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Email From NOLA IIf
It was always pretty quiet on this block of Rocheblave. And Sunday mornings in New Orleans were always quiet. I was getting ready to say how completely different and eerie is the quiet here now when a vessel twenty blocks behind me, floating down the Mississippi, gave a long sustained blast on the foghorn. I heard a bird chirp a minute ago. Somebody's rooting around in one of the Bienville houses, whose back yards back up perpendicularly to my side yard. Three crazy Blue Jays flying around, one slid down the slope of my porch railing earlier. They not making any noise though. I hear some vehicles moving somewhere. The cooling fan of my universal charging device plugged into the cigarette lighter makes a little noise. There go that aggressive Blue Jay sound.
Heard somebody say recently that the Monk Parakeets are gone but I saw some yesterday. They noisy too. Just not right now.
There was a muffled thump and a vibration felt, maybe the structural beam of a far off structure crashing down. And finally, a songbird.
The chauffeur went back to Houston for a few days. On the way out he called me and said the Red Cross has set up another food truck at the battered and boarded up Shell station, Orleans and Broad. I do not fit the profile of the beleauguered victim. I was not here for the storm and my house did not suffer any great damage from the flood waters. I have cold running water, and toilet, and even though I am without power I am living pretty much the same ascetic lifestyle I take with me wherever I go. Even on the small scale that describes my assets, I have considerably more value than debt and can afford to be here as an observer and watchdog of my block for some time longer, before my conservative fiscal sense requires me to take a job, here or elsewhere. So I haven't been hitting the Red Cross trucks but the chauffeur has and I have sampled several different styrofoam container filled lunch selections. The best so far has come from City Hall where the chauffeur was last week trying unsuccessfully to find out something useful but came away only with two lunches. It was the lunches provided for the few employees still employed down there. Brisket with gravy over rice and crisp salad with dressing and that stuff I cannot think of its name but its not cauliflower and I won't eat it anywhere else but New Orleans. Its like a relative of the lettuce family, thick, clear leaves, with some fat cooked with it and preferably some spices on the hot side.
So yesterday was my first direct contact with the Red Cross and there was nobody else waiting and I just pulled up, asked Lorina to hold please and went and got two lunches. The woman told me to tell other people because what the deal is--I mean God bless the Red Cross and all, but--there just aren't that many actual citizens living here, on the east bank of New Orleans, in these poorer neighborhoods. The lunch was delicious, chunks of white chicken meat w/gravy over rice, and an apple, two bottles of water and three mini-packs of Oreos. There are no restaurants nearby other than the FQ and Uptown, and nothing cheap and what the Red Cross is giving out is quality and relative to what I was getting pre-K in those same styrofoam containers, from various local sources, I would gladly pay three dollars for, but nobody is charging for, or providing, cheap food here so, such as it is convenient, and doesn't require that I burn a lot of gasoline to acquire, I will gladly accept free food, from any source, any time. Driving down Broad back to Rocheblave a dude walking in the street flagged me and I stopped and he was looking for South Broad and I said you on North Broad. He said I know, I said get in, shifted the lunches and that mornings newspaper and kept on in the direction I was heading. Four or five blocks later we crossed Canal and I said Canal is the North/South divider and three blocks later dropped him at the Carpenter's Union, behind which is a trailer, out of which I can only guess is being conducted the business of business, as regards carpenters. Here, take a lunch I said and he said no, he wasn't hungry, but I said, come on man, they free, and he smiled and took one, saying surely somebody in there would be hungry. He got out and stood there looking in the rolled down passenger window, all beamy-eyed, like nobody had done anything nice for him in a long time. He looked sort of like a blond, middle-age version of that actor who had his heyday in the forties and fifties, Wally Cox. I said, hey man, you are entirely welcome. I was a little bit my edgy aggressive self because I was momentarily pissed off. Nobody should have to be that grateful for accurate directions, a free ride, and a chicken casserole.