one day and then going back the next, we found ourselves last weekend thinking again about staying. We had been leaning towards leaving when an afternoon with friends and an evening at the first parade of the Mardi Gras season left us yearning to unpack our bags. Sunday we drove around and looked at a few houses (from the outside) and walked in Audubon Park and fed ducks while couples danced to swing music in a great gazebo built sometime in the early part of the last century. One house in particular caught our eye. It was a true New Orleans Victorian (a double shotgun converted to a single) a block away from the shops and restaurants on Magazine Street. It was priced right and, most importantly, is only a few blocks from the river, the highest point in the city. It was “high and dry” during Katrina and, presumably, would be again in another hurricane.

So we saw it on Monday at noon and knew instantly that if we were going to stay, we should not pass up this deal. It has loads of New Orleans charm—high ceilings, wood floors, painted medallions on the ceilings, exposed brick fireplaces—and was much cheaper than all of the other post-Katrina-priced houses we had seen. But were we ready to make the leap? Just that morning I had an interview with a school via video-conferencing and realized the job was not for me (it is a very small school, a freshman-sophomore campus, and I would be teaching almost all composition), plus my husband’s job prospects in the smallish city would be slim. But we still had hopes of returning to the Midwestern college town where we had lived before moving to New Orleans. So my husband made a quick call to the paper where he had worked and was hoping he could be rehired only to find out the region is in financial crisis and the paper might have to let people go. We suddenly realized, all viable prospects had been exhausted. In the space of a few hours, we had become New Orleanians again.

Now comes the fun and hard part of telling everyone we know. It is fun to tell people here. They are delighted we are staying. I suppose it is a sign of hope for them as well, that friends are restarting their lives here instead of pulling up stakes and moving on. But telling everyone “out there” is harder. How can we explain that after this most traumatic event and the seemingly grim prospects for the region we are reinvesting our money and our emotions, putting down roots in sinking soil, so to speak? I could say it is the magical pull of New Orleans—the music, the food, the culture, the parades, the revelry, the architecture, the friendliness of strangers, the scent of magnolias and jasmine, the beautiful weather in the winter. Or I could say it is our friends who have made this place home, and that the thought of starting all over somewhere else is daunting. But it is just as true that our jobs, as I have said all along, are holding us here. We may be risk-takers by staying and confronting future hurricanes, but we are not brave enough to risk un- or under-employment. We’ll take our chances with Mother Nature. And if she does hit us again, our new house will be insured against wind and flood (at reasonable rates, I am surprised to say, because the elevation is so high near the river).

So now, while I am sure I will continue to write about life in post-Katrina New Orleans and will rail at federal officials who are short-changing the region and local officials who are standing in the way of recovery, I hope that I can also move on to the kinds of issues that also affect me as a professor and a mother. It would be nice to reflect on other aspects of my life and let all of this take a back seat, to really get on with my life. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a more “normal” existence, at least until the next hurricane forms in the Gulf.

Off the Map

2006-02-04T15:24:00.000-06:00

A good friend of mine, who has been living with relatives in three different states for five long months, finally has a new home. She has landed with her husband and daughter in the D.C. area, where, she says, people don’t even bat an eye when she tells them they are from New Orleans. Not that they want attention or sympathy—they have had plenty of that—but they are surprised to see, even in our nation’s capitol, how completely people have moved on from Katrina.

I am heartened every time I hear a story on NPR or a cable news program about New Orleans. But it seems as if the stories are falling on deaf ears. Here, you cannot escape news of the recovery (or lack of one)--the catastrophically inadequate government response from the landfall of the storm up to the present, and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles that people here are facing as they rebuild their homes and their lives. I was surprised when we first came back at the end of October to see that every day the Times-Picayune’s front page and editorial page are almost all Katrina-related, every local television newscast is at least 75% about the aftermath of the storm, and even on the radio every other ad is about how “we are here to help you rebuild your lives.” And it is still like that. Here it is still all recovery all of the time. And you get so used to it that you can’t believe that everywhere else in the country people hear almost nothing about what is going on here. And Bush’s speech did nothing to change that.

A heartening message from a Massachusetts man appeared in the letters to the editors yesterday. He wrote: “Last weekend I visited the city. I was shocked to see how much has yet to be done. . . . It saddens me to see your city, so broken and so forgotten by the rest of the country. I implore you to keep New Orleans in the spotlight. Residents should jump in front of cameras, rush to talk to reporters and pressure those in charge not to forget you. I will continue to do what I can by writing to my senators. I want my tax money to go to the people of New Orleans and surrounding areas. Let's take care of our own."

I published an op-ed in the Times-Picayune in late November. It is sad to see how little we have progressed since then. The feeling we had then of being abandoned has only increased. And now as we approach Mardi Gras, the cameras will roll here. But will they show the suffering and desperation behind the revelry? I have written to all of the key Congressmen and Senators as well as President Bush, and have urged my friends and family to do the same. But that was months ago. Now where do we go from here? As the New York Times wrote today, “The sad fact is that New Orleans has all but dropped off the map of national priorities. Listening to President Bush's State of the Union address, one would be hard pressed to guess that one of America's greatest cities and the region around it had been laid to waste only five months earlier.”

After I published my op-ed, some people wrote to tell me that in this great country of ours, we have to learn to fend for ourselves. We can’t look to government to solve our problems. So the culture of right-wing aversion to public programs has come to this! We are so afraid of government that we will send a check to the Red Cross (which can provide only temporary assistance) but we won’t demand that our tax dollars help to rebuild one of the nation’s greatest cultural and historical treasures after the most destructive natural disaster and engineering blunder in our nation’s history.

As I write this, I can’t stop thinking about my dear colleague, a poet from Nigeria, who related his harrowing tale of escaping the floodwaters after Katrina. After being herded with thousands of others in various locations over a five-day period with no food, water, toilets, shoes, or medical care, he kept thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening here, in America. This is what leaders do [abandon you] in third world countries. And I have plenty of experience with third world countries,” he said. And he couldn’t believe that five months later, the city is still in the state of utter devastation that it is in—and this is America.

