Part 17: The Borderline Merry Ol' Month of May

In the first week of May, things did not seem so bleak. We took our 7th and 8th grade class trip concurrentl with the high school retreat. The retreat was scheduled to leave New Orleans the DAY that Hurricane Katrina hit us. Thankfully, they cancelled the trip ahead of time. Could you imagine having a brand-new high school, open for 8 days in all of history, and have every student ten hours away in Mentone, Ala., where cell reception is non-existant? Luckily, we had paid attention to the news enough that they got on the phone and alerted parents ahead of time.

This trip ended up being fun. Having the now significantly smaller high school with all of our 7/8s was more fun than we expected. We stayed at a sleep-away camp, where we split the two schools into two different areas. We only had the 8-hour train ride and 2-hour bus ride, as well as our closing-night campfire together. It worked out well, except for the sheer amounts of rain we had.

On the Wednesday of our trip, we had a surprise visit from Patty, the school president, and Mike, the Academy principal. Wiley, the high school principal, was on the trip with us. They interrupted all of our activities and called a meeting in the lodge. This is where we learned about our new patron Saint, Reggie Bush. Students and teachers and administrators alike wound up in absolute tears over the news. Happy tears, mind you...tears of relief....and we were all in absolulte shock over how wonderful he was. I managed to place a collect call home to Mark from a landline to share the news with him. And George W. thinks he's the Bush who's got the term "Shock and Awe" down pat.....he's grossly mistaken!

Melissa, who was my original teaching partner, was picked to go on the trip with us ot replace another teacher, Kerrie, who had daycare issues and was unable to join us. That also made the trip pleasant....especially since our train ended up being about 3 hours late arriving back in New Orleans.

Besides being a place where we learned fantastic news about our school's future, and a place to bond with my students, and a place where I got royal treatment by planning the trip with two other teachers (royal treatment being used here as a term to mean "sleeping in a special teacher building and getting chocolate ice cream one day"), as well as a place where I didn't have to work much with my current teaching partner, it was a wonderful escape. We left Louisiana. It was my first time out of state since my trip out West last summer with my travel camp. I stayed in New Orleans for the storm, evacuated to Baton Rouge and Morgan City right after the storm, went to school in Thibodaux for a few weeks, then came back to Metairie. I did not get the luxury of straying far from the destruction the way most people, my parents and brother included, did. I was able to leave the area and watch as the destruction levels decreased....until it reached an untainted perfection in, of all places, Northern Alabama. Until, at one point, on the train ride back to New Orleans, it started creeping back into our psyche and lines of vision.

There's really nothing more depressing than leaving the mess, going somewhere tranquil and beautiful, and then being faced with the stark reality of returning home.

On the train ride home, though, I was informed of the most excellent news I'd heard since August: my father's business was open again!!!! He was open for mild automotive services, like nails in tires, and had the convenience store open again. In a matter of days, they would start pumping gas again. The darkest days were over. A different mood came over the house. While my father came home very late, and usually aggravated, it was all very different from before my trip. He had some of his old complaints -- cranky customers, high gas prices (yes, even service station owners hate the raised prices!), and long hours. Each day was a new record high for gas, for service, and for food sales. The first day he opened, I drove almost 9 miles out of my way to get gas from him. He was the only person I would go to once again. I will fill up on Friday without needing to just in case I drive a lot on the weekend need gas, all because they close early on Saturday and are closed on Sunday.

Thank God.

Suddenly, the end of the school year was upon us. The week after the trip was the eighth graders' last real week of school. The next week was their exam week. Then, they graduated, leaving my classroom with a whopping 6 7th graders, assuming we had perfect attendance. Graduation was really nice. We were able to go to the church on our old campus to hold the Mass and ceremony. They all did so well, and it was a lovely day of happiness combined with sadness. Mark came to the graduation, because in April he switched from the overnight shift to 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. After the ceremony, we went to lunch at Semolina's. We tried to go to P.F. Chang's, but due to Katrina, they are still closed on Mondays. Ah well. I had the rest of the day off, which was nice. Then, it was back to the 7th graders to prepare them for their exams. Once those were over, we had to do report cards, and then we had to pack the entire school and the entire high school and move back to the other campus. We were being evicted, and the administration rearranged the school structure, really, to make us all fit in on the New Orleans campus.

The day of graduation, the school borrowing our campus, St. Dominic, was packing up. It was strange seeing them there. Good strange, though. Their campus had been repaired enough for them to move out. They will have a normal school year in the fall.

Also the week of graduation, we held our Annual Gala. It was a '70s theme: "Stairway to Heaven." They had a band, a silent auction (the adirondack chair my students painted and our room mother designed went for a couple hundred dollars, if I may say so...), and lots of food and spirits. They also worked out a deal for reduced prices on hotel rooms. Naturally, we took them up on that. It was a lovely hotel, and it was a nice break from our cramped quarters in my parents' house. The next day, we wandered around the French Quarter, giving local shops some business. They had given us the next day off, and Mark had taken the next day off, so we made good use of it. It was a nice distraction from the daily routine.

The following week, we had a barrage of parents and students needing service hours help us pack, caravan, lift, reach, and unpack. In a matter of three or four days, we were completely moved over. All that was left was unpacking and organizing.

