Alone in New Orleans

I am alone at the moment for the first extended time since I came back from New Orleans two weeks ago. Scott is away at a four-day training with the reserves, and Aimee is at driver's ed for five hours (driving plus 3 hours of class). It's odd how I fluctuate between needing company and enjoying my privacy. At times, especially when Scott would go away for weekends for reserves, I would get very depressed and just mope around the house doing nothing. I suppose I shouldn't be that attached, that I should be able to entertain myself for one weekend, but I often can't. Perhaps it comes from being from a big family and always having someone around. Now Aimee is here--and as much as she annoys me sometimes, I like having her around when Scott is gone.

But tonight I am by myself, and I have been having a fabulous time. I planted some more spinach and lettuce in a flower box with the neighbor girl. There's a lilac above the spot, so I don't know if it will get enough sun, but I like digging in the dirt. And as we all know, I like weeding, so I pulled dandelions for about an hour. The person who owned the house before us was a weed expert, but I think he just grew weeds so he could practice identifying them, rather than actually killing them. My goal is to pull them all before they go to seed. It looks like a miniature gopher has invaded our back yard.

I also just finished the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, which was ...it's hard to put words to it. It's an autobiography about his time in several concentration campus during the Holocaust, so words like amazing and fabulous--words that you typically use to describe books--don't seem appropriate, and definitely don't do it justice. But it was very powerful, and focused more on his emotions and what it feels like for your humanity to slip away. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his work. It was also a slim novel, so I could read it in a few hours. I know he has also written Dawn and Day, so I shall have to read them next.

I've also been meaning to write down some of the odd things that I saw in New Orleans (when I was alone and could wander wherever I wanted to, as long as it was in the French Quarter, other people were around, and it wasn't nighttime):

* A sign under a bridge warning that the bridge will freeze during ice and snow. It was 70 degrees and 97% humidity--and apparently never snows.

*Palm readers and fortune tellers parked outside of the the St. Louis Cathedral.

*Signs on the back of the Hilton Convention Center women's bathrooms warning pregnant women not to drink. Of course, I have seen these signs before, but not on bathroom doors.

*I only saw one McDonald's and one Subway--and they were in little hole-in-the-wall stores just like every other store, not using an entire building devoted to their wonderfulness.


Some interesting things:

*The air conditioning there is perfect. Most times air conditioned places are freezing, but this was the perfect temperature.

*The accent was not nearly as "Southern" as I was expecting it to be--and everyone was very friendly.

*The food was delicious, and I someone managed to go the entire time without eating anything too spicy.

*The French Quarter has cobblestones and 3-story buildings. It really is a city where you stumble upon hidden treasures as you wander around.


And some of the things which were sad:

*The water line still 4-feet up the buildings from after the flood (one of the locals told me that the hurricane itself didn't have much rain--the town flooded purely because of the levies breaking)

*Segregation is alive and well in the South. Every single staff person I saw at the hotel was black.

*The town has lost a lot of people. It felt at times like I was walking through a ghost town, rather than a major tourist spot.

*Many of the schools never re-opened, so the town lost a lot of funding that was tied directly to the schools. Most of the funding provided has gone to food, shelter, and medicine, but almost nothing has gone to rebuild community programs that focus on literacy, music, art, history--in other words, those necessary things which make a community productive and worth living in.