The State of Our Union

2006-02-01T20:16:00.000-06:00

Our house hunting in New Orleans came to a rather abrupt standstill about two weeks ago. I receive the occasional new listing via e-mail from our realtor, but we have decided not to make any sudden moves. All of our latent fears and worries came rushing to the surface the night we asked a friend visiting from Boston if we were crazy to be looking at a house that had come about an inch away from flooding. It looked like a cute little Arts-and-Crafts cottage with lots of exposed woodwork. But the water lines in the neighborhood were a good foot and a half high.

Our friend, who lived in New Orleans until last summer, asked us the question that put everything into perspective. “Aren’t you afraid it could happen again?” “Well, yeah.” “Because if this city floods again, it’s all over. New Orleans won’t get a dime from the government and the businesses will all be gone for good.” He was right. If the worst happens again anytime soon, it won’t matter how high the ground is under our new house. It will be an albatross around our neck.

The clincher for my husband came with the Sunday paper. Tax assessors have devalued properties that didn’t even flood from 15-50%! But if you buy a new house, you pay taxes on the sales price, which will be well above pre-Katrina prices. So you are carrying the tax burden for a city that is on the verge of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Uptown blue bloods with homes worth 1 million dollars are getting off scott free! Business as usual is only getting worse down here. If the slate is not going to be wiped clean, why should we put up with the crazy corruption here?

So we have decided to wait and see a while longer. I’m teaching again and life is taking on its own new rhythms. There is no emergency. We can stay put for a couple more months. But it amazes me how, five months after the storm, I still feel like we are on vacation, as if we’ll be home again soon. This isn’t real life, just a vacation from it. We still have only four plates and four bowls in the cupboard. I have only two bottles of spices in the pantry, and there is no bedspread on the bed or dressers to put our clothes in. Books are piled on the floor or in bags. So many things are just on hold until we are settled again. Like when you are on vacation, just getting by with the minimum for now.

A colleague of mine and I joked yesterday about how the constant refrain in New Orleans right now is “it could be worse.” When things are this bad, all you can really say to keep going is, “it could be worse.” And one of the secretaries told me she was surprised how calm things had been at the start of the semester. Usually the main office is a madhouse for the first week of classes. But it seems that we are all taking the myriad complications in stride, as if we didn’t expect anything to run smoothly. What is a scheduling snafu to a city-leveling hurricane? What is one more inconvenience piled onto the mountain of nuisance that characterizes our post-Katrina lives?

I’m sitting in Borders and a man walking by just said, “Not after the president’s speech last night. They don’t care about us.” Ouch! The front page of the paper said about the same this morning. I hope the rest of the country recognizes the glaring absence of Katrina in the State of the Union that was otherwise so laden with talk of compassion. Where is Bush’s compassion for the victims here? 1,500 people died in the greatest natural disaster of recent memory, and he barely said a word about it. Thankfully, I just heard Newsweek’s Howard Fineman say as much on Al Franken’s radio show. Bush has rejected the Baker plan, around which politicians and citizens of all stripes united as the most promising plan for getting New Orleans back on its feet. (It would help homeowner’s pay off their loans and move to higher ground.) But he has offered no alternative. He has already done enough, he seems to be saying.

The New York Times published an amazingly sympathetic and astute editorial on Monday that points out how Bush has failed New Orleans: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon1.html?th&emc=th

My freshman composition class will have a Katrina theme this semester. I am looking forward to discussing the issues with students and encouraging them to contribute to the conversation.

Seeing with Fresh Eyes

2006-01-30T14:32:00.000-06:00

What a crazy week and a half it’s been. First my daughter came down sick and then my dad came for a visit. All the while I was trying to prepare for classes, which start today. I think I am ready for my first class tomorrow. More or less. And I’ve missed writing my blog.

Having my dad here gave me a new perspective on post-Katrina New Orleans. I was looking forward to him coming and to having a witness, someone from our family to see what has actually happened here. As everyone says, you can’t imagine it until you see it for yourself. No pictures or written description can truly represent it. And I wanted someone from the outside world to verify, I guess, that this is real.

Watching him experience this apocalypse for the first time brought all of the emotional impact home to me again. As I’ve already mentioned, you get numb to it. It becomes almost normal. But as we drove through Lakeview, our old neighborhood, I could see it hitting him like a ton of bricks. “Oh my God,” he kept saying. “This is just so sad.” Block after block, mile after mile. He was overwhelmed. “This is all just so senseless,” he finally said. And then he said he’d had enough. I tried to get us out, but there were detours and traffic back-ups. So we ended up driving around quite a bit more and sitting in a line of cars as we attempted to make our final escape from devastation back to civilization. With no traffic lights working, cops were directing traffic and we had to wait a long time in front of a row of once-beautiful, now-blighted homes. He certainly got a good look.

Our tour was also more emotional because, while I had been showing him our immediate neighborhood, I spotted a gray tabby cat only a block and a half from the house where I had been searching for Jasper a couple of weeks ago. I stopped in the middle of the street and opened my door and called out his name. Then I pulled over and ran up to the yard. I didn’t get a real good look at the cat, but my first thought was, “this isn’t him.” He was afraid of me and ran under the house and I couldn’t coax him out. I’m pretty sure this was the cat that had been spotted and that I had been looking for. What a strange coincidence that I would drive by and see him. But I don’t believe it was Jasper. I just stood there and felt both sadness and relief. I don’t have to worry about him being out there anymore. But I also can’t hope of ever seeing him or holding him or stroking his silky fur again.

Driving around Lakeview with my dad made me relive all of the pain of loss once again. And now, as school starts, I will be driving through the general area every time I make my way to campus. The university is an island, surrounded by miles of death and destruction. Living out in Metairie, I can avoid driving through there. But now it will become part of my routine.

The next day, after my daughter’s nap, I got her and my dad into the car to head for the playground. Our favorite ones are in New Orleans, I told my dad as we pulled away. “Oh, I don’t want to go back there again,” he said. I tried to explain that we wouldn’t have to drive through Lakeview, but we would have to drive through some flooded areas. He was reluctant. I said, “Well, Dad, this is where we live. This is our world now. We can’t avoid it.” That really hit him. We ended up going to a playground in Metairie instead because the traffic to New Orleans was so bad. But the next day we headed in to go to the zoo. My husband wanted to take my dad on a tour of the destruction out in the Ninth Ward. Surprisingly, he said he wanted to go. I was right, he told me. This was our world now. And he wanted to see the worst of it.

