I went on a field trip yesterday, really a wild goose chase that bore no fruit.  It led me to the neighborhood I grew up in.  The area was very badly damaged by Katrina.  As I drove toward my old address, I passed the hospital I was born in, the library I used to spend hours in, street names that immediately reminded me of my childhood.  Simultaneously, everything, all I remember, was different.  But the same.  The buildings are, for the most part, still there.  But most are no longer what they were when I moved away over 15 years ago.

So as I was driving not recognizing a thing, I was turning on the streets without having to look at signs.  I know that area like the back of my hand.  I always will.  And it was the oddest emotional mixture being reminded of dance lessons and summer school and swim lessons and the house that kept their glass Christmas tree in their front show window all year ’round while at the same time seeing just the skeleton of those memories.  The neighborhood is still raw, exposed, vulnerable.  It’s like someone took a huge swath of duct tape and stuck it on all the surfaces and then YANKED.  Underneath it all, it is what I remember, the past.  But on the surface, what is the current, real situation is destruction and slowness of recovery.

The Catholic Church that was right down my street, that housed my Catholic grammar school, is in good shape.  They obviously worked to get it re-opened.  It looks different.  Again, the buildings are the same, but there was a new street and new paint that changed the appearance.  It no longer felt like “my” school.

Then I turned on my old street.  And I got butterflies in my stomach.  I remembered so much!  Our friends’ homes; the house of the cranky old man who had a hook instead of a hand (he was a fireman and lost it in a fire and was very bitter about it); the big house with the fountain in the center that we’d go through as it was being built; the house of the architect and his family–he built it off his own design ala Mike Brady; the houses surrounding my old house that house more memories than I could maintain in the moment.

And for each house that had been worked on and had a car in front, four houses were still empty with the tell-tale watermark and spray-painted “X” on the wall.  Some had painted over the “X” but when your house is brick, paint is hard to cover.  The one bright spot was that there was a car in the driveway of my old house.  It wasn’t a vacant, forgotten house.  It had no watermark.  It looked surprisingly like we left it, even down to a sticker we left on a small window in the front.  That sticker!  I have a shrinky-dink of that sticker in some box somewhere.

I do not think a single neighbor from 15 years ago still lives there.  The empty lot across the street had a “new” house on it.  It was vacant all those years we lived there.  It had been flooded, and the For Sale sign had a Mississippi phone number.  Another NOLA ex pat.

I pulled away and drove the block and a half to the location of my first job–a hardware store.  It is still open.  Just after Katrina, when we were still rather numb but functioning, I recall being at the corner of my street heading to drive to Baton Rouge (an hour away) to go to the temporary office my firm had set up.  On the local talk radio was a familiar voice.  My first boss.  He was pleading for help in getting electricity back on at the shop so he could sell, you know, HARDWARE to folks that needed it desperately. I almost cried when I heard his voice.  I had been thinking about him, the store, the old neighborhood, knowing it had been hit hard.  But he is tough and survived and was fighting to get back on line.  It was the first real sign to me that the city WOULD recover.  Because of the business owners like him that just wouldn’t walk away and would make it go even with no help from our government (fed, state or local).

I walked into the store yesterday.  He’d expanded the ol’ place.  One of the doors was boarded.  The front desk has a watermark a foot high.  I sneaked to the back and saw him doing something so typical–bending over a lawnmower with a wrench.  He sharpens chainsaw, lawnmower, and edger blades and fixes their motors, too.  He looked up and said, “Can I hep ya… [then he recognized me] … Girl, get over here and give me a hug!” And we embraced. And caught up on the last five years, focusing mainly on his recent heart surgery and his troubles post-Katrina.

He was like a second father to me back when I worked for him.  Two of my brothers worked for him before me.  And his key employee is the same as it was 15 years ago.  And many of her siblings worked there over the years too.  It is a quintessential family joint.

Damn. Writing this is getting to me.  I titled this post before I started writing it.  And I realize I am wrong.  My home wasn’t that house.  It was the people that housed my life back then.  And many are relocated but still around.  And seeing my old boss, my dear friend, WAS going home, at least a little bit.

The loss and devastation currently playing out in Myanmar cannot but remind us here in New Orleans of Hurricane Katrina.  I’ve previously mentioned the loss of my grandparent’s fishing camp in Katrina.  This was a colossal building — two stories, over 3,000 square feet, exterior walls all cinder blocks.  But not all was lost.  In the rubble was this:

This elephant lamp was on the second floor.  How it survived in one piece, I can only imagine.  The only thing more remarkable than its survival was that an identical black elephant lamp in another second-story bedroom of the camp also survived in one piece.

