As many of you know, I grew up in New Orleans, so Katrina has been a bit hard for me. Of course, my regret for the loss of the city of my childhood has seemed inconsequential in the faces of the people still trapped in the city. Those who are suffering, looting, and standing on their roofs deserve everyone's attention, so I've neglected to say much about how I feel. However, I found a very well written pieve in the Guardian that I think captures some of what was lost.
Richard Ford on the tragedy of New Orleans:
For those away from New Orleans - most all of us - in this week of tears and wrenching, words fail. Somehow our heart's reach comes short and we've been left with an aching, pointless inwardness. 'All memory resolves itself in gaze,' poet Richard Hugo wrote once about another town that died. Empathy is what we long for - not sadness for a house we own, or owned once, now swept away. Not even for the felt miracle of two wide-eyed children whirled upward into a helicopter as if into clouds. We want more than that, even at this painful long distance: we want to project our feeling parts straight into the life of a woman standing waist-deep in a glistening toxic current with a whole city's possessions all floating about, her own belongings in a white plastic bag, and who has no particular reason for hope, and so is just staring up. We would all give her hope. Comfort. A part of ourselves. Perform an act of renewal. It's hard to make sense of this, we say. But it makes sense. Making sense just doesn't help.
...
It is - New Orleans is - a city foremost for special projections, for the things you can't do, see, think, consume, feel, forget up in Jackson or Little Rock or home in Topeka. 'We're at the jumping-off place,' Miss Welty wrote. This was about Plaquemines, just across the river. It is - New Orleans - the place where the firm ground ceases and the unsound footing begins. A certain kind of person likes such a place. A certain kind of person wants to go there and never leave.
And there are the streetcars (or there were). And there are the oak trees and the lovely French boulevards and stately, rich men's houses.
...
Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.
And I think for me, the moment when this all hit me squarely was just a couple days afterward, when standing at Walmart, some blackberries caught my eye, and I said, "I used to have a blackberry bush in my backyard," and as I said those words I realized that that same bush, if it's still there is underwater.