We had a wonderful time at the zoo. It is a beautiful place, a true oasis in the sea of wreckage and ruin. We reveled in the bright green palm trees and the vibrant flamingoes and care-free carousel. Then we got back into the car when my daughter should have been tired and ready for her nap and headed out to the East. I was worried about her looking out the window and hoped she would sleep. But she didn’t. She didn’t look around much, though. Instead, she played with her stuffed bears and we listened to cheery children’s tunes, which formed an eerie soundtrack to our destruction tour.

I hadn’t been to the Ninth Ward before the storm. So seeing it now didn’t hit me as hard as other areas that I knew so well. But it was hard not to be dumbstruck. From the bridge we saw where the Industrial Canal had been breached and only splintered wood lay in heaps for blocks where homes once stood. It is hard to believe that anyone would think they could return and rebuild that area. The wood-frame homes were either obliterated or severely comprised.

As my dad said his goodbye’s yesterday, he looked at me with a penetrating gleam in his eyes and said, “Don’t worry. You guys will figure things out. It’s really depressing here, but don’t let it get you down. You guys will come out alright.” He felt the need to leave us with a ray of hope and a vote of confidence, I guess. We need that, of course. But more and more I am not looking to the city’s recovery for signs of hope. We have to make our own way. Because we can’t depend on the city to bounce back from this. It may never.

Stop the Insanity

2006-01-19T11:07:00.000-06:00

I’m not sure how much more of this roller coaster I can take. One day we have decided we are going to try to leave. The next we are deciding to stay. Literally. We simply can’t figure out what to do. And it’s driving me crazy.

What is making this all so unbearable is the fact that I have been in this limbo for years now. Every since my daughter was born I have been contemplating moving away from New Orleans, even if that meant a career change. A year and a half ago, as I prepared to go on the job market again, I wrote in a piece I submitted to the Chronicle of Higher Education: “There is this unspoken sense between my husband and myself that this is the year our fate will be sealed, and an even greater feeling on my part that my whole understanding of who I am will be determined by how I fare in this year's job market. Becoming a mom has radically altered not only my day-to-day life but also what my career means to me. Being a professor is both less important than giving my daughter the best opportunities in life and more important than ever as I try to hold on to a vital part of myself that I hope she will know and appreciate someday. A terrible choice may lie ahead yet.”

It was so frustrating to read that this morning and realize that I am still in the same place. The job market that year did seal our fate. My lack of success kept us here in New Orleans and made us victims of Katrina. But Katrina has thrown us right back where we were before. I’m getting ready to start teaching again, and I wonder how I will feel about my career once I am back in the classroom. Will I be willing to leave it? Or will I want to hang onto it enough to risk staying?

Of course, a lot of our decision making (or lack thereof) reflects the larger state the city is in. We read the paper every morning wondering, which way is New Orleans headed? The mayor’s now infamous comments during his laughable Martin Luther King Day speech have not inspired much confidence that the city can recover economically and will heal its racial wounds. Fortunately, Wynton Marsalis also spoke on MLK Day. Unfortunately, though, the media has not paid any attention to his inspirational remarks. The Times-Picayune published them today. Check them out. (I also recommend Chris Rose's hillaroius column about Nagin's speech.) Now if we can only get rid of Nagin (whom I generally respected until Monday) and find a true leader to lead us out of despondency and into the Promise Land.

Seize the Day

2006-01-16T14:22:00.000-06:00

Today is supposed to be our “Seize the Day” day. Seven years ago my husband and I were hit by a car while crossing the street. We both had leg surgeries and went through months of recovery. But we were very lucky. It was Martin Luther King Day, so it’s easy to remember. And every year as we think about King’s legacy and how he moved a nation forward, we also think about our own mortality.

This morning on Al Franken’s show I heard Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, who was there in Memphis with King when he was shot, talk about how King was almost killed years earlier (I didn’t know that, or had forgotten it) and how King spoke very movingly in his Mountain speech, the night before he was assassinated, about all that he would have missed if he had died then, including delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the National Mall in Washington. Then King said, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

We cannot all measure our lives against his. To inspire a mass movement, to give one’s life for the larger cause of human justice, and to still have the power almost forty years later to inspire people to make the most of their lives and to treat each other right, is beyond what most of us are capable of. Nevertheless, his example and his sacrifice beg us to walk through life with our eyes wide open, to remember that our time here is short, and to do what we can to make the world a better place.

So each year at this time I try to think about what kind of life we are living and how fulfilled I am by it. I inevitably return to the idea that I would like to be able to leave some kind of mark, not one of empty fame but of having contributed something worthwhile. I try to tell myself that teaching writing and literature is important work. Sometimes I think it is, like when students feel the sting of injustice and recognize their own prejudices when we read literature about race or gender. But teaching college doesn’t give you the opportunity to move students the way daily interaction with students on the high school level would. And writing to a select academic audience about the concept of “separate spheres” or the little-known literary history of minor nineteenth-century women writers feels rather like mumbling in your sleep compared to what King did with his ideas and words. I find myself yearning to speak to a larger audience. To be a part of the larger conversation going on in this country about parenting, women’s life choices, democracy, and opportunity. I am always talking to my composition students about how through the written word we can enter the debates we read about and become an active participant in the world of ideas. But as an academic, I feel I am limiting myself to a very small intellectual sphere, a “separate sphere” of professors and grad students who are often competing with each other more than participating in a conversation.

What has motivated so much of my work as an academic is the desire for recognition. The research grant, the Ph.D., the publication in a scholarly journal, the book contract with a distinguished university press, and tenure have all been feathers in my cap. But how much true satisfaction have they yielded? If I knew, as King did, that my days were numbered, would I be content with the work I had accomplished? Would I feel that I had done what I had been put here to do? That I had used my abilities to leave the world a better place? What the hell good is a talent if you use it only for personal gain?