We recovered both lamps.  My grandfather took them home and cleaned and rewired them.  The black one went to my aunt, and the green one came to live with me:

If you shake him, you will hear one large, very solid clump of mud rattling inside.  My grandfather, try as he might, could not break down and remove that last clump of evidence of Katrina from the elephant.  I am kinda glad he couldn’t.

I keep thinking of my grandparents fishing camp in Hopedale.  I still think of it as existing, as housing chiffarobes and roll-a-way beds, crab nets and fishing poles, seafood pots and Styrofoam beer huggies.  I can still see the spot of kitchen floor tile that sank as a result of Hurricane Betsy.  I spent two weeks a year as a youth fitting my foot in that pitting.  I’ll even still smell it from time to time–a stale briny scent.

My 88 year old grandfather does not miss his camp.  Prior to Katrina, it was needing a lot of work and in many ways was more of a burden than a joy to him.  I wish there were more pictures of it.  I wish the pictures that were in it when Katrina hit were with us now.

When I have trouble sleeping, I imagine myself back at the camp.  I let the pitch-darkness envelope me and then I listen for the drone of the a/c window unit.

I guess what I am saying is that although things are overall better for me, I am still feeling out of sorts.  I am having trouble concentrating–reading, knitting, getting things ready for a visit from my in-laws this weekend (which I am excited about)–and feel tired all the time.  I don’t feel depressed, but it sure sounds like I am, doesn’t it?

I mentioned in my last post my being a patient of Dr. Socks and then sleeping with a lesbian and getting pregnant. I am sure The Google will send all sorts of disappointed visitors to my site with this post, but here’s the rest of the story.

If you did not evacuate your home, your life, for a month or more following Hurricane Katrina, you cannot understand my sense of community upon my return. We had little actual damage ourselves, but the devastation was so vast that all of us were deeply impacted in many ways. And for me, like many of us, I looked for unity, community, continuity.

When I learned my OB/GYN wasn’t returning to town, I was really upset. He worked out of Memorial Hospital and that whole situation was quite distressing. I am not one to just pick any ole doc to be my OB/GYN, so losing my doctor, the doctor I’d used for over a decade, really wigged me out. I asked girlfriends who they used and whether they liked their doctors and I got a lot of lukewarm responses.

One day, I went to my favorite local yarn store. Think of “Cheers” but with yarn instead of beer. I opened the door and heard, “Noooooola!” The shop owner was helping the sole customer in the shop–a man. The one thing you see little of in a knitting shop is the male customer. You will see sad male friends and husbands looking bored silly but few actual male customers.

They were in the needlepoint section of the store looking at the needlepoint canvases and threads. Their conversation, which they included me in on, was about the sad state of medical affairs in the post-Katrina NOLA; the lack of doctors and the high need for care. I mentioned my situation with needing a new OB/GYN. And the proprietor said, “Well, Dr. Socks here is a gynecologist!” [If I told you his real name, you'd pee your pants. Trust me.]

It was a sign.

Here I was struggling to find a gynecologist I could trust and feel comfortable with. And here he was–a fellow customer of the yarn shop! It was meant to be.

So I made an appointment with him. As soon as he saw me he said, “You’re the girl from the knitting store!” His remembering me filled me with confidence in my decision. We talked about his current needlepoint project and my current knitting project. He wore pink argyle socks. Always.

At that first visit, he saw the Anthony Trollope novel in my hands and commented about his love for his work and his disapproval at Trollope’s descendant’s (Joanna Trollope’s) less high-brow work—I hadn’t know Joanna and Anthony were related! [It was at this point that I began to suspect that he was gay. Yeah, I'm slow like that.] Needle arts and Trollope? Really, it was too good to be true.

You can click here to read more of the specific details of things going wrong. Suffice to say, things went really wrong. And against Dr. Socks’ advise, I ended up seeking the help of a local fertility specialist.

Skip ahead five months later.

We were scheduled for our second in utero insemination. CS and I drove in separate cars because afterwards I was driving out of town for an overnight convention. I got to the doctor’s office first and signed in. They called my name; CS hadn’t shown up yet. I went to the exam room and CS showed up about one minute before things got underway. Four minutes later, I was lying on my back giving CS’s guys a fighting chance. CS had brought me a lemon Hubig’s pie (part of the reason he was late).

I munched and watched the clock. After 20 minutes, I jumped up and hit the road. Then I sat in a conference for the next eight hours. No lying around all day for me like I’d done the first time.

