An Exile in Time and Place

28 August, 2012

An Exile in Time and Place

WASN'T IT A 

MIGHTY DAY!!!! 

I remember that September - 
T'was seven years ago
I left my home in New Orleans 
And the mighty winds did blow!

Oh, wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day?!
Wasn't it a mighty day that mornin' when Katrina came to town.

The airwaves shouted warnings:
'You'd better leave this place!'
But they never meant to leave their homes
Till death was in their face.

The seas began to rollin'.
The ships they could not land,
I heard a captain crying, "God,
Please save this drowin' land!" 

Wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day that mornin' when Katrina came to town.

The winds they then subsided
We thought the worst was done
We thought we dodged a bullet
From an awesome loaded gun!

There were levees there in New Orleans
That kept the water down
But the high tide from Lake Pontchartrain
Let water into that town!

Oh, wasn't it a mighty day!
Wasn't it a mighty day!
Wasn't it a mighty day
That mornin' when Katrina came to town!

A surge - like Ol' Man River
Came rushing to and fro'
I saw my daddy drowndin', Lawd
I saw my mamma go!

Wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day that mornin' when Katrina came to town.

Some folks they sought a refuge

On bridges in the air...
But when they needed water, Lawd
Couldn't get anywhere!

They went up on the rooftops
For help they raised a cry
But help was slow in comin'
And the choppers flew on by!

Wasn't it a mighty day? 

Wasn't it a mighty day?
Wasn't it a mighty day that mornin' when Katrina came to town.

(Apologies to Chad Mitchell Trio and the Highwaymen - the original Mighty Day was about the Galveston Flood. I have tried to rework this for Katrina.) I am still searching for an author to credit for the original lyrics.

      It Ain't Dere No Mo'

The other day I got in touch with an old family friend - a guy I knew way back when. Every once in awhile it happens... I'll hear someone like him with a real New Orleans accent and we'll reminisce: talk about the old neighborhoods, old times, familiar streets, and people we knew. A little pang will hit me, and for a minute or two I vividly recall those old days, old places, good food and loving faces - now gone forever - but not forgotten! 

A favorite post-Katrina saying in New Orleans is: "It ain't dere no mo'!" It is a lament about what used to be... places I once knew and grew up with as a kid that, sadly, I can't take my grandchildren to and say: "Hey, I used to play here. I went to school there." They have all gone to join the swelling ranks of things that I look back upon.

A melancholy jazz song, played on Pete Fountain's clarinet, asks the question: "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

I know I do! I miss it each night and day, as the song continues. It's always been a part of me, and always will. Recently, my best friend, who still lives there, asked me a fair question: "So why don't you come back home?"

The thing is, I CAN'T go home anymore. It ain't there no more. Sure, the CITY is still there, but, like me, it, too, has moved on. It's not stuck in the past. Like Ol' Man River, it just goes rollin' along, always changing, ever becoming something else - as I have - as WE ALL have --- as it SHOULD be. 

I've spent more than half of my life around Cubans, who left their beloved island - most never to return. For some reason, I have always felt a connection to Cuban nostalgia - never dreaming that, like them, one day I, too, would become an exile from my home town, missing what once was. 

Like them, I am an exile in time and place.

A Cuban who, after so many decades away from home, finally manages to return to the land he or she left behind, gets off the plane to find quite a different place from the land of his or her memories. It's no longer the same land of childhood memories. It has all changed. It has moved on. So it is with me: even when I return to my hometown, it is, and can never again be the same.  We must come to terms with this reality, no matter how much it may hurt.

 

                               HURRICANES: 

Hurricanes have been part of my family since at least 1893. My great-grandmother handed her 3-day-old son and toddler daughter to rescuers in pirogues as the water rose higher and higher. Her husband never returned, nor did her future second husband's father. The storm raged for hours, obliterated an entire island of Chenière Caminada in south Louisiana, killed over 2,000 people, and then it was gone.

The skies once again cleared, the dead were buried, the débris as cleared, houses were rebuilt, and crops were replanted. Life went on. An entire island, though, would never be seen again - it had sunk beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

My grandfather told me about the great hurricane of 1915 which hit New Orleans - how boards and chickens went flying in the wind. HIS father (my great-grandfather) went down to Belize in the mid-1930's to help the nuns of that unfortunate country rebuild their convent after a major hurricane caused catastrophic damage there. He used his personal time and money to do it, and sought no recognition or repayment for his trouble - and got none. 

I myself weathered over a dozen tropical systems - from numerous depressions to Donna in 1960, Hilda in 1963, Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969. Safe in Houston, I watched helpless on TV as Katrina nearly destroyed, and forever changed my beloved New Orleans. My family fled Rita as I drank a hot chocolate in Scotland. We all fled Ike the following year. Family in Maryland later suffered from Sandy - and that one was supposed to have been a Category one storm!

There is too much sadness, to much pain to take ANY cyclonic storm lightly. These tempests remind those of us who care to learn the lesson, that our time on this earth is precious - and precarious! We need to learn to treat our one-and-only home planet with care, and we need also to learn to treat each other with that same care, or else one day our lives may literally be gone with the wind.