Of course, none of these questions are new or unique. I have read the tormented musings of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a nineteenth-century writer, who feared that her desire to write and publish was motivated by selfishness. She came to the happy conclusion that God gave her the talent and the desire to write for a reason. And I have heard Ethan Canin recently say at a seminar that he doesn’t think fiction writing serves any social purpose, that he writes simply because it makes him happy. Of course, many of us in the audience tried to argue with him that what he did was valuable beyond his own pleasure, not because we were writers ourselves but because we taught literature and were trying to inspire in students the notion that stories matter.

I have to disagree with Canin in order to feel that I do have some purpose on this earth. For I have been nearly all of my life drawn to stories and know that my only real talents lie somewhere in the world of words. Our job is to figure out how to make something meaningful out of the talents we have and to share that meaning with the people around us, however large or small that circle is. And we will not die peacefully, and the world will not move forward, unless we first believe that we have something, however small, to contribute.

Having just read back through what I have written, I am surprised at where my thoughts have led me. I didn’t plant to sit down and write about “the meaning of life,” if that’s indeed what I’ve done. God forbid that any writer would sit down with that goal in mind. The very weightiness of the subject could throw you into a fit of writer’s block. But a blog seems to give you the opportunity to write about whatever pops into your head.

So I guess I can say that I have in some way “seized the day.” Usually, our “Seize the Day” day goes by with nothing more momentous that a trip to the grocery store and we feel like we have failed once again to do anything spontaneous or memorable. Today, it seems, will be no different. We are dangerously low on eggs, frozen pizza, and diapers.

But we have spent the last day or so having some very serious talks about our future, seriously hashing out what it is we want to do with our lives—where we will live, where our daughter will go to school and grow up, what work we will do, and how we can make a living. Like our accident, Katrina has given us the opportunity to reassess our lives. Seven years ago, we realized how lucky we were to have each other and how much we wanted to spend our lives together. So when I took the job in New Orleans (only 4 weeks or so after our accident), we knew it meant a new beginning, not an end, for us. Now are waiting to see what new beginning is in store for us this time.

No Sane Choice

2006-01-12T10:44:00.000-06:00

Believe it or not, I am going to look at a couple of houses in New Orleans this afternoon. Are we crazy? Last week I was so far away from even considering staying that I can’t believe we are starting to talk about it now. The fact that we are is prime evidence of the roller coaster of emotions that I think is typical of Katrina survivors. We tend to fluctuate wildly from one week to the next (or day even) as we try to make reasoned decisions about the direction of our lives. But the choices, if rationally considered, are not particularly appealing. No one course of action stands up and says “Hey, this is the sanest thing to do!” Instead, any decision we make will feel crazy. And so the emotional turmoil takes over. There is just no way to approach all of this rationally.

We would love to move back to the smallish Midwestern city we lived in before coming down here, but we’re not sure how to manage it. The main stumbling block is our jobs. If my husband was able to get a job with his former employer (and that’s still a big if) and we did make the move, we would immediately lose 50% of our income. And I’m not sure how I would be able to start earning again. What are my options, even? Freelance writing is certainly appealing but also so unpredictable. Adjunct teaching is so poorly paid and subject to semester-by-semester renewal. And then there’s the demoralizing lack of respect accorded adjuncts at most schools, even though most of them are recent Ph.D.’s struggling to find (and certainly qualified for) tenure-track positions. It’s a demoralizing position to be in.

So is feeling like you are not in control of your life. My husband and I have decent jobs, but they are in a city we don’t feel safe in (never have--but now, forget about it). And now we feel stuck. I’ve put myself out there repeatedly over the years and been shot down. My husband knows from co-workers’ experiences that the job market in journalism isn’t much rosier.

So maybe, we are starting to think, we should try to find a “high-and-dry” house in New Orleans and stop this awful state of limbo we are in. We also don’t know how much longer we can take living in our 700-suqare-foot, refrigerator-odor-infested apartment suitable more for college students than a family. But even our prospects here, financially speaking, don’t look so good. It is becoming clear from our own online hunting and a recent house search of some friends of ours that a decent 3-bedroom home in Uptown that didn’t receive any water will cost you about a half million dollars. Prices per square foot have gone up 75% in Uptown since Katrina. What’s a middle-class couple with a small child to do?

The houses I’m looking at today are in the Irish Channel (south of Magazine Street). It was a neighborhood in flux before the storm, and now, who knows? Probably the best move is just to wait and see how things will shake out for New Orleans. Maybe sellers will come to their senses and lower their asking prices. Maybe Bush and the Congress will come through with Category 5 levee protection and coastal restoration. Maybe the city will get behind the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s plan for rebuilding the city and real progress will begin. Maybe middle-income people who were flooded out will be able to afford new homes and will be able to stay. Maybe the schools will finally become places of learning instead of fear and ignorance. Maybe there will be a place for us here. Or maybe there won’t. But how long will we have to wait to find that out?

Raising Consciousness

2006-01-10T20:26:00.000-06:00

I have been reading Stephanie Wilkinson’s essay “Say You Want a Revolution? Why the Mother’s Movement Hasn’t Happened” in Brain, Child magazine. She ends the article by talking about consciousness raising and how this is the start of change. Her article focuses on mothers, but what about younger women?

This past fall I began teaching a course called “Images of Mothering,” which was aimed at helping students think about the larger issues involved in the transformation we undergo when we have children from woman or individual to “mother.” I assumed that mostly mothers would take the class (we have quite a few non-traditional students). But I was surprised to find that most of the students were young and far from becoming mothers. As we went around the class and introduced ourselves, I was thrilled by their diversity—of background, circumstances, and opinion. One even declared that she had no idea what this class was about (it was listed as Women’s Studies, Special Topics in the bulletin) and that she didn’t plan on ever becoming a mother. But she was game for an interesting semester. And so was I!

That first week had already become the most intense teaching experience I had had. After years of teaching composition and literature to only-sometimes-willing learners, now I was exploring “real” issues with students who knew that they were learning something that would affect their lives. Then Katrina struck. I only knew them for one week, but I hope I get to meet some of them again.

I will never know what we could have accomplished that semester. I only hope that I have the opportunity to teach the course again because I believe that young women should think about the issues involved in becoming a mother long before they actually embark on that journey. How much I would have appreciated the opportunity to do so.

