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I just noticed that the little triangular wood doorstop the cleaning staff use to prop the men’s room bathroom door down the hall while the floor dries after being mopped has a name written on it in red permanent marker: Denise. I’m pretty sure that doorstop used to belong (in a work kind of way) to a longtime administrative assistant who worked in our office prior to Katrina. Makes me want to scrape my name off my stapler.
We were supposed to have a garage sale on Sunday, August 28, 2005. We had recently moved into a house we bought in Central City and had cleaned out our old Broadmoor apartment and planned to sell the odds and ends that didn’t make it to our new home. It was to be the final hurrah of our move. Suffice to say we evacuated the night before and the garage sale never happened. I didn’t get back into town for another three weeks, but there on the second floor of our old apartment’s stoop was our last Times-Picayune, still in the plastic and dry. I tossed the paper in the car and drove back to Houston. I finally pulled that newspaper out of its plastic bag this weekend.
Today’s Times-Picayune has a Jobs section that is 4 pages long, while the Jobs section in the 2005 Times-Pic was 14 pages long. Here’s what I assume is Charity Hospital’s last display ad:
A 16 year old girl who attended Chalmette High School died in a car accident on August 21, 2005.
On August 26, 2005 a man was shot to death in the Ninth Ward. The Times-Pic reported:
His body was found on the north side of the street between a gray car and the sidewalk in front of Off Da Hook, a barber-beauty shop and music studio, and across from a neutral ground crowded with cars apparently parked by people seeking higher ground in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina.
Layers of misery …
Then, regrettably, there’s Sheila Stroup with a B-1 column called “Cat got what he wanted at church” : “This is the story of Grayson, a cat who went to church. He was an Episcopalian, and a loyal one.” Last 2 graphs: “Even now, after a month and an outpouring of sympathy, it’s difficult for Patty to go to church, because there’s no gray cat sitting in the foyer, no shadow to follow her home when Mass is over.” The cat died.
An editorial pushed the Orleans Parish School Board to approve the charter application for Lusher Alternative Elementary School. A couple letters to the editor and a Stephanie Grace column raked over the details of a recent scandal involving an audit of the Orleans Parish School Board that found questionable expenditures on overtime and stipends.
And here’s a couple of news nuggets from 2005:
Greenspan says Fed will survive departure
JACKSON HOLE, WYO — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed confidence Saturday that the central bank will meet the challenges that lie ahead after he steps down next year from the institution he has led for nearly two decades.’I have little doubt that my successors, and theirs, will continue to sustain the leadership of the American financial system in an ever-widening global economy,’ Greenspan said.
World record attempt kills Iranian daredevil
TEHRAN, IRAN — An Iranian daredevil died while attempting to break the world record for jumping over buses on a motorcycle, state television reported Saturday. Javad Palizbanian, 44, was trying to leap over 22 buses parked side-by-side when his motorbike came down on the 13th bus, the report said… Minutes beforehand, Palizbanian had told an audience of hundreds: “I am going to break the world record and do something for my country to be proud.”
The Times-Picayune neglected to run our garage sale ad.
***
Yesterday as the sun was going down I took our dog for a walk in our Central City neighborhood. It had rained all day but in the west a blue window of sky opened. As I walked stunned by the blues, oranges, and grays of the clouds and sky I berated myself for not bringing a camera (I bring a camera with me on roughly half of these evening walks). I could only gawk and gawk I did. I turned up certain blocks just to keep my eye on that blue window as long as I could. I passed a guy sitting in the passenger seat of a car with the door open. “How about that sky?” I said. He looked up. “Beautiful! Just beautiful …” I turned the corner and saw an old woman on her porch. “How about that sky?” I said. She smiled and shook her head in awe. “Who could make something like that?” she said and entered into extended praise of god. To another old woman on another porch, “Isn’t that sky beautiful?” “Yes it is.” On the next block my eyes moistened. I ducked down a darkened block fearing I was about to lose it. I get why most of us try to edit sentimentality out of experience. It can be a little embarrassing. But it can be earned, too.
