After the Flood
I didn't know New Orleans before Katrina.
Twenty years ago today, CJ had an ear infection. It was the one time that child was sick enough to require antibiotics. They were two weeks past the 18-month mark, robust and healthy, until they went to daycare for the first time earlier that week and picked up the latest snot-causing, ear-clutching, milk-puking bug.
We were home alone. CJ, the baby who refused to be swaddled and didn’t sleep until they had their own bedroom, refused to sleep in their crib. All day, my fever-warm child snuggled in my arms on the couch, sleeping and slurping on a pacifier, waking only to throw up on me a few times.
In addition to my usual postpartum anxiety that always veered toward panic, I was worried to death about my sick kid, as any new parent knows. I had other big worries, too. My best friend’s mother had suffered a catastrophic stroke that morning, and I was awaiting news of her condition. All while watching New Orleans disappear under water in real time on CNN.
While I ached for the whole city, I was focused on another friend who’d given birth in the city days before. She evacuated with her infant and two-year-old, while her husband evacuated with part of the football team at Tulane University, where he was a coach.
The world was ending, and all I could do was rock my baby and cry.
We all know what happened next.
I didn’t know New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. I longed to know her, but realistically, I wasn’t at a time in my life when I could travel. I spent my 20s too broke to go, and the beginning of my 30s was full of marriage and this new little person.
Theoretically, I had been to New Orleans, but I was so young I couldn’t remember much. I was two, and my parents hauled me along. I vaguely remember feeding peacocks in either Jackson Square or City Park. And I’ve heard a story about my reaction upon seeing a Black man for the first time on that trip. I thought he was made of chocolate, and I wonder if the magic of place played a part in my tiny little brain putting that together. I’d rather think that was the case, but chances are higher that I was repeating something racist I’d heard elsewhere.
(Please take your children to places with some diversity so they know humans are all made with human stuff as early as possible. Thanks.)
But I missed New Orleans before Katrina, and before the end of my middle-aged years. My first trip was three years ago, for my 50th birthday.
Why did I put off New Orleans for so long? Part of me assumed it was all Bourbon Street and beads sold to tourists year-round, surrounded by just another mid-size city like the one where I live that shares the fleur-de-lis symbol. I had no interest in convention-hosting, binge drinking, street puking New Orleans.
The other part of me knew the truth: I was afraid I’d fall in love with a city that shared my values, only to lose it. I grieved for New Orleans 20 years ago, and I didn’t even know her. What would I do next time?
My friend Jonathan is from Gulfport, Mississippi, about an hour’s drive from New Orleans. He lived in the city for many years and visits often. He’s told me bits of his Katrina evacuation story, but I don’t push for details. Being friends with him made me realize I needed to experience New Orleans.
And I was correct—it was love, immediate and hard, developing over a beautiful October week filled with the kind of magic that only exists in New Orleans.
It happened with my friend Jeremy over island drinks and bacon butter biscuits at Compère Lapin. At a nondescript coffeehouse in Uptown where I settled in to write. In my first-ever Sazarec during a Saints game at R Bar. With the teenage server at Dookie Chase who called me “Baby.” The rows of shotgun houses painted bold and bright as the Caribbean sun. The chicory in the coffee in Treme.
It happened with apologies to my rental car every time I hit a pothole that felt as deep as Lake Pontchartrain, and rubber-burning Dodge Chargers taking over Claiborne as soon as the sun set. It happened sitting on the red bench outside Hansen’s while eating a satsuma sno-ball with condensed milk as mosquitoes swarmed the syrup drips.
The trip started with a pall over it—my beloved grandfather was dying. He turned 97 on October 13th. I made a breakneck trip to my hometown that day to see him one last time, to tell him the things I wanted him to know. And then I spent the next few days debating whether or not to cancel my trip, sitting around waiting for him to die.
This is the grandfather who spent his career on the road behind the wheel of a semi, then spent his retirement traveling with my grandmother.
I bet he would have understood why I went.
The day I turned 50, a week and two days later, I knew Jonathan had something up his sleeve. When I planned the trip a few months prior, he laid claim to the night of my birthday. All I knew was that there would be food, and I had some ideas on where that food might be obtained.
Sure enough, I got a good morning/happy birthday text from him, informing me that we had a late dinner reservation at Commander’s Palace. I don’t recall ever mentioning that Commander’s Palace was on the short list of my dream restaurants. That, when Katrina hit, not only did I grieve for the senseless amounts of human suffering, but I also mourned the legendary Victorian building dressed in amplified Tiffany and Co. blue. They had taken a hard hit, closed for over a year. I knew chefs in St. Louis who worked there when the storm hit. They evacuated and never returned.
Before dinner, Jonathan had another surprise in the Garden District—cocktails at Cure, Neil Bodenheimer’s award-winning cocktail bar that led to the post-storm revitalization of Freret Street (now one of my favorite secret off-the-tourist-path parts of town). While we perched at the bar, the bartender heard mention of my birthday and asked if he could do a shot with us. With their overwhelming collection of the best spirits in the world, I couldn’t begin to choose, so I asked him for the most unique bourbon he had—a proprietary wheated bourbon from Weller, made just for them.
Our dinner reservation was one of the last of the evening and led to one of the most beautiful meals of my life. I don’t even remember everything we ate, and I didn’t take any photos of the dishes. It didn’t even cross my mind, what with being so happy to have time in that beautiful room, with a beautiful friend, incredible dishes, a sweet staff, and a lot of Sazaecs and balloons and silly hats.
We closed down the restaurant and took a car back to my double shotgun in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, wrapping up the night with strong cups of Community Coffee for Jonathan, since he had to get back to Mississippi in the wee morning hours.
I fell into bed, sure that the cocktails and contentment would have me snoring in no time. Instead, I tossed and turned all night, never fading into sleep deeper than a lucid dream state, until the sun started to peek and I finally started a deeper doze.
I slept for an hour before my phone woke me at 7 a.m. My mom, telling me that my grandfather had passed.
“He waited until after your birthday.”
That, he did, giving me a birthday that’s bookended with the anniversary of my paternal grandmother’s death on October 21, and his on October 23.
New Orleans is vibrant and full of life, but as they say, the veil there is very thin. I’m sure my restlessness through the night had more to do with knowing, on some level, that he was making his exit. He didn’t weigh heavy on my mind as he passed and I wrestled with the blankets, but I wasn’t surprised by the news. Because in some way, I was there.
I rolled over and, finally, slept.
New Orleans brims with humanity, from wealthy tourists to tent towns under the interstate that towers over the city. We walk past cemeteries where the dead sleep above the ground so they’re not stolen by the sea or the storms. Because with all that life, there is death, and it has to balance somehow.
I don’t want to live in a world without New Orleans. This is where I could easily veer into the political shitshow that keeps the city from being protected like the precious jewel it is. But like a diamond, New Orleans is also hard as fuck and impossible to break.
They are still here, living.
No place reminds me to live my life—be an active participant in my life—the way New Orleans does. Life is short, even in this ancient city, and not one minute should be wasted. Whether it’s your best night or one with sick babies and terrible news, it’s all here for us, and we have to grab it fast and drink it slow.
I was afraid to fall in love with New Orleans. But like any love, the threat of loss makes me love even harder. It’s a love that’s absolutely worth the pain.
New Orleans friends, I love you, and I’ve thought of you all weekend. I’ll be home soon.
Wanna offer one-time support? You can buy me a coffee. Or a sno-ball.
We love you too, Robin. Will you be back anytime soon?