In Lieu of August Dispatches, II & I

I took Friday night and most of yesterday "off". After getting home from New Orleans late Monday night and diving straight into a work week with back to school wake up times (ARRGGH!), I just didn't have the strength to go out Friday night, as is my custom, and my best friend, spending her first weekend at her new mountain home waiting for her horses to arrive, wasn't here to drag my tired, old ass out into the world.  I did manage yesterday to make the grocery runs this little family needs to get through the coming week, but other than that, I've been worthless, except for some blogosphere exploration. I find myself this Sunday afternoon, enjoying this moment of maximum happiness over having a holiday tomorrow (well, maybe second to the crack of dawn in the morning).

I never posted August Dispatches. It's a bit of a blur. Of course, the highlight was last weekend's  Rising Tide Conference, and I need to thank all of those fine folks who conceived and executed this wonderful information sharing event: Oyster, Adrastos, Maitri, Dangerblond, Mark, Alan, Ray (great post today about what geeks we've all become), Blake, Ashley, Mominem, Loki, Lisa and Troy (who am I leaving out?). Some of my readers have requested pictures, and I confess that I didn't take any. The good news is, that's not a problem because many others did (some were uploading them from the conference) and you can find them all over the NOLA links in my gutter. Some of the best can be found: here, here, and here (Maitri also has some wonderful pictures of the Katrina Anniversary Second Line to the Superdome). Somewhere in those picture links are some fine pics of Dangerblond's party following the conference.

The highlight of the Conference itself, was the participation of Robert Block and Chris Cooper, Wall Street Journal correspondents and authors of the recently released book, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of National Security.  They were articulate, insightful, and highly accessible. In addition to their keynote duties, they stayed for most of the day, signing books, talking and listening (highly recommended podcast here), and Cooper participated in an afternoon panel discussion on the "Influence of Journalists and Bloggers". I have only just started their book, and I hate to say I'm not going to get much farther until I get caught up on the work I have due for my internet marketing client, to which I will turn upon finishing this post. The book is first on my list when I'm caught up with the duties for which I am paid.

So, I put my head down and walk into the wind. It's fall, and there's no fun scheduled and not much room for adding it. This could be my last year of day-to-day, full-time mothering, as my youngest is a senior in high school and may very well go away to college next year. I am trying to savor every moment, and I'm happy to still have folks around to cook for. I did end up buying two pork tenderloins at Costco yesterday, and then saw the baby back ribs on sale at Kroger. I just couldn't resist, so there's some serious cooking in my immediate future (food porn to follow - I'm taking suggestions). We are very busy at the KnockingShitDownCo and I'm liking it less, so I'll try to focus on my client and look for one or two more. I work to stay open to whatever happens and to see the paths that are offered before me (damn, that's harder than it ought to be). It's kind of lonely, though, I think, precisely because it's so full. I don't know if I'll ever get back to a place where I can imagine fitting any kind of romance into my life. I might have been broken of that. At least I can't envision it now, can't see where there's room for such shenanigans. Still, I am glad to have new friends, especially those new friends, smart and funny with such generous spirits, who don't mind if I get carried away by a singular focus on New Orleans and The Aftermath. It's nice to go there from time to time and hang out with people who don't roll their eyes and sigh heavily when I start talking about that again.

Well, it seems I've gone long (who, moi?), but, sorry guys, I have to make it worse. I was browsing through my posts from last year and I found one that bears repeating, especially in light of the recent discussion about the evacuation, On Augues 31, 2005, I wrote, In Lieu of August Dispatches:

It's so sad it breaks the heart, and it's impossible for me to take my eyes off of it. I had fallen in love with my son's adopted home, New Orleans, and his university, Loyola. It was, what appeared to be the perfect fit. I thought I knew what we were getting into. I'd been watching hurricanes approach the coast of North Carolina ever since his older brother headed up there to school in the fall of 1991 [Sic! It was 2001]. What I didn't understand, until I started researching as Ivan approached last fall, was that New Orleans was different, uniquely vulnerable to The Big One, as it came to be called. Aptly named.

I learned how to watch hurricanes, how to read the NOAA/NHC data and Katrina didn't get my attention until Friday morning, because she approached so innocently, looking very much like no big deal, a failing low, sputtering over the Bahamas mere days before she woke suddenly and roared over southern Florida, tearing it flat up. Friday morning, when she emerged into the Gulf of Mexico in a surprising manner and southwesterly direction, I started paying attention, close attention, and in the course of the morning I saw the computer models, one by one as they were issued, move the forecast track to southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi. Over the course of the day Friday I saw the National Hurricane Center do something I've seen them do so many times before: They revised the forecast track, but only slightly. It appears to me, after years of watching them, that they don't like to make radical changes in their forecast track (the "cone"), even when it's called for. It makes them look, for lack of a better word, wrong. This time, they were likely rattled a bit by Katrina's barreling over them the night before in Miami, too close for comfort and stronger than expected, but it took them almost twenty-four hours to inch that cone over to where I believe they knew by mid-day Friday, it belonged. I called my son in New Orleans at 2:00 on Friday afternoon and said, "Heads up, baby, this one is coming your way and it could be The Big One. Get ready to leave. I'll call you in the morning."

I suppose that the possibility of The Big One contributes to the spirit of New Orleans, providing the last, unspoken line to their fully-lived chant, "Laissez le bontemps roullez!" Because it could all be gone tomorrow! The New Orleans accent is melodic and beautiful. Their celebratory embrace of life, in all of its pain and glory, is honest and expressive, earthy and joyous. They deserve better than this. They deserve a Red Cross distributing food and medicine and dry safe beds in which to sleep. They deserve a ride out of town, whether on land or water, and safe shelter. They deserved the seventy-two hours they needed to evacuate. They could have had it.

May God be with them now.

Well "now" has gone on for over a year, and they still need our prayers, our dollars, our volunteer hours and our attention. Read their blogs. Tell your friends to read their blogs. Our President might consider the Gulf Coast, "that part of the world" (at least he keeps putting it that way), but they are our fellow Americans and they're heroically living in it every day. They are the single most vital ingredient in the recovery, down there just doing it, and they're  talking so we should at least listen.



Edit: I've just found a link to Block's and Cooper's Keynote remarks and Q & A recorded at the Rising Tide Conference. It is so worth listening to. They are smart and zeroed in on what really happened and what it says about our national security going forward. They spend a fair amount of time discussing blogs, blogging & bloggers, and their respective places in the media universe. Sometimes they're funny. Many thanks to Ashley Morris for providing this.

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