Just the other night I was watching an old baseball movie on TV, “A League of Their Own.”
Dottie, the catcher for Atlanta, calls for time as her sister, Kit,
steps into the box. “High fast balls,” she tells the pitcher. “Can’t
hit ‘em, can’t lay off ‘em.” And then it struck me. New Orleans is my
high fast ball. Can’t live here, can’t stay away.
I moved to Tucson after Hurricane Katrina, “The Storm,” as the
locals say. But I’ve come back more times than I can count, driving
through Lordsburg, Deming, El Paso, and stopping for the night in
Junction, where the endless flat turns into hills. Last trip, when I
went for dinner before collapsing at the Roadway Inn, the waitress
greeted me: “Bohemia, right?” You know you’ve got it bad when a
server in Texas knows your drink.
This time, I’m staying in New Orleans for a whole year, in an
attic apartment by City Park. I’ve rented out my Tucson house so I can
watch my grandson get his start. I miss the desert, but my body
defaults to this place as if it’s pre-selected in some hard drive at my
core. The minute I step onto its sidewalks my whole gait changes—I slow
down, I sashay—and my mucus membranes let out a sigh. It’s a muscle
memory as much as a choice. It’s a rhythm, a lilt.
My first stop when I got here in September was the Rite
Aid to pick up some cash. The woman at the register, black, about my
age, bagged my shampoo and opened the till. “Here your twenty, baby,”
she said. I misted up. Where else does a purchase come with an
endearment? And when you’ve got “baby,” who needs verbs? The same thing
happened at Halloween. My son and his wife were cooking when the
trick-or-treaters rang the bell. One little girl took her candy, told
us thanks, and gave her own sweet back to us: “Y’all food smell good,”
she said.
There’s a tee shirt shop on Magazine with a singlet that reads,
“Listen to Your City.” And I’m hearing it, not just the music down on
Frenchmen Street, but the voices with their own riffs, their own
motifs: “Hey, how y’all doin’?” “Hey, all right.” I’m hearing the
poetry. “Y’all food smell good.” Two spondees. But mostly I’m looking
at a cityscape, a big messy jumble of old and new. I’m walking through
it, around the paths in City Park, down to the Quarter via Esplanade,
and through the streets of Lakeview where I used to live before the
lake moved in. Mostly, I’m looking at trees.
The knobby stalwarts are still here, the
ancient oaks, along the new-built jogging paths in City Park and by the
practice track off Roosevelt Mall. But in their shadows the young trees
mark the spots where the brackish water took its toll. Dying oaks stood
rooted there when the mayor first called us back to “look and leave.” I
looked at them. They were twisted, denuded, wearing their trauma for
all to see. Then the city axed them and planted more. Ten years later
those saplings have quadrupled in size, on a beeline to the canopy that
shades the road.
By the shores of the Big Lake, one shady survivor
has become the park’s Zen Tree, its branches draped with wind chimes
whose deep gongs reassure us: “I’m okay, you’re okay, it’s in the
past.” And then, a little farther down the path, a Katrina tree
rescinds all that. It’s as if there had been a third choice then, when
the arborists determined who would live and who would die: a “maybe” or
an “other,” an “almost dead,” a “wait and see.” The gamblers
lost. Amid the survivors this one pokes up like a bad dream, frazzled,
failing to thrive. When I look at it, the storm comes back. I can
almost hear the wind blow. By the art museum, where massive oaks once
lined the road, someone lost all hope and clear-cut the lot of them,
planting in their stead that anti-oak, the crepe myrtle,
slender-bodied, bush as much as tree. Someone played it safe.
In the neighborhoods, on the other hand, people
dreamed big—too big. They swung for the fences, building Hummer-houses
on bungalow lots. Or going for a land-grab and ending up with an
estate. On my block I once was the fourth house from the veterinary
clinic. Now I’m the second—or someone is, whoever lives in that modular
building too big for the space. One neighbor spread out on the three
lots north of mine. The clinic ballooned in its former space as if,
having given up on small pets, it now deals in ungulates. Down the
street the friendly little school with its tiled depictions of nursery
rhymes now looms above its marquee, an institution, an academy. I can’t
imagine a kindergartener’s first day at this place, how scary that
would be.
My coffee house, next to the vet’s, has kept its
footprint, except that it’s a Starbucks now. There’s that same side
door I would enter through when it was Coffee and Company, and we’d go
there
after soccer games to pick up a lentil plate, too tired to cook. When
it first went up, I noticed that racing stripe, above eye level, a
classic design. Then they lettered beneath it the word “Katrina,” and
we all understood. That’s the water line, the mark of the lake-lap
overhead. My house had a real one, just along the porch lights; every
house in Lakeview did. We hardly need a “lest we forget.” I like to
think it’s empathy, a corporation’s version of “I’m sorry for
your loss.” An architectural “baby,” a mitigating sweet.
Here in Mid City houses wear their storm-signs too.
Every several blocks one flashes the X spray-painted by the National
Guard back in mid-September, 2005. I’m not sure why. I couldn’t wait to
blot mine out when I lived in my son’s house just after the storm. I
ended up painting his entire house just to cover up that bit of blight.
Now, strolling my grandson around these blocks, I encounter on some
tidy street, a house encrypted with that selfsame code. It’s like
coming upon a Katrina tree, or a ghost bike propped up on a city
street. To me, it’s a kind of wallowing or maybe a sign of survivor’s
guilt: “The lake might have passed me by, but I was here too, and I’ve
got proof.”
One day as I was pushing Andrés down the sidewalk in
his little car, a woman came out to say hello, as strangers here are
wont to do. “Wow, what color are those eyes?” she asked. “Well,” I
answered, “I’m not sure. They’re not blue and they’re not brown. I
guess they’re grey.” She took a closer look. “Lake Pontchartrain eyes,”
she proclaimed. And once she said that, I saw it too, a water line
almost to his rooftop, a strange murky marker on this new iteration,
this boy who, having missed it all, still carries the lake in the color
of his eyes.
At the end of that movie, Dottie and Kit are parting
ways, Dottie to marry and leave the league, Kit to play on. “Lay off
the high ones,” Dottie advises. “I like the high ones,” Kit replies.
And there’s the rub. I am at once the character Dottie, who abandoned
ship after the storm, and Kit who, despite herself, can’t lay off.
I have three months more before my lease runs out,
and I go back to Tucson. In the meantime, I’m walking through the city,
long, hot out-and-backs from the southern boundary of City Park all the
way to the river, an hour away. There’s a point toward the end, just
about to Decatur, when I reach a kind of tipping point, my footfalls in
synch with the beating of my heart, the sweat spilling into my eyes.
And in that rhythm, in this urban space, I say to myself, “Here your
city, baby. Here it is.”