My beloved city
I'm trying to go to sleep, but I can't stop surfing the internet for the latest news, pictures, anything of my beloved city of New Orleans that is currently sitting underwater. I have received many calls from friends and relatives who all know that I lived there and they are concerned about the city that I loved and my friends who are still there. These conversations have again made vivid what it is that I loved about it and I thought I'd try to describe it here.
New Orleans is a place where meals are consumed with gusto, drinks are drunk all day long, celebrations are big and everything is celebrated -- Halloween, the French Quarter, the classic Mardi Gras, Jazz, food, Art, Music. There is a sense that this could be the last celebration, meal, festival and people engage as if it were their last days on earth. This spirit is not depressing; it's a spirit that is infectious and creates a world that you never really want to leave and that gets in your blood. The weather is hot and muggy, it slows things down and draws the celebrations long into the evening. People of all eclectic backgrounds know each other and frequently socialize. Eccentricity is embraced in all forms. I could go on, but in reading this I'm not doing justice to the place. As it turns out, it is too hard to put into words what makes the city so vibrant.
For me, New Orleans is the scene of so many memories of loves, of laughter, of parties, of people that will never again converge at the same time in the same place & not because of this current tragedy but because it is a fluid place that hold precious moments in time. Watching this disaster is breaking my heart.
New Orleans is a place where meals are consumed with gusto, drinks are drunk all day long, celebrations are big and everything is celebrated -- Halloween, the French Quarter, the classic Mardi Gras, Jazz, food, Art, Music. There is a sense that this could be the last celebration, meal, festival and people engage as if it were their last days on earth. This spirit is not depressing; it's a spirit that is infectious and creates a world that you never really want to leave and that gets in your blood. The weather is hot and muggy, it slows things down and draws the celebrations long into the evening. People of all eclectic backgrounds know each other and frequently socialize. Eccentricity is embraced in all forms. I could go on, but in reading this I'm not doing justice to the place. As it turns out, it is too hard to put into words what makes the city so vibrant.
For me, New Orleans is the scene of so many memories of loves, of laughter, of parties, of people that will never again converge at the same time in the same place & not because of this current tragedy but because it is a fluid place that hold precious moments in time. Watching this disaster is breaking my heart.
posted by LuLu at
2:14 AM
1 Comments:
Thank-you TJH2. I cannot bear that this has become a political debate. Now is the time to help people not to fight about who did what/didn't do what/should have done what. There is plenty of time for that later. And I hope that doesn't become the focus. The focus should be on preventing this sort of tragedy from happening again in any of our vulnerable cities, including New Orleans.
Oh, and the city will be beautiful again. New Orleans will recover from this. The spirit of the people who live there will never let this glorious utopia of a city die this way.
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