I feel like, for the most part, I was just winging it, despite the fact that I had waited until I was 34, had a husband and was approaching tenure. Much of my anxiety focused not on how I would take care of this child, but how would I do all of these things at once? And when I was pregnant I looked for books or articles from women who had gone before me to help me figure it out. I found a few, but I have found even more since then. There has been this incredible explosion in mother-writing. I hope it doesn’t end anytime soon. For I think the women Wilkinson interviewed are right, that raising consciousness—among men to, for that matter—about the difficult “choices” women are confronted with is crucial to making a better world for our children.

So Many Stories

2006-01-06T10:52:00.000-06:00

My rekindled hope of finding Jasper has dwindled. I have been back every day, snooping around the abandoned neighborhood and calling out his name and leaving more food, which gets eaten. I have seen three cats, but no gray tabbies. And now they are tearing down the houses across the street from the house where a cat who looks like Jasper was spotted a few weeks ago. I can’t stake it out anymore, and I doubt the cat will even come back there. It is a noisy mess. And now I know what a demolished house looks like. It ain’t pretty. And it doesn’t smell pretty either.

But I have contacted Animal Rescue, which is still picking up stray animals, and they said they would look for him. So if he is alive, there is hope they will find him or that someone else will. If they scan his microchip, they can contact the shelter where we adopted him 8 years ago, and they will give them our number. But I need to stop hoping and searching. Driving over there and lurking around the ruins every morning has been an emotional odyssey.

On my forays into the area, though, I have met people from the neighborhood and have heard some interesting stories. The most remarkable was from a fireman, who pulled 80 people off their roofs the day after the storm. Now he and his family have moved back into his home. He had his three-year-old son with him. I couldn’t imagine bringing my daughter to that place. But his son has seen it all—he lives in the middle of it. I can’t stop thinking about what it must be like for them to live there. He said it is pretty eerie at night. There are no lights and everything is quiet except for the distant chirping of smoke alarms from vacant homes. But he is convinced Lakeview will come back and they are proud to be one the first who have returned. He said CNN was there to watch his kid open presented on Christmas. I drove by their house yesterday. It looked beautiful—green lawn, fresh paint, and landscaping. He did a lot of the work inside (they had 4 feet of water), so he was able to get it ready long before most others. Another man I met told me it will take another year before he can move back into his home. He also said that he stayed for the storm and retreated upstairs with his cat when the water filled the first story. When he was rescued they wouldn’t take the cat. So he and his son “found” a boat a week later and rowed it in to get the cat, who was still okay.

It was more than two weeks before the water had receded enough for my husband to drive up to our house. By then it was too late. We hadn’t thought about him trying to rescue our cats because we assumed they would have drowned right away. Now we are thinking that one of them probably did and was buried beneath all of the jumbled up furniture when the water receded, and that’s why we never found him. We still can’t imagine how one could have gotten out. The woman working at the shelter where we adopted him told me “you know, cats have nine lives.” And another woman I met said she found one of her cats as late as Thanksgiving, and she had no idea how he got out.

There are so many stories out there. You just walk up to anybody and ask them and they start pouring out their whole experience. At the playground, you compare stories with the other parents while the kids listen in. How many kids have been traumatized by all of this? How much does my two-year-old daughter process when she overhears my conversations?

As you walk around Lakeview it is especially easy to have such conversations as you stand right in the middle of ground zero. We know that we have the same pain to talk about. Most of the people there right now, though, are crews of workers, some local, I’m sure, but many not. You feel strange walking around the ruins of your old life as they look on.

Creating out of Chaos

2006-01-05T14:31:00.000-06:00

I wanted to share a beautiful essay I just read about the urge to create, called "Finding the Courage to Begin Again" by Amy L. Wink. I have been thinking a lot myself since the storm about my desire to write. Something clicked for me about four weeks after the storm when I read a review of E. L. Doctorow's new novel The March about General Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. This work recognized what so many other war novels did not, the reviewer contended, namely "the way that destruction transfigures, pulverizing established human communities and forcing the victims to recombine in new ones. . . . Yes, war is hell, and 'The March' affirms that truth, but . . . hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it's by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world. They have no [other] choice." These words came as a revelation to me. I had not yet begun to imagine the future. Yes, our lives would change. We would move on from this low point--if not to bigger and better things, at least to a normal life again. And an important part of that renewal for me is the urge to create out of the chaos. And I guess that's why I'm here now, blogging away, because I need to give shape to all of this. Amy Wink quotes Katherine Anne Porter: “Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, . . . but the work of the artist ... is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.” That's all we can do.

Searching for Jasper

2006-01-04T13:56:00.000-06:00

Yesterday for the first time in four months I bought a bag of cat food and a bag of treats. And now I sit outside of a house one and a half blocks from our old house, hoping that our cat, Jasper, will magically appear.

A feeding station has been set up here, and a woman leaving the food spotted a gray tabby and took a picture of him. It was blurry, but I could convince myself it was him. This woman saw a picture I had posted of Jasper on petfinder.com a couple of weeks after the storm. My husband had just been back to the house and thought Jasper could have gotten out because he found a window broken. We had assumed from the beginning that he and our other cat, Zephyr, had perished as the flood water came up. It was 11.5 feet, according to satellite imagery. But there were signs that the cats had lived on the floating furniture. The thought tortured us. If they were going to die, we had hoped they went quickly.

My husband did find the body of one cat. (He threw my daughter’s bean bag over it so we wouldn’t have to look at it, but I could still see a flattened, matted paw reaching out.) But we never found the other. We’re not sure which one died because they had the same coloring. But we think it was Zephyr. Jasper, we hoped, had escaped. The next time my husband went to the house, though, he discovered that the broken window was double paned and only one pane was broken. On many subsequent trips, however, we never found another body in the house, we assumed the worst--until last week when I received an e-mail from a woman who had spotted some gray tabbies in our old neighborhood, where she has been feeding many surviving cats.

