Lessons Learned from Katrina: The Pain of Procrastination

One of the Lessons: I Never Got To Visit 8/31/05 9:22 P.M.

Laying here tonight, television off, air conditioning churning, trying to give myself a break from some of the Gulf images, I just got this tight wincing feeling in my stomach. And I finally realized what it was about. I never got to visit New Orleans.

New Orleans is a place that I have been longing to visit for the last several years. Professional conferences have been held there. I’ve looked at jobs there. I’d even gotten on their tourism bureaus mailing list and had been fantasizing about visiting one sultry holiday with my sweetie. All I could ever imagine was the food, the jazz, the history of the place. And one of the things that I believe is happening to me as I get older is that my fascination is growing for the things of my parents, the places and haunts of their memories, their childhood, their coming of age in the South. So, this week, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, when my mother speaks of the Biloxi she knew or my aunt recalls just how many times she’d been in and out of New-awlins, it was hard to hold back the tears.

I am a daughter of that netherland, that middling space between North and South...between the city and the country...between mama’s house and nana’s house...the Chicago-New-Awlins-Jackson, Miss connection was just in the blood. We lived our lives in Chicago, but Mississippi was always present in their speech and stories and memories or plans for the next visit to see Unka’ John. The thing that I feel more plainly now than ever is how important, how central, how defining the South was for that wave of young educated blacks who came north in the late 1950s/early 1960s. In Chicago, Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana and at time Arkansas and Texas were always in our ears, on our plates, just under the surface of city living.

So, in all the emotions that will continue to come up over these next days and weeks and months, I will mourn—there is indeed so much to mourn: the massive loss of life, the displacement, the uncertainty for all of us as this thing unfolds, the grim events yet to unfold...as the water recedes and reveals what Katrina really cost us as bodies and momentos and shards of lives collect in mounds on the sides of roads.

But most of all, I will mourn the things I took for granted. I spent my time visiting intriguing locales in Africa and Europe and the Middle East. In my procrastination, I boasted smuggly, even snidely, that "there weren’t many places of interest in the US." I somehow kept putting it off and saying, "oh, I’ll get there" or "I’ll go there next time". Never did I imagine that a storm would take New Orleans from us so quickly, so dramatically, so completely.

Is it possible to mourn a friend you’ve never met? If so, I do indeed mourn you for a while, New Orleans, you were the stuff of legends... mm—mm----mm.