Birthday Reflections
from August 29
I share a birthday with “the Storm.” It’s the day when people stop and reflect on a moment in time that split their lives into a "before and after." I reflect too on this day, in 1983 and in 2005, which marks a time before and after me, and before and after Hurricane Katrina.
2024
Reflections on Disappearance
My hometown was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. But there were two different kinds of physical destruction (let’s stick with physical destruction this year). "Up da road" in St. Bernard Parish, where I lived (though this is relative to your reference point in “da road”), the Storm left us something. Moldy, water-logged, off-kilter, haunting remains of what was once our houses, our schools, our parks, our grocery stores, our dance studios, our banks, our restaurants, our fire stations, our bowling alley, our donut shops, our churches; you get the point. Though they resembled some version of hell, they gave us something to point and gasp at, something to cry about, something to source our nightmares, something to mourn.
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Here is a photo of our dining room after the Storm.
"Down ‘na road" (now objectively “down”) where I spent a large portion of my childhood, the storm left nothing more than some concrete slabs and steps leading to nowhere. The ice house in Ycloskey, LA, where my paw paw died from a heart attack after climbing the stairs to repair the machines, was still there. The Storm left that. But it did not leave the metal stool he sat on by the single window facing the bayou in the “office” shed, flipping switches to send ice and fuel through large hoses to boats loading up for the next trip. It left no ice hose to steady as ice surged through it from the ice house, across the road, and into the boats where it stood ready to keep fresh shrimp cold in the hot Louisiana summer; no La-Z-Boy chair where I sat and watched the little antenna tv while my paw paw sorted through the wooden box rolodex to add ice and fuel charges to the right boat’s “tab” as fishermen came in and out and paid what they could for now. Hopefully, they’d have a good trip. No rolodex, no office shed, no boats; no dock where my dad unloaded his shrimp, where my paw paw stood in front of the conveyer belt weighing and counting shrimp in a hanging metal scoop while fisherman watched carefully sometimes lobbying for a lower count; no big metal desk in the dock shed that came nearly up to my shoulders and held the calculator that I used to multiply the number of #s for each shrimp count and the corresponding price needed to write the fishermen's checks, no calculator, no big leather check binder, no desk, no shed.
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In the other direction at “the Junction,” where my grandparents lived there were no “poker keno” cards sitting moldy in the box, no table or chairs from the kitchen where we played card games for hours, no Magnalite pots that we could talk about trying to save for another round of gumbo or red beans and rice on the stove, no stove, no kitchen. No pieces of linoleum floor that my maw maw could worry about us scratching when we rearranged the furniture in the middle room for the 100th time, no furniture, no middle room, nothing to rearrange. No toilet from the small bathroom where my cousin Mandy and I were traumatized by the biggest flying roach we’ve ever seen inside, no roaches inside, no inside. No "under the house," where we had birthday parties and ate boiled seafood and uncle Chris played his guitar and we danced “the jitterbug” to Fats Domino, no 16-foot pilings to hold the house up, no front porch, no house. The slab was there though, and I remember thinking how small it looked.
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Here is a pre-Storm picture of my grandparent's house in Reggio, LA.
Just when you think you’ve properly mourned the physical destruction from the Storm, you turn 41 and realize that you’ve not had time to mourn the disappearance.