I came out here the other day and was shocked to see how close to our old house one of the feeding stations was. The woman who had lived here happened to be here retrieving some things (what I can’t imagine--the contents are completely ruined). She told me she was here during the storm. I stared in disbelief at her squat, one-story home. It was raised about one foot off the ground. I asked her how she survived and she said she had climbed onto the roof with her 50-pound dog. I wanted to hear more, but all she would say was, “You can’t begin to imagine what it was like unless you were here.” It must have been harrowing for her to even come back here. It is hard enough to see what the floodwaters have left behind, but to have seen the water lapping up against your home and submerging the whole area, and to be climbing onto your roof . . . She’s right. I can’t know what it must have been like.

While I talked to her, a car full of tourists from France pulled up and came over to talk to us. They were very sympathetic and concerned. But it felt awkward having them gawk at our ruined lives. One of them stood across the street in front of a white house where the water lines are very visible and had his picture taken while he pointed at them, showing how the water reached well above his head. (They aren’t alone, of course. See this story about post-Katrina tours in New Orleans.)

The woman who survived the storm told me she had just seen a gray tabby cat run across the street about 15 minutes before. I walked up a driveway, into someone’s back yard, peered into their house, and began to call out “Jasper, here kitty kitty.” No response or movement. So I walked around the block, calling his name, peeking into yards and homes where there was no sign of life. Occasionally a car would drive by. More gawkers? I wondered. Did they see me with my hands cupped around my mouth? Did they hear me calling a pet’s name? Did they feel bad for me? Did I make them think about their own pets, which they may have lost?

In the mad rush to evacuate, my husband had said that we couldn’t bring the cats. Indeed, it would have been very difficult. Zephyr never would have come. He was too wild. But we could have gotten Jasper out. He was a very affectionate, friendly cat, but not a pushover or a demanding lap cat. He was strong and had real character. My dad, who has always hated cats, fell in love with him. So did we, the first time we saw him, at a pet shelter just after Christmas in 1997. He looked straight at us and made eye contact. We felt a real connection with him. We doted on him as if he were our first born. When our daughter was born two years ago, poor Jasper lost his prized position at the top of the totem pole.

From that day on, I’m sad to say, we never fully appreciated him. How many new parents neglect their beloved animals when a baby comes? New-born love is so all-consuming that there doesn’t seem to be much room for anyone or anything else, sometimes even a spouse.

And now as I search databases and make phone calls to rescue organizations, I know I am trying to allay my guilt—for leaving him behind and not loving him enough. My husband says he will be happy if we find Jasper; he will be king of the hill for a long time. But he never wants to get another. I suppose we don’t really deserve one.

Strangely, my daughter doesn’t remember the cats. She loved them (although they only tolerated her), but how quickly they faded from her two-year-old memory. Someday we’ll have to explain, though, because there are plenty of pictures to remind us of them.

Returning to Disaster Land

2006-01-02T07:45:00.000-06:00

Returning to New Orleans after a week and a half in beautiful, debris-free Maryland, has felt a little like stepping out of your warm, cozy home into a blustery storm. I had been bracing myself for my reimmersion into this alternate universe that feels even more disconnected from the rest of the country than it did before the storm. But it has been both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in my journal about how I wondered if I would feel guilty about moving away from New Orleans, or if life in a peaceful, normal city would ever feel “normal” again. I wrote, “Would it be hard for us to go back up North? Could it be like a soldier who returns from war and can no longer look at the green lawns and noisy school yards in the same way? Of course it wouldn’t be quite like that. But I can imagine it feeling strange, almost like we don’t deserve it or as if it is a mirage. Sure, I crave a peaceful, stable life without storm debris lining the curbs, buildings crumbling, men hovering on every other roof (to repair them), Humvees roaming the streets, and every conversation being about FEMA or insurance or how many feet of water you had. But it might also not feel right if we suddenly had nothing more troubling to confront than a barking dog past midnight or the choice of a paint color for our new house. Is it right to live in virtual luxury—even the middle-class kind—when so many are struggling to rebuild this city that was our home? Is it right for us to escape the struggle that is going on here to retreat to a ‘normal life’ in the Midwest?” After my trip to Maryland I can see how much I crave the life the rest of the country is living right now. I was gone long enough that this place started to seem surreal again. How long before it reasserts itself in my mind as “reality”?

My return to disaster land was made even more surreal when I went into the belly of the beast yesterday. I drove through our old neighborhood, now a wasteland that feels as if its inhabitants have been vaporized. Every house is vacant and either stripped to the studs or left to rot. I have seen this all enough times that it even started seeming normal to me. But when I drove up our old street, I was shocked to see nothing but a gaping hole where our house once stood. We sold the house to a developer two weeks ago and knew he would tear it down, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Here was our old street, which we were only just beginning to settle into when Katrina struck, but our existence had been removed from it. Where once our home with the accumulated possessions of thirty-plus years stood, there was now only dirt. There were no trees, grass, concrete driveway, or brick sidewalk. Nothing had been left behind except for a beat-up washer and dryer on the curb. After a few moments of disbelief and a long, cathartic cry in the car, I got out to look closer. All I could find were a few of my husband’s baseball cards, a fragment of my computer’s hard drive, and a teaspoon in the dirt.

Until I had to confront its absence, I didn’t realize how much I had been holding onto that home, even though we had known for months it was unsalvagable and we would not feel safe rebuilding it. Many nights while I lay in bed, I couldn’t get the image of it out my head. I knew that only a few miles from here stood a vacant shell filled with the rotting, stinking remains of our life. I walked through it in my mind, passing over the overturned furniture, the boxes that were never unpacked, my daughter’s toys, the newspapers, kitchen paraphernalia, artwork, tv’s, CD’s, and my books, oh my books, hundreds of them. All of it was brown, covered in mud and flies, and emanating a stench that first hit you out on the curb and overpowered you by the time you entered the house. Markings spray-painted on the outside by rescue workers, broken windows, brown trees, twisted plants, black mold growing up the walls, slick mud covering the floor all marched through my mind when I couldn’t sleep. Then the things I couldn’t find but knew were there somewhere, buried under a pile of furniture or tucked away in a closet made inaccessible by a stray dresser, like the stuffed animal I loved as a child, or the photo albums containing indispensable memories, or my daughter’s baby book, or the computer with years of scholarly work on its hard drive.

