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Home is Where the Heartbreak Is The newspaper web sites, the evening news and the radio stations are packed from the top to the bottom of every hour with updates on the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. You can’t escape them. Even if you stick your fingers in your ears and scream “La la la la la la la la.” I know, I already tried it. It just annoyed everyone in the office and made my fingers smell like olives. There has been a lot of talk about the destruction to some of the city’s oldest and most historic landmarks like the Cabildo, Storyville, Jackson Square, St. Louis Cathedral, the Superdome and Bourbon Street, the most vomited upon street in the entire country if you don’t count Barbara Streisand’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Frankly, those sites can just crumble into the Earth into a finely crushed powder. When I’m watching the news or reading updates on the web, I’m looking for signs of my grandparents’ house on Annunication Street in Uptown, a house Grandpa Gallagher built with his own hands more than 60 years ago and proudly tried to stay in even though he couldn’t take care of himself and my Grandma after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’m looking for signs of my aunts’ and uncles’ houses in Lakeview and Metairie where I spent many Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easters and Mardi Gras eating my head weight in spicy, fried food cooked by a loving group of people who made me who I am today -- successful, soft-spoken and gassy. I’m looking for some sign of my friends, some of whom I have known since elementary school and still knock back a few pitchers with whenever I’m down in the Big Easy. The silver lining in these dark clouds is I haven’t even heard from any of my ex-girlfriends either. New Orleans is the town where I was born and raised. It’s a place I have loved and bragged about with all of my heart for as long as it’s been able to beat (which is a miracle in itself given all the Shiner Boch and industrial-processed cheese spread it had to deal with in college). Today, 80 percent of New Orleans stands under 15 feet of water. The homes that I grew up in, the schools I attended and the special places I remember -- from the Uptown Square Mall, where I had my first kiss, to my Aunt Marlene’s French Quarter candy factory, where I held my first part-time job -- are damaged beyond repair or already gone. For the first three days after the hurricane’s passing, I dealt with the pain the only way I knew how -- through humor. Cracking jokes with my family and friends kept my spirits high and my vocal chords from bleeding. It got me through my Grandpa Melancon’s funeral, it got me through 9/11 and it got me through my high school prom. People piled into the Superdome, the last refuge for people who couldn’t evacuate the city, by getting in lines that snaked up those huge entrance ramps and down Poydras Street. All I could think was, “Wow, the Superdome hasn’t been this packed since...ever!”. My brother, Paul, a fellow hardcore football fan, called me that night and wondered what the Saints would do now. “Lose, what else?” I responded. President George Bush cut his vacation short and vowed to fund the rescue and rebuilding efforts of New Orleans. He said he would start them himself by repaying the bar tab he ran up at Tipitina’s in the 1970s. Then, my thoughts turned to those funny personal memories. I remembered back to those nights I spent in the French Quarter when I attended the National Society of Newspaper Columnists convention with Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez and smoked cigars from Mexico that he had snuck into the country in his pants. I remembered my cousin Katy’s wedding reception at the Jax Brewery where my cousin Michael danced with a pretty young thing called Gin N. Tonic and almost caught a carriage ride down Decauter Street from five floors up the hard way. I would write here about the times I spent with my friends in the French Quarter, but I really don’t remember many of them. I swear Mom. Then the flood gates broke. The sad truth is, some of it can’t be saved. Most of it will be gone before there is time to save it. I broke down and cried. I cried for my family who lost their homes and businesses. I cried for my friends who have to find new jobs and relocate from homes they just bought. I cried for my city that’s being torn apart by nature, fear, panic, disease and death. My old man who hates it when I call him my old man, who lived and loved in New Orleans longer than I did, told me in an email from work quite succinctly, “My history is disappearing.” I didn't know what to tell him, so I wrote back with something writer Harlan Ellison once said about the Holocaust, a tragic piece of his family’s history. The only way your history can disappear “is if you forget it.” New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast will return. I’ve seen a lot of photographs of Katrina’s aftermath and the people whose lives she destroyed, but very few of them show people who are crying. Some of them are very sad. Some of them are hugging their families. But some of them want to go back home even if there's no home to go back to. Some of them are smiling and even laughing. Some of them are glad just to be alive. That’s the way life has always been in my hometown -- people who love to be alive and love to show it. Long before the hurricane, they showed a lust for life I have not seen anywhere else in this world, and that feeling is stronger than ever before. Their home won’t die because they won’t let it happen.
We will celebrate the
rebirth of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast some day, and we
will thank God when it happens -- right up until the hangover.
Danny Gallagher is a
freelance writer, reporter and humorist who lives in Texas and left his
heart in his other pants. He can be found on the web at
www.dannygallagher.net.
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