That night, I met a fellow attendee of the conference—a very good friend of mine who is also a lesbian—and one of my oldest friends. The three of us had drinks and a rich dinner. Then I went to my hotel room, the room I was sharing with my friend also attending the conference. We had asked for two double beds; we got one king. We were confident enough in ourselves, our sexuality and our significant others to know nothing would happen. So we shared a bed.

She warned me that (1) she snores loudly and (2) she has the tendency to have women who are trying to get pregnant that are near her find themselves pregnant. “One night with me, you’ll be pregnant,” she exclaimed.

That night, she did not snore. But I DID get pregnant.

Bonerama is playing at Rock ‘n’ Bowl this Saturday night. Rock ‘n’ Bowl is a uniquely NOLA institution. The whole Mid-City area was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and Rock ‘n’ Bowl clamored to re-open as fast as possible. It’s been re-opened for some time now and I haven’t yet been back. That’s going to change this weekend.

Yes, I am going out. At night. To listen to a band play. Live. Oh, to think about it gives me goosebumps. It is so reminiscent of my days following Big Sun. Ah, the good ole days!

If babies are welcome (and I think they are because first and foremost RnB is a bowling alley), Captain Sarcastic and Sun will be joining me. And I think Pete may come too. And I know Stacey will be there (being the good groupie/merch seller that she is). So in one week’s time I will have met at least two NOLA bloggers. So much for me being an anonymous blogger!

Wanna join us? You know you do! Come see an awesomely unique NOLA band at a most unique NOLA music venue. Show starts at 9:30 pm. Hope to see you there!

The commercial properties along Airline Highway leading to NOLA were badly flooded in Katrina. One store, AMA Distributors (they sell pool tables, pinball machines and top quality poker chips), put up a plywood wall as they rebuilt their store. One day, this plywood wall got painted white. Then some sketches were drawn on this white fence. Then the sketches were painted and a beautiful mural emerged. Every time I’d pass it, I’d slow down and admire this NOLA-inspired mural. I loved it. It honored our music, our great chefs, our landmarks.

This mural was completed before I had a digital camera, and so I’d ask Captain Sarcastic over and over to go take its picture. He never did. Time passed, and I’d find myself taking Airline Highway just to pass this thing. It always made me feel good. My in-laws came to town and I took them to see it. My MIL snapped two pictures of it. I recently asked my MIL about those two pictures and she had not recalled even taking them but promised to look for them.

Then AMA Distributors reopened and the mural came down. I was so sad to see it go and was a touch pissed at CS for never having got its picture. I still pass that strip of Airline regularly and I miss the mural every time.

Yesterday, my MIL e-mailed me the pics; she had located them. This renewed my curiosity about the mural–who did it? what became of it? So yesterday afternoon, I called AMA Distributors to inquire about the mural; the call was disappointing but did give me a few leads. The woman who answered told me that all she remembered was that the artist’s name was Neville and that Frank Davis did a piece on it. I then e-mailed Frank Davis. He recalled doing the piece but did not know what had become of the mural.

Since then, I have been googling “Neville mural NOLA artist” in every possible combination to learn the identity of the artist. Then a weird thing happened.

CS and I went to the NOLA art market today at Palmer Park. The page Pete and I posted of the Fore!Kids fleur de lis came up (as did the new website for the streetcar art project). So when I got home, I clicked on my fleur de lis page and was admiring all those beautiful pieces of art. And then I saw it, a name. Larry Nevil. Nevil instead of Neville? Could it be? I googled Larry Nevil and found pieces of his art and it is unmistakable that the mural that I had so come to love was his work! All this time, I’ve been premiering a piece of his art on my own website while unwittingly admiring another! This year old mystery that I finally got serious about yesterday is today solved. It’s just too weird.

I am stunned. And delighted. I will call Mr. Nevil to learn what became of his lovely mural. In the meantime, enjoy the two quick snapshots of it (that do not do it justice) that my mother-in-law took of it:

When I moved out of my parents home, I had a new vacuum cleaner. Everything else was secondhand–bed, dresser, kitchen table, sofa, coffee table, TV, TV stand, side tables, appliances, washer, dryer, refrigerator. And over the years, I’d upgrade to new or better secondhand furniture.

When I moved to my last apartment before getting married, I bought a kitchen table and four chairs from a friend who was moving to California. When I moved in with CS, I reluctantly gave/threw away my junky furniture. I knew that if it didn’t work with CS, I’d have to start over with every last stick of furniture. That was scary.

That table and chairs, though, I could not part with. The table started out in the kitchen and the chairs scattered in the dining area. Then that was too crowded. So the table got moved to the spare room to be used as my sewing table and the chairs went into the attic. But I wasn’t using the table for sewing so the table ended up being stored in the attic, too.