Now that it is has all disappeared, I feel not merely sorrow at what we have lost. That feeling has been lying just under my rib cage for months now, making it difficult to breathe sometimes. But I think I feel lighter, able to inhale more deeply. It’s all gone, as if it never existed, which is easier to bear than knowing it is still there and slowly rotting away. Now I hope we can move on. I know I am ready to turn over the calendar and start anew.

How Hard Can It Be to Get a Job as a Professor?

2005-12-30T14:39:00.000-06:00

So what the hell am I still doing in New Orleans? Like I said, my husband and I still have jobs here. But what I really want to explain is why, despite searching for a new job for four years, I haven't been able to leave. The short answer is: the job market in academia, particularly in the humanities, is, well, take your pick: insane, outrageous, senseless, just too damn difficult.

The statistics are embarrassing for anyone who has foolishly thrown themselves into the fray, hoping that they will buck the odds. According to a Modern Language Association report, the percentage of Ph.D. graduates in 2001 who captured tenure-track positions was 42.9%. And you know the 56% who didn't get jobs will be out there again next year. And this is how it goes, year after year. There is a kind of snowball effect. "But aren't the baby boomer professors retiring?" my mom reasonably, but naively, asked me once. So I explained that many of those retiring are being replaced by part-time adjuncts because state legislators have decimated public university budgets. I know it seems incredulous to anyone outside of academia, but, as I have been informed by job search committees, hundreds of applicants apply for each position. And there are definitely not hundreds of positions to go around. Each year, there have been between 20 and 30 jobs in my field to apply for.

Trying to get a tenure-track job feels like trying to break into Hollywood, except you have to spend years of mind-bendingly hard work and tens of thousands of dollars to get a Ph.D. first. Then you slave away scouring the job ads, crafting your job letter and fine-tuning your vita, begging people (preferably big names) to write you recommendations, and mailing dozens of packets out to schools all over the country. Then you wait for your existence and, hopefully, your brilliance to be recognized. First come the Affirmative Action postcards to fill out, which you throw away because you have no minority status to report (and God don't you wish you did), then requests for your letters and writing samples, which also take weeks to get into shape, so you'd better have them ready beforehand, preferably in a variety of lengths. You might also be asked to submit a teaching philosophy, which is damned hard to write so that it doesn't sound like vague B.S. along the lines of the freshman essays you abhor grading.

Then during those first weeks of December you wait for the phone to ring as if you have been taken out on a first date and are dying for the handsome, mysterious stranger to take you out again. When he doesn't call, your despair is far greater than one little date would warrant. But when he does call, you start planning your wedding, re: your move to the most idyllic little town with an ivy-covered campus and a nice office for you overlooking the quad. The problem is, however, that this is just another date, and you are still many months and hurdles away from monogamy.

Having been through this process a total of four times, it is strange to say that my first foray, when I had the least to offer a department in terms of experience and knowledge, was the most successful. I was still finishing my dissertation, and I only landed one MLA interview. Miraculously, I was offered the job, but not until February. (The following year one of my colleagues told me I had been their third choice after two very advanced candidates. One even had a book coming out.)

After sitting out for a year, I decided to try again and did a very limited search. No interviews. The following year, I was pregnant and due on Sep. 30, just before the deadlines begin. But I wanted to apply for jobs in the Midwest, having decided that I wanted my daughter to grow up there and not in Louisiana. Only three jobs in my field fit the bill, so I did a very limited search that year. I ended up with one MLA interview again and then landed one of three campus interviews. (The story of what it was like to leave my breastfeeding three-month-old on those two occasions will have to wait for another entry.) I still ache at the thought of that lost opportunity. That was the real deal.

Last year, my book had just been published by a highly regarded university press and I had managed to get a letter of recommendation from one of the scholarly gods from Harvard. This was going to be my year to land a better job in a saner place to live! And the clock was ticking. I was also up for tenure and knew that this was my last chance to get out. Once you have tenure, you are no longer marketable because 95% of the advertised positions are entry-level. What I didn't realize was how hard it is to convince a search committee that you aren't damaged goods because you want to leave one tenure-track position for another.

I ended up with a surprising but gratifying five interviews. But there the courtship ended. No fireworks. One interview was embarrassingly awkward as a professor began by joking about my seat being wired to shock me. Another was very warm and felt like true love but was apparently all show. (One of the committee members later told me they went with someone else who was a better "fit," that vague quantifier ubiquitous in the academic job market). Another was nice but groggy at 8 in the morning. One, for which I had been told I was one of their top candidates, went well until a professor said she couldn't imagine why I would want to leave New Orleans and I had a difficult time convincing these snow-bound Midwesterners that life in the Big Easy was anything but easy. The fifth and last was congenial and refreshingly frank as they explained to me how cash-strapped their institution was and how difficult it was to cater to their ill-prepared students. Although this school later called my references, I pulled out, knowing that a move to this school, which sounded a lot like where I already was, wasn't worth the upheaval to my family. In retrospect, it would have been. We would be living in a safe place, closer to family, and I would still be employed as a professor. Now, four months after Katrina, that job is looking pretty good.

Instead, however, I got tenure by a unanimous vote of my colleagues, and my husband and I decided to make our lives in New Orleans. We bought a new house in a great neighborhood and prepared to embrace all that the city had to offer. We gave up on our dreams of returning to the Midwest and decided that life was pretty good. We had it all, we realized, and we stopped looking at the seemingly greener grass over the fence. We both had good jobs and many good friends, and a new home for our daughter to grow up in. Then came Aug. 29.

One of my first thoughts after I learned of the loss of our home and the flooding of New Orleans, a realization that literally made me sit up in bed, was that this would likely be the end of my career. But in the following weeks, I did what I swore I would never do again. I dusted of my C.V. and rounded up my letters of recommendation and wrote a new job letter. This year, no one would wonder why I wanted to leave. And many friends predicted that search committees would have sympathy for displaced New Orleans faculty. Apparently not. I was supposed to be spending this week between Christmas and New Year's Eve at MLA interviewing for jobs. Instead, I moped around my mother's house and decided to start this blog.

At a Crossroads in New Orleans

2005-12-29T13:59:00.000-06:00

Probably the main reason that I have decided to take up blogging is that I find myself approaching a crossroads right now. Katrina has irrevocably changed the lives of thousands, and my family and I are no different. So many were uprooted and tossed across the country and now find themselves starting over somewhere new. We have decided to go back for now, but it is unclear how long we will stay. Many of our friends who have not left are considering major, life-altering moves. We are all just taking a little longer to do it.

