what’s bred in the bone

I can write for hours about how my family is doing, about how my sister’s roof damage and my brother’s work in Houston and my grandparents feeling lonely in Alabama and wanting to at least go to Baton Rouge for awhile … and so on, and so on. I can recount any number of silly conversations with them.
What’s difficult for me to write about is how I have felt about the recent disaster and how I dealt with it … or didn’t. I can tell you this: however bad you think it might be, if you haven’t ever experienced your hometown being devastated and nearly destroyed, it’s gonna be a whole lot worse. I had imagined the possibility, because every year someone would predict terrible things happening to New Orleans if a hurricane ever hit it outright. But I was never, ever prepared for what actually happened, particularly regarding the survivors left in New Orleans. The Superdome is essentially ruined for me as any kind of event center; it’s a symbol now.

I keep thinking of Robertson Davies’ writing, specifically his Cornish trilogy. The themes throughout those books have to do with the ways our childhood, upbringing, ancestors all affect who we are and what we do. The two recurring phrases throughout all three books are “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh” and “Let your roots feed your crown” (like a tree). And I keep thinking, how in the hell can anyone let her roots feed her crown when her roots were ripped out of the ground by a Category 5 hurricane and blown into power lines and toxic sewage-ridden water? My roots were gone, or that’s how it felt to me. How am I supposed to deal with that?
On a much less culturally elevated note, the other thing that stuck in my head was a song from, of all people, Benny Grunch. If you’re not from the New Orleans area, you have no idea who I’m talking about; if you do, you probably hate me because I just stuck one of his songs in your head. Mr. Grunch is probably best known for a song called “The Twelve Yats of Christmas” that gets seriously overplayed in my parents’ house and which I liked the first 100 times but now cannot abide. But he also has a more recent song called “Ain’t There No More,” which WWL-TV played over and over for the past couple of years as an alternative to the other Christmas-y Grunch tunes, although it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas apart from a Mr. Bingle reference.
Anyway, “Ain’t There No More” is about New Orleans-area institutions that are no longer around, as of a few years ago, from Schwegmann’s grocery to the K&B drugstore to McKenzie’s Bakery, not to mention D.H. Holmes and Maison Blanche. (I did like the line about “Krauss is gone so you can’t try on/No queen-size lingerie” but sometimes I am six years old.) At one point Mr. Grunch names store after store and his backup singers chant, after each store, “Ain’t there no more.”
And I keep hearing that in my head. Liuzza’s? Ain’t there no more. (Judging from Chuck’s photos, it’s there but under a whole lotta water.) Rocky and Carlo’s? Ain’t there no more. Domiliese’s? The Prytania? Canal Place Cinema? Well, we’re not sure. My grandparents’ house? Ain’t there no more. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown? Damn. Dozens of old people in nursing homes where the buses never showed up to evacuate them, where many of the medical staff just left … it all goes downhill from there, to the point where it can feel unbearable.
I spent more than a week trying to concentrate on work and other mundane stuff and with every thought, with everything I did, some memory of growing up would flash in my head. I wasn’t just mourning the recent devastation of New Orleans, but every person I knew from the area who’d died, every friend I can’t find, every place I loved that closed down long before we’d ever heard of Katrina. I heard the Robert E. Lee shopping area by the lake was completely flooded and I was sad for the Robert E. Lee theater even though that theater has been shut down for at least a decade and turned into a gourmet grocery.
How I could get anything done and act anything like normal was a miracle to me. It wasn’t until late last week that I felt like I was functioning anywhere near my usual self. I hadn’t seen a new-to-me movie in weeks and didn’t want to, until we went to The Brothers Grimm (which I think has been unfairly maligned, by the way) this weekend.
I quit my job on Friday, giving two weeks notice. It is an amicable parting on all sides. And I was planning to quit before the end of the year anyway. The job and I were not suited to one another anymore. The job changed and I changed. But the hurricane, and how it made me feel, definitely had some effect on the timing of that decision.
I don’t have another job lined up. I’m going to try freelance writing and design for awhile and see how that works for me, unless some spectacular dream job appears (and I am lucky enough to get it). I may end up eating a lot of mac and cheese, or plastering ads all over this site, or participating in some of those medical studies. Okay, not the last two.
The other thing that had been going through my head recently, before the hurricane even, was the movie Holiday. I was envious of Cary Grant’s character. I wanted a holiday. Now I have money saved up and some interesting freelance possibilities and I am going to have a holiday, Phillip Barry style. Okay, I’m not traveling to Europe with Katharine Hepburn, or even Edward Everett Horton, but I’m striking out on my own now rather than later.
Unlike Ray, I don’t want to move back to New Orleans. It took a hurricane for me to realize how central New Orleans was to my writing … I feel less like a Texas resident and a lot more like a Louisiana expatriate. At some point, I want to go to New Orleans and see what is there and what has happened. But I have no interest in moving back. Austin has spoiled me with clean lakes and breakfast tacos and top-notch movie theaters and free wireless at the Dairy Queen.
I’m looking over this and it still doesn’t quite reflect how I felt. It’s just pretty writing. But goddamn, I never thought I would actually look forward to the possibility of sitting in my parents’ house at Christmas time, with the TV blaring, playing those silly Benny Grunch songs all day long.