All the while, CS kept asking me to get rid of it. We’d use the set every Christmas Eve. But it seemed a bit excessive to keep for use just one day a year. But I held on to it. Something nagged at me to keep it.

My friend had recently moved back from California and had a nice new kitchen set. She gave no thought to her old table and chairs.

Then Katrina hit. Our home and its contents were fine. My friend lost everything. Except her table and chairs. We gave them back to her. It’s as though I had been storing them especially for her.

From my journal two years ago:

Hurricane Katrina hit the city at around 8am. It is rare for a hurricane to arrive during the morning; they usually come in at night, and so coverage of them is difficult in the dark. This one is different; it is visible and, from the start, a nightmare. CS and I had an early dinner together, and then I drove him to the Little Rock airport to leave for work in Philadelphia for a time period yet unknown.

Upon my I return to the hotel room, I broke up a fight between Zella and Lucy. Apparently 13 hours in a cramped car made them disagreeable. In the midst of this fight, Zella mistook my wrist for a piece of Lucy; it is in this way that I was bit by Zella. Once I wrenched my numb wrist free of Zella’s bite and was able to drag Lucy to the bathroom, I became truly hysterical and contacted the room of the one co-worker of CS’s whose last name I could remember. The co-worker’s wife came down and she and CS’s supervisor convinced me to go to the Emergency Room.

I got directions and drove myself to the nearest ER and was awash in tears in the waiting room. I was alone in a foreign city, maligned by my pet, unsure of the condition of the possessions I held most dear to me and of my beloved city. Since CS was flying, he was not able to be contacted. Thus, I called my mother-in-law to get CS’s social security number so that our insurance would cover this ER visit. I am sure I gave my mother-in-law reason for a heart attack even though in my state I did the best I could to explain it was for me and not her son.

The triage nurse was trite. He advised that the Number One way to get bit by a dog was to try to break up a dog fight. Number Two, he advised, was messing with them while they are eating. Thanks, I thought, I’ll remember that tip, asshole. I ended up with four stitches in three areas of my left wrist. It hurt terribly.

I returned to the hotel room and took a percocet left over from my broken right wrist some ten months earlier. Now both wrists would have visible scars. Dammit.

Email sent, Tuesday, August 30:

I am not particularly spiritual but this is testing that. In addition to both of our houses not being destroyed, I rode on a ripped tire for hours (partly through the evacuation and all of Monday) that was only fixed today; my husband’s employer is picking up the cost of our suite through this ordeal. And thank god for that, as our pets now each require their own room. Skooter is in the bedroom, Lucy, the den, and Zella spends much of her time in time-out in the bathroom.

If only I could sleep more than four hours on any one night, I’d feel a lot better. Damn–Zella is whimpering as I type this. I gotta kennel her. Alas.

I can be reached at the hotel if you wanna talk. I am in and out, though, walking the dogs (separately now) and running errands (you know, fixing my tires, getting Rx’s filled, grabbing meals). Be warned, I am cranky and you will hear Zella whining and me yapping at her. Then I get really silly as an alternative to crying. I think I am out of tears, but I doubt it.

The 17th Street canal that broke is now the size of a football field. This is near the lake by the Metairie-Orleans property line and causing NEW flooding in those areas as well as downtown.

How will the city ever recover? What will these people do who lost their homes and all their belongings and don’t have insurance? How can businesses get back to normal when “normal” won’t come for at least a month?

It makes me shudder to realize the comparisons to the Galveston storm. It is too surreal and devastating, even under my miraculous situation, to comprehend.

Please send out all your well wishes to us all dealing with this all too real nightmare.

much much love,
Nola

My time has been a bit consumed by following the coverage of the indictment of Congressman William Jefferson (”Dollar Bill”). Some idiot they interviewed on the news today said, “They still don’t have anything on him.” Really? Does this guy not watch the news? Can he really not remember the $90,000 they found in frozen food containers in Jefferson’s freezer before Hurricane Katrina? How ’bout the two cohorts of his who pleaded guilty and are serving time? To me, that’s not nothing. I am all for “innocent until proven guilty,” but I am even more for a Congressman doing what is best for his district and his constituents, especially when New Orleans is in the crisis it is in.

And there is little hope that Jefferson will step down of his own accord. And it just burns me up that to the rest of the country it just appears to be another example of how we here in Louisiana just seem to gravitate and support the crooks and liars in politics. There is no way this can bode well for the support New Orleans needs from Washington.

Please just know that not all Louisianians support Jefferson; that many of us are humiliated by and ashamed of the whole story and of Jefferson’s actions of late in his handling of the situation. If only he would resign on his own. Alas!