For a couple years in college I partnered with a friend and we wrote a political column for the school newspaper. We were the designated liberals–I think we saw our beat as Noam Chomsky and American imperialism. I distinctly recall editorial meetings when we would shout and point shaky fingers into the face of the conservative columnist. On better days we would be more playful with the conservative guy, who had a penchant for speaking in cliches, and we would try to invent or mash-up cliches that we hoped would enter his cliche lexicon to later embarrass him (“Tony, I think you’ve got your mistress’ underwear in your closet on this one …”).
We helped to start a student political group that aimed to be a sort of an umbrella organization of the disparate liberal groups on campus. We handed out condoms (taped to flyers that read, “Condoms not Contras”), protested against Nazis (Cue Blues Brothers: Elwood: Illinois Nazis. Jake: I hate Illinois Nazis), organized an April Fools Day Tribute to Ronald Reagan. I tried to grow facial hair and scowled. His girlfriend later became my girlfriend and we drifted apart, then drifted back to being good friends. Over the years we’ve stayed in irregular contact. I moved away from political writing, wanting to write something that had more of a shelf life (still working on that). He went into union organizing. We both got married and had children. I moved to the South …
The political fixations we had back then all seem almost quaint now.
In a recent email, he asked,
Can you imagine if we could have magically brought ourselves forward to this point in time from our vantage point back in 1986? What would we make of the shift in American politics? And would we be hopeful, or terrified? (Remember when the idea of using American military in foreign countries was unthinkable? We were protesting proxy wars then.)
Ah, proxy wars. Them was the days.
It’s often assumed a person grows more politically conservative as they grow older. Personally, that’s not the case. Politically I’m pretty much the same, though I’m not quite as in-your-face about it as I once was. And I like to think I’m wiser, that I have a longer view of things. I’m less certain and see complexity where I once saw simplicity. I find meaning in my family and in my writing and other creative endeavors, not in abstract political goings-on. I’m happier, too.
But lately I’m feeling more and more angst about political matters. This whole Cordoba House near ground zero controversy has really gotten to me. But it’s not just that, it’s the whole array of bullshit “issues” the right wing keeps dreaming up. Oh, how offended people are. Sometimes it seems like we’re just a nation of outrage junkies.
Over the past year my brother (12 years older) has sent me a slew of ludicrous chain emails, everything from Obama isn’t American to all Muslims cannot be trusted. Each time I have dutifully fact checked the nonsense (it doesn’t take long to cut and paste into Snopes.com). All of my adult life I’ve been having these kinds arguments with my brother. I’ve grown better at avoiding emotional investment in his nonsense, mostly because his political beliefs lack content and are really just feelings, but lately I’ve found myself thinking that I don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. And that’s sad. Yet his home is our designated hurricane evacuation destination, so I suppose I’ll be seeing him sometime in the next month or two. And that should be fun. He’s also prone to saying stupid shit about New Orleans.
Could it be that things have actually gotten worse in the past 20-25 years?
I know the culture doesn’t move in a straight line. There are always backlashes, fits and starts. In 1986 I would have been shocked that gay marriage would ever seem inevitable. In 1986 I would not have been shocked that I would someday marry an African American woman and have a child together, but to have a biracial president? No freaking way would I have seen that one coming.
I think the right wing hyperbole we’re witnessing is essentially the last gasps of a white majority culture not coming to terms with the vast demographic changes our country faces. Add to the mix the 9/11 attacks, a whacked economy, a brown president, a mid-term election, and here we are.
There’s one other change I didn’t see coming that I really like: Senator Al Franken. Senator Al yesterday said the conservative attacks against the proposed Cordoba House are “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.”
Thanks, Al. I needed that.
I’ve had this semi-private fantasy where I tote around a paint gun to shoot drivers’ cars with when people blow through red lights, don’t use turn signals, etc. The main problem I saw with implementing this vision was the paint would serve as evidence of my criminal actions. But what if I harvested the poop from a colony of pigeons and filled paint gun pellets with bird poop instead of paint? Blasting a window with bird poop would offer clear deniability. My other problem, however, is the poop delivery system. Paint guns, at least to my untrained eyes, look like real guns, so my bird poop pellets may be answered with real bullets.
