Reocities

It's seven a.m. in Tucson.  The Catalina mountains are sharp-edged against the sky as I walk north three blocks from my house, coffee in hand, to the Whataburger on Speedway Boulevard.  There I drop three quarters into the newspaper dispenser and pull out a Daily Star.  Back at my house I will read it under the mesquite tree in my desert yard while the lesser goldfinches feast at the sock above my head.

This is my new normal, three and a half years after Hurricane Katrina drove me from New Orleans, changing forever not only my life but my newspaper rituals.  I no longer subscribe.  I walk, as I did all those months on the road and, later, in my FEMA trailer, my paper trek becoming a necessity when I lost my home and thus my permanent address.  No paper boy would service trailer 30 in the mornings, though my daughter once had a pizza delivered there by some intrepid soul whom she guided via cell phone, through the gates and back against the cemetery, where, knocking at her tinny door, he handed her the pizza, now cold as the cardboard it came in.  Every morning during the months I lived there, I would walk to the Burger King on City Park Avenue, quarters in hand, and pick up a Picayune, circling back past the cars lined up to school the automotive students of Delgado Community College, my employer and now, bizarrely, my landlord as well.  Were there an entry through the graveyard, my walk would be shorter, though disheartening, leading, as it would, past unmarked paupers' graves, past homemade headstones etched in Sharpie, past the monument to Buddy Bolden with its half-filled whiskey flask, a testament to tributes paid there after dark.  Back at trailer 30 I would savor the paper, devour its news--the latest copper theft and murder; the plea for a recipe lost in the flood; the op-ed rants; the Hot Picks for the weekend's music, directing us to seedy bars on Frenchman Street; the debutants' faces, smiling out from some parallel universe on the high ground by the river; the box scores; the crossword; the comics; the ads.  I would read it all, devour it like a carcass:   the meat, the sinews, the bones, the very hide; in this post-storm wasteland, nothing gone to waste.

Months before, an evacuee taken in by my son's friends in Washington, DC, I  could walk to any corner where, dropping a dime and quarter into the dispenser, I'd retrieve that daily bargain:  a copy of the Washington Post.  With it in hand I'd walk down Calvert and over the bridge to Adams Morgan where I'd buy a cup of coffee at the local haunt, Tryst.  There, an evacuee in my care-package tee shirt and Payless sneakers (bought with my Red Cross debit card), I'd read the Post through a haze of  smoke, surrounded by strangers who, like me, tended toward solitude, each engrossed in his paper or laptop, but craving, still, community.   It struck me, as I drank and read, that we who flock to coffee bars have somehow plateaued in our growth.  Eternally moored in "parallel play"--that stage between pure solitude and group interaction-- we sit:   half-hearted gatherers, destined since preschool to fill this niche in the same way Wall Street must be rife with those who moved on to grammar school but never learned to share.  I felt then my exile in my very bones, and each day hence, as I wandered unfamiliar streets, dropping coins in dispensers holding someone else's Daily, then reading the news of someone else's town.

After almost a month in Washington, I headed home, though there was no home there anymore--no neighborhood, no postman, no newspaper carrier.  I salvaged what I could and journeyed west, over rain-swept Texas plains, through New Mexico, then  Tucson, Phoenix, and finally Flagstaff where, seven miles north of town, backed up against a national forest, stood my parents' old-age dream:  a house they built with their very hands, its north face tilted to frame Mt. Humphreys dead-center in its picture window, it walls now harboring mice and ghosts.  For another month, I trapped those mice, appeased those ghosts, and built my fires to ward off the chill.   In the mornings I'd drive a mile and a half to the Ski Lift Lodge and buy a copy of the Daily Sun.  One morning, jarred by the washboard of the Snowbowl Road, I saw ahead of me a dog and slowed as he crossed, then vanished into rabbitbrush.  But it was no dog.  I recognized its weightless gait, that sidelong lope, from my desert past:  a coyote, now exotic in the same way egrets once seemed to me, despite their abundance-- dripping from the trees in Audubon Park or flying in New Orleans' skies, legs stretched out behind in perfect springboard diver form.  I couldn't have come farther from my flooded home:  from swamp to mountain, from oak to ponderosa pine, from hazy skies to air so thin the mountain seemed within my grasp.