My husband stayed through the whole ordeal, and I have since returned to a ruined city, in order to keep working. While so many have lost their jobs, we are very lucky to still have ours. Without deep roots in New Orleans, our jobs are keeping us there for now. But for how long?

They say you either love New Orleans or you hate it, but the real feelings are more complicated than that. People who have grown up there have a deep attachment to the city. They are the ones you hear on the news saying without skipping a beat that they will rebuild New Orleans bigger and better, whatever it takes. Those of us who have moved to the city from elsewhere tend to be more divided--and we were before the storm as well. Sure, there are some who jumped right in and soaked up every experience they could. Others, such as myself, were more reluctant to embrace the city. My husband and I loved the culture, music, food, and people, but couldn't get past the crime, the corruption, the appalling schools, and the stark stratification between rich and poor. And, of course, there was always the threat of hurricanes. I have to say that for me, the fear of rising water made it impossible for me to ever feel safe there.

When I moved to New Orleans from the Midwest six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I accepted a job as an English profressor without even visiting the city. Jobs in my field are so scarce that I did not have the luxury of weighing my decision. This was my one opportunity for the holy grail of academic positions--a tenure-track job. The fact that the department was not paying for campus visits was my first clue to the city's and the university's poverty. The second red flag was raised during my interview when the chair of the department asked if I'd ever been to New Orleans. "No, but I've only heard good things about it," I said cheerily. ("Be upbeat about everything" was the mantra I had learned while preparing for interviews.) One of the committee members shot me a surprised look and mumbled, "Oh really? I could tell you a few things." But the chair quickly changed the subject. Those words have rung in my ears ever since.

Shortly after I arrived, the two junior members of the department filled me in. They took me out to dinner and what ensued can only be called a form of hazing. I heard every outrageous story imaginable--some about the department but many about this city that had become my new home. There were the crumbling schools with no air conditioning despite the subtropical climate, the highest murder rate in the country, the third-world living conditions, the constant muggings at gun-point, the ubiquitous rats and flying roaches. Last, but not least, I was informed of what all of America now knows, the rapidly disappearing marsh lands south of the city and the increased threat of hurricanes. "They say that if the 'big one' comes straight up the river and hits New Orleans the city will be wiped out," one of them told me. By the end of the evening, I could only laugh at their increasingly shocking stories. I couldn't believe the state they had worked themselves into. Surely these two are depressives who need help, I told myself. Really, I was not ready to hear their dire tales. I wanted to look on the bright side as I settled into my new home. But within three months I was battling flying cockroaches (they call them palmetto bugs, but they are nothing but cockroaches), my hubcaps had been stolen, and everyone I knew had verified my worst fear: that I was indeed living in a city that could any day be wiped off the face of the map.

When my husband got a good job with the paper the following Spring, we bought a house north of the lake about 40 minutes from the city. His new job required that he live in the community he was covering. We were happy to be together, but it felt like exile. While thousands of white folks had moved there over the years, fleeing the city's problems and many motivated by racism, we wanted to go the other direction. This was the kind of strip-mall suburb that was safe but mind-numbingly bland. We might as well have been living anywhere else in America. It feel light-years away from the unique culture that New Orleans had to offer. But we stayed put for five years, waiting to see if we could get out of Louisiana all together.

Within months of moving into our home, which was just above sea level, we experienced our first tropical storm (Allison). We woke up in the middle of the night to the most frightening sound I had ever heard--I can only describe it as Niagra Falls pouring straight onto our roof. We got up to look outside and found that our backyard had become a lake. Soon water began seeping in along the back wall. We frantically gathered towels and stuffed them against the walls. They soaked through almost immediately and we yelled at each other for more. But it was hopeless to try to stop the insidious seepage. And, of course, what we could see happening in the bathroom, we soon realized, was happening all along the back of the house, including under the rug in the living room. We were lucky. The water stopped coming and only the rug was ruined. But that night taught me how vulnerable we were, in a one-story home on the Gulf Coast that had supposedly never flooded before. Every year from June to November, I could never feel safe. And how can you make a life for yourself and your family if you are always waiting to be washed away? How can you raise a family and plan for the future if you are living with that kind of fear? The only way you can is to learn to ignore it. Many are still doing just that. But I no longer can.

An Admittedly Timid Beginning

2005-12-28T21:13:00.000-06:00

I should have started this blog months ago, as the news that Katrina had swept away our lives began to filter through my evacuation haze. But I wasn't convinced then, in the midst of so much suffering, that I had anything much to say. Our story was like thousands of others, it seemed. But now I can't resist any longer. There is so much to say--about life in post-K New Orleans, trying to be a good mom in the midst of so much uncertainty, and figuring out what the hell to do with my life and our family.

I'm not sure if blogging is for me. I have only recently discovered the medium. But I'd like to give it a try. Writing in a journal feels so secret and so futile. You shamefully allow yourself once in a while to imagine someone reading it someday, perhaps after you are a famous writer. Or, more likely, your kid will be eager one day to discover who you used to be. But all my journals are gone now, a soggy mess in the bowels of my mold-infested home. Who I was as a college senior or a high school exchange student is gone forever. Fortunately, though, I did have the foresight during our evacuation to call my husband and ask him to get my most recent journal and put it on a high shelf in the closet. It got wet but didn't sit in fetid water for weeks, so it is salvageable. It reeks and the ink has bled a bit. But it is legible. It is in a zip-loc bag in the freezer for now, my attempt at mold remediation. In a few months I can take it out and maybe I'll have the time to read through it and even type it up. It is the journal I kept when I was pregnant with my daughter (now two) and in the months after her birth. It is a record of the most important period of my life, and I am grateful to have it.

But having lost so many ideas, so many parts of myself, in those soggy journals, I find that simply starting a new one (which I have done) is not enough. I have been sending op-ed pieces to papers (one was printed) and writing more pieces with an eye to publishing them. But I feel some urgency, some need to get these things out of me and onto the page, some page, any page. So here it is. My first blog entry. Let the blogging begin!