As with most everyone, New Orleans and Mississippi have been on my mind so much this week. It feels wrong to be able to walk around a dry, clean, warm home, where your precious family photos have not been ruined, where your pets lounge oblivious, to be able to drive to a nearby grocery store where everything is fresh and available and you could almost -- almost -- convince yourself that it was all a bad dream.
It's weird to be 3,000 miles away but to still be able to picture so clearly standing last May in Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. I remember waiting for Sue to get out of the bathroom and being kind of crammed into the kitchen, watching as waiters and waitresses rushed back and forth, watching them set plates of hot beignets under this funky machine. They'd pull a lever and --shoom! -- a blizzard of powdered sugar would fall out of the machine, dousing the beignets, the plate, and everything in sight. You just knew that this went on, hour after hour, day after day, feeding the tourists and the occasional local, and that it was one of those places that never changed.
In what feels now like a scary premonition, their Web site notes "The Cafe is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It closes only on Christmas Day and on the day an occasional Hurricane passes too close to New Orleans." In one of the few heartening notes in this whole grim house of horrors, it looks like Cafe du Monde has survived. Like New Orleans itself, it's unclear what it's future is, but it has survived. Most of the French Quarter seems fairly well-off, in fact, with a tiny guard of locals has battened down there and is hanging on, living all by themselves in what was two weeks ago one of the busiest neighborhoods in American touristdom.
"What has happened down here is the wind has changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, 'Little fat man, isn't it a shame what the river has done
To this poor crackers' land'. . ."
--"Louisiana 1927," Randy Newman
Thanks to Poe for the lyrics.
1 comment:
I grew up in Southwest Louisiana (Lake Charles), so, when we wanted to take a shortish trip, New Orleans was a destiantion. In high school, my family usually made a weekend of the Tulane/USL (now UL-Lafayette) game.
Cafe du Monde, and really that whole Jackson Square aread, is what I often think of when I think of New Orleans. Now that I live in Ohio, when people ask where to go, that's where I send them. It's where my wife developed her love of beignets (the donuts they serve).
I hope, when things have settled down and rebuilt a bit in a few years, I can have a cool spring morning with my wife and daughter there. Take the trolly to Jackson Square, and have beignets and cafe au lait. We'll walk around the square, pop into the kite store, and watch the sidewalk artists paint.
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