To others, strangely, I seemed at home.  "We thought you were a Navajo," one neighbor told me when we met.  I'd read about these people every morning in the news, these native sons, Navajos and Hopis-- the Tsosies, the Begays, the Sekaquaptewas, the Manygoats.  Their names, so alien, carried me back to lecterns where I'd first called roll, stumbling over Chachere, Melancon, Schexnayder, Boudreaux, those names that now roll off my tongue as easily as a Jones or Smith.   And I'd read about the mountain:  the plan to manufacture snow there out of reclaimed water and the furious dissent by Native tribes for whom this mountain is a sacred place, set down, according to myth, before the moon and sun were placed into the sky, and the stars then flung there by Coyote, tired of these efforts to arrange the world.  One morning the mountain figured in a rescue tale, two hikers having set out in the warmth of day, then wound up lost just off the Humphreys Trail as day became night and, above the tree line at 12,000 feet, the cold bore in.  I looked up at the mountain as I read, imagining the fear, the cold, then the cell phone call to rescuers who hiked up with blankets and thermoses and led them down.  Through binoculars I could see the trees, the yellow swath of aspen there, in mid-October, wrapping around the mountain's face below the spot where I imagined them, two hikers exiled high above the deck where I now sat and read, in exile too.   One morning at the coffee house, Macy's, where I'd gone in search of company, I was reading my Sun at the window facing Beaver Street.  As college students idled by,  bicyclers sped, I saw snow begin to fall, sticking to their sweatshirts, then melting as it met the ground.  I knew then it was time to leave.

But I had one more stop before I headed home:  Brooklyn, where an old friend had invited me to spend Thanksgiving.  After decades I'd connect with her and with my son, a musician who had fled, like me, three months before and landed in the almost Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn's Crown Heights.  There, for three weeks, I slept on his couch and walked his dog, down sidewalks strewn with chicken bones,  across streets where cars sat double-parked as street-cleaners swept, to the corner store, where I'd buy for a dollar the New York Times.  In the mornings I'd digest its news, at night ride into the city where my son would play with musicians from New Orleans who had lost, if not their homes, for certain their gigs; who would fill the air with familiar tunes, belying the strangeness of the world outside:  "Satin Doll," "Autumn Leaves," "Just Friends," and always, since the storm, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"  The music would play, the crowds applaud, the standards soothe, until at daybreak I'd confront again the Brooklyn streets ( cars double parked), the sidewalks (strewn with chicken bones), and pick up a copy of the New York Times.  The paper, I could see now, mirrored the neighborhoods it served:  columns packed as tightly as the brownstones on the avenues--filling up the page-- where words, like people on subways, jostled for space.  
One day, as I walked along Manhattan streets, a woman stopped me to ask for directions.  "I'm from New Orleans," I explained.  "Oh," she replied.  "I'm from Venice, down on the bayou.  How'd you do in the storm?"  "I lost my house," I answered.  "So did I," she replied.  "Isn't it sad?" I agreed that it was, as she melted back into the crowd, lost, as we all were to varying degree, blown across the country by Hurricane Katrina, in the same way Coyote, that enemy of order, first scattered stars across the sky.

It's raining in Tucson.  Clouds hang low to the ground, obscuring the mountains, which this time tomorrow will be dusted with snow.  I'm jonesing for the paper, but I've left my umbrella inside my car, a good soaking away.   It might be time, I think, to start home delivery (that pungent phrase)--as if by taking the paper I might also find, riding on the arc of the carrier's toss, some semblance of home.  The mountains, the desert, the very air might work its way inside my skin until, some years hence, from my spot under the mesquite tree I might hear the truck, the brakes, the swish of the newspaper taking flight, and then, in the thump of its arrival, the sound of my own.

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