I find it very interesting to see the House doing an ethics investigation into his indictment with the possible outcome being to eject him from Congress. I may soon get to use one of my big words: defenestration. I’ve waited almost ten years to get an opportunity to use that word. Well, hot damn. Something good may come out of all this after all!

CS and I had dinner last night with a friend who confided that she is going through a difficult time. And I recognized something awful in her eyes: deep, raw pain. And it immediately took me to a place of reserved pain that I involuntarily hold within. I had intended not to blog about this issue of mine for various personal reasons. But last night made me rethink that decision at least a bit to discuss the issue of the universality of pain.

A week before Katrina hit, CS and I went to my gynecologist to discuss with him the fact that I’d been off birth control for over a year and had not gotten pregnant. That was the first day the “F word” was thrown out to me–we had a fertility problem. I shut down before we reached the elevator. My doctor referred us to a fertility specialist. I had previously decided that I was not one of those people who’d ever go through the hormone treatments and shots and in vitro. I didn’t want to know who had the problem–CS or me. This was the end of the line for me. I walked out of that office and into my own personal storm. Then Katrina hit and made it easy to ignore this “problem.”

Upon returning to New Orleans, my trusted gynecologist, along with countless other doctors, had relocated out of state. Not knowing what step to take, I made an appointment with the fertility doctor my gynecologist had recommended. I was not ready for this, though, and stormed out of the waiting room unable even to complete the new patient forms. What did me in? The question of whether this problem was negatively affecting my marriage. It was.

I decided I’d start over. I found a new gynecologist–one that would do the initial screening some gynecologists do prior to sending their patients off to a specialist. This felt safe. To make a very long story short, he diagnosed me as having a “T”-shaped uterus. He didn’t know what caused this deformity, other than I was born with a defunct uterus. He explained that getting pregnant would be extremely difficult and maintaining a pregnancy would be all but impossible.

My world fell apart. Completely. It was like Hurricane Katrina ravaged the insides of my body and no one knew. The fault was mine, not CS’s. My body had failed me; I had failed myself. My shock, disappointment, and pain were palpable. I could barely function. Work was the only thing I even attempted to focus on, and, I assure you, that was very difficult. Most days, it was all I could do just to get out of bed, bathe and put clothes on (and some days I failed even at this). I had never felt depression the way I felt this.

Then I was told that a relative was pregnant. And a good friend’s wife. Understandably, I did not handle this type of news well. My family was never brought in on our secret. It was way too painful to explain to them, so instead I wore a mask when I could not avoid them. A few very close friends who had had their own problems in having a child were told, and these friends became my lifeline during this very trying time. The despair was all I knew. I was upset and embarrassed and ashamed. I felt cheated and angry and at the same time deserving of this shit. I mean, wasn’t I the one that had said a decade ago that I never wanted children? Wasn’t I the one that put my education and career before settling down and having a child?

Then my gynecologist recommended that I see a specialist in New York to perform surgery to “stretch” my uterus. This was out of the question for me. It would not be covered by our insurance and I suspected it wouldn’t do any good anyway. If we were going to spend copious amounts of money (or, to state more accurately, go into serious debt) on having a child, it would be in the way of adoption–where we’d be guaranteed a child in the end. But I was struggling with the idea of adoption as well. It was my guilt in not being able to give CS “a child of his own.” I got really good at beating myself up.

Again, long story short, against the advice of my gynecologist, I made another appointment with the local fertility doctor recommended by my previous gynecologist. I wanted to know with certainty that, as I suspected, there was no hope. If, however, he agreed with my new gynecologist that surgery was a viable option, then maybe I needed to reconsider it.

At our first visit with the fertility doctor, he looked at my HSG (hysterosalpingogram) film and said this to me: “Your uterus is ‘T-ish’ shaped. It isn’t technically T-shaped. I see them regularly; this is not one.” I didn’t believe what I had heard; I couldn’t believe it; I wouldn’t believe it. Omitting the details, after 5 months of fertility treatment, I was pregnant. And it is with great relief that I can report that things have gone quite smoothly in my pregnancy.

Now, there is a LOT I can (and, in time, will) write about this whole experience. But the part that sticks in my throat, and I suspect always will, is that pain. All my heart-wrenching pain came to the surface last night when I saw that similar look of pain in my friend’s eyes. The reason for her pain may have been different, but the depth of her pain was the same. I know because once you experience pain that deeply, you can recognize it in another. It’s universal.

I know that her pain is her own, and my pain is my own. And neither of us will ever really know the dark corners of each other’s suffering. But I equally know that real pain, raw pain is universal. And I have learned that the best salve for this type of pain is the help and support of your close and trusted friends.