January 12

This morning, our church choir sang an original poem set to music written by one of our own, a voice major and music-therapist in training named Sarah Ruth Altman. Below is the poem – linked here is a recording, starting at about 12:45, if you would like to hear us. While the L.A. fires have (not inappropriately) replaced New Orleans’s misfortune in the news cycle, as locals we are still bound up in the Bourbon Street terror attack, folding it into our collective consciousness. It takes some time to fit it down to a size that a human can tolerate. As a choir for Sarah Ruth’s simple piece we droned a wordless low chord behind her solo. It was quite hard to do – droning for five minutes straight on the same note requires breath control, patience, focus. It’s almost like meditating. If done without care, it can lead to overthinking breath and panicky gasping, or almost forgetting what note you’re singing – like all of a sudden looking at a word you know well and not recognizing it. It seemed to work best for me when I pushed on my diaphragm with two flat palms, just below the ribs: The counter-pressure makes it easier to control. Our quiet but steady rumble of open-chord sound grounded Sarah Ruth’s lilting soprano. The focus and control combined with the subject matter put us all into a Moment – a small few minutes that I won’t forget in an otherwise normal day.

“New Year’s Mourning” - by Sarah Ruth Altman
If I should wake on New Year’s Day to find our streets with violence stained, 
I will arise and weep for their fall back to the dust where come we all. 
If you should seek to strike with fear into our hearts whose homes are here, 
you cannot win; for this city of mine has ever light and dark intertwined. 
If we should look through eyes of tears toward a new Carnival year, 
our mourning breaks such holy rain even the bones shall rise again. 
The dead shall march in our parade Where’s death’s sting? Where’s victory, oh grave?

At the time we sang this it did not occur to me that I would be on Bourbon street within the hour, walking to my Mardi Gras krewe’s annual season brunch in the Rex Room at Antoine’s on the corner of St. Louis and Bourbon. I drove past the now-crowded memorial block where he turned off Canal onto Bourbon, then I continued right on Rampart at the corner where the Hard Rock hotel collapsed many years ago. That corner property is still a leveled construction site, and the entire Quarter is a road construction disaster zone right now – blocks of road closures like that pictured below. The work being done is unrelated to the terror attack but also one reason he wasn’t able to go farther: just three blocks down he crashed into a construction crane, which is very New Orleans. Our undoing is also our salvation, and vice versa.

I turned off Rampart at St. Ann and parked at my paralegal’s parking spot (he and his husband live in the Quarter and purchased two spots in a gated lot behind their home. They only own one car – I have free use of the other spot. It is the handiest damn thing.) It was chilly – low 50s – spitting rain. Antoine’s is a half mile away from where I parked – just a quick ten minute walk up Bourbon. My heart fluttered a bit as I turned right onto the pavement and walked the famous street, nearly alone due to a combination of the rain, the time of day/year, and likely residual fear. Today there are barriers on every block of it, somewhat security theater as some of them are light plastic I could easily lift and move. I found myself walking along the sidewalk, glancing nervously behind me every few steps, just checking. After a moment I didn’t like that breathless watchful feeling and I strode with more deliberate confidence than I felt to walk down the center of the street. I forced myself not to look back. For some reason it felt like the thing to do. Fuck terrorists, right?

Under a jaunty flowered umbrella my pink Nike Dunks plodded on through the puddles. St. Ann to Orleans. Orleans to St. Peter. Club and restaurant proprietors barked invitations as I walked – “Hey lady, come have lunch!” “Hey gal, hurricane, right here!” I gave a wrinkle-nosed no-thank-you smile under my purple wig and kept walking (we wear wigs at this thing, quite itchy but appropriate for the Gras). St. Peter to Toulouse, Toulouse to St. Louis – this was my turn. The next block is Conti, then Bienville, then Iberville – the three blocks where people died just over a week ago. I looked openly down those blocks towards Canal. It would be wrong to stare, but also felt somehow disrespectful and weak to avert my eyes. It’s so banal, the scene – just the usual tawdry bars and strip clubs, the animated neon signs blinking dully in the gloomy midday winter light. Chilly, and ordinary, and extraordinary too. Kenopsia is the term for the eerie sight of a normally-bustling place that is now vacant – like walking the high school hallways at night when no one is there. Staring down the ghosts on Bourbon today was not unlike that feeling. “Fuck you, terrorist” I whispered to myself, before turning down St. Louis, to take brunch at an establishment that has been operated in the same building on St. Louis street since 1868, one-hundred ten years before I was born. We drank purple champagne under a crystal chandelier, bantered with the in-house jazz trio, cheered and clapped when the waiter dimmed the lights and set the baked Alaska on fire. The Rex dining room perimeter is a museum to old Mardi Gras, with more than a century of costumes, doubloons, old invitations and shoes and headdresses worn by revelers long-dead. It was all very much to carry in my two hands today.

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.” – Aldous Huxley