My father has a painting hanging over at Place St. Charles as part of the Louisiana Watercolor Society’s 40th Annual International Exhibition:
© David M. Bridges
It’s one of several paintings he’s done based on my photographs. Here’s my version.
I’m monogamous, liberal, and an atheist. It’s suggested this makes me not as dumb as some.
For some reason it didn’t occur to me that I might want to go to college until after high school. Nobody in my family had gone to college, so I guess it wasn’t a stretch I hadn’t considered it. However, after working at a gas station for a while I decided I should really do something else. Almost anything else. So I registered for classes at the community college–its acronym was CLC, usually interpreted as College of Last Chance. My first class was American history and the text was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I plowed through that book–I recall being shocked that I’d read more than 40 pages in a single sitting! What great stories from American history I’d never heard before! In a lot of ways, the experience of reading that book changed me. I was probably primed for its political message, since just a couple years earlier my father had joined a strike (technically, his union was honoring the strike of another union), the strike was broken after many months, and he lost his job and was blackballed from other jobs for years. The union even paid me $4/hr to walk the picket line for a while, where I was cussed at and, yes, spat on. By the end my father was disillusioned with not only management but also with his union and with many of the people he thought were his friends and even some family members, including his own father. I think Zinn’s book helped me see that my father’s story was about more than my father and our family. But I think it was more than the politics of Zinn’s book that made such an impression on me. It just plain made me want to learn more.
So I owe a lot to Howard Zinn. I’m very sorry he’s gone.
Update: A friend points out that I left out a salient detail about my journey to college. When I worked at that gas station one of my co-workers was Ed, a responsibility averse yet diligent guy in his 60s who worked the daytime full serve island. He had darkly tanned skin with sharp creases in his face, I assumed from all the full serves. Ed had this habit of keeping a capless Bic pen in his breast pocket. But every time he returned the pen to his pocket, he left a black or blue mark on his shirt, so his shirts had generations of pen marks above his breast pocket, fresh ones over varying shades of faded ones. He just didn’t give a shit about the pen marks. I’ll say this for Ed, though. He was the only person who worked there, other than the manager, who ever wore a uniform. So it wasn’t like it was his shirt. I think those pen marks probably played some role in getting me to college, and Zinn helped me to keep going.
I came across a great blog a while back that a photographer wrote which featured only descriptions of pictures he didn’t, for whatever reason, take. Usually they were fleeting images, the kind that would require photographic gear in your eyeballs to capture. Sorry I can’t find/link to it, but it was nicely done. So let me steal the concept for this post.
Picture:
Driving down Freret Street Wednesday morning on my way to dropping my daughter off at school, I was struck at how the low bright sun blasted drivers in the eastbound lane. Traffic ebbed and flowed by dictate of the cop near Lusher’s Fortier campus. So I had plenty of time to appreciate the light that illuminated drivers’ faces in such interesting ways: hard shadows cast by sun visors blacked out foreheads, or nearly made faces glow, and add to that the talking faces, the glum faces, the ones on the phone and the others drinking coffee, the talking hands, and I was captivated by the stream of images–until I realized I was driving through a red light and my primordial brain crushed the anti-lock (great investment!) brakes in the middle of the intersection, averting an accident, not to mention a traffic ticket and spiking car insurance. (And no traffic camera at that intersection yet). I won’t say I was panting but it was one of those “glad to be alive” jolts. There are worse ways to start the day.
So, to any drivers I may have terrified and/or angered at Freret and Jefferson Wednesday morning around 7:50 a.m., I apologize.
I still want those pictures, though. I’ll be back.
You know you wanna start the new year right.
Mild flu-like symptoms. Been feeling feverish on and off for about a week. Achy. For a couple days I actually felt better. The last couple days, though, my energy level dropped considerably. However, I’m told other people who get the flu, whichever one it is, have many more symptoms–and more severe ones.
Attempted to doze off to C-SPAN today. It was a House Committee hearing of some kind, something related to immigration, and I found myself pulled in by something a Boeing executive said. He said Boeing calculated what was the largest budget they could likely secure from Congress for a contract to develop a border video surveillance system that turned out to be both more expensive and crappier than anticipated. Once they got that budget number, they determined the parameters for R & D.
So I turned off C-SPAN. Slept.
Blogged.