However, in the midst of all of this, my maternal grandmother took a horrible turn. This is the grandmother who was in Houston for months and had been transferred to Hammond, La. She was 87 years old and suffered from Alzheimer's. She fell ot the bed and had a HORRIBLE black eye. My Uncle Mike flew in with his oldest, my cousin Cristina, who was going to be a college sophomore this year. He had been in around Easter with my aunt and their younger daughter, Stefanie, to visit, and he wanted Crissy to get one more visit in. One week later, roughly, he was back in town to say good-bye.

The last day I was supposed to report to school, I had a frantic call from my mother. Her youngest brother, David, called her to say that Granny would not make it through the night. My mother had already spent the weekend in Hammond watching over her. She needed me to bring her an hour away to Hammond, because my father could not leave work, and my brother had started a new job on the Westbank and couldn't leave. I ran downstairs, told Patty that I had to leave for the family emergency, and ran to my dad to get gas. I ran home, changed my clothes, freshened up, grabbed a snack, and flew out the door with my mom. When we got to Hammond, my grandmother was in horrible condition.

Part of Alzheimer's is that your body shuts down. As a result, your body undergoes physical changes. She was already working on being unrecognizable; with her black eye, vacant and glassy stare, and constantly open mouth breathing shallow, rasspy breaths, she wasn't even a shadow of what she once was. At one point, she was a hearty 5 foot 7. Over the course of her almost 10-year batle with the disease, she seemed to shrink in height, stature, and definitely weight. When the nurses came to turn her, she was literally skin and bones. She looked like the Civil War prisoners you see in pictures of the Andersonville camp. Barely alive and hardly human.

My brother got our messages and drove down, too. He met us there, and we bought food for my mother for dinner. She was staying the night in Hammond. My Uncle Dave came by for a while, too.

A few times, there were some freaky moments. She would seem to stop breathing for long periods of time, and then would start again. A couple of times, she tried to sit up, made a strange noise, and feebly lifted her arm while staring over our heads. What was she seeing?

I went to follow Geoff home, but he missed the turn to head back to New Orleans, and I didn't. I remembered where to turn. Nerd.

The next day, my grandmother was still alive. My mom's three brothers worked together to persuade her to go home, that maybe Granny was hanging on because she was around. Dave brought her home, and my mom was as okay with that as she could be. Sure enough, on June 7, my grandmother died. They checked on her hourly; the last time was 6 a.m. Mike called the Assisted Living Center a little after 7, and when they checked on her, she was gone.

The phone call came minutes before I had to wake up. I had just started back at JCC Camp, as assistant camp director, and it was our orientation week. Yet I got up, got dressed, and went to work feeling relieved.

Am I inhuman? No. If you had seen her....

In addition, my grandmother was not a very grandmotherly type. We were not close at all. She and my mother had a rotten relationship until Alzheimer's altered her personality completely.

The stresses her illness and longevity placed on our extended family was astounding. My mother and her oldest sister were no longer on speaking terms. But my grandmother's looming death ended most of the bitterness, and they were able to make up.

All of this was just in time to celebrate the birth of the fourth generation at the end of April. My oldest cousin, Erin, and her husband, Jim, had a baby...sweet little James. We met him at the funeral.

On June 9, we held the funeral at St. Philip -- the church I grew up in and was married in. In fact, our wedding was the last time our whole family had been in that church. Before that, it was Geoff's christening. We buried her in Greenwood Cemetery, then had an "Irish wake" at my Aunt Maureen and Uncle Lance's house. This means that from about 2 in the afternoon until midnight, my entire family ate, drank, and laughed. Everyone from my older aunts and uncles to my 15-year-old cousin was drunk. Even Erin, Jim, and James stayed until 11 p.m. He's a great baby. So good and so patient... It was a raucous time. All of my mother's cousins were there, and at one point, Geoff's two roommates and all of our friends showed up.

The day ended, at it was Saturday, June 10. My birthday. I didn't realize it was coming until about 2 weeks previously when Mark mentioned he was out birthday shopping for me. I was confused until i realized how close the day actually was.

We spent the day at Audubon Zoo. It looked good. A lot of trees were down, but otherwise, it looked okay. Almost all of the animals there survived Katrina, unlike the Aquarium, which lost almost everything. We went with Geoff, Alicia, Kurt, Mike, Jean, Crissy, and Steffi. That night, we set up Chris' inflatable waterslide at the Cabin and had a fun party. In all, it was a pretty nice birthday.

Monday was the first day of camp, which meant my days were fun and action-packed.

Stay tuned for the Summer months....

Part 13: A true Thanksgiving

Recap: Last time, I was moved to 7/8 and found myself with a sourpuss teaching partner. My insurance check came, and I bought a RAV4. We treated the kids to an awesome Halloween, because there weren't many places to trick-or-treat. Neighborhoods were desolate or unsafe, so we had a big fair.

We entered November, and it got to the point where sleeping on an air mattress on the floor of my brother's old bedroom at my parents' house was no longer an option. We went to a few mattress shops, and finally found a lovely deal on a Serta mattress and bedframe. I even got a Serta sheep for buying it! They delivered it that first week, and it was like heaven. The mattress we had before the storm was not chosen by us. It was a wedding present, and I think it was a pillow top, which is way too soft and does nothing for your back. It was hard to sleep on. Tiny Katrina blessing number 82, I think. The new one is firm and high and lovely beyond description. That first night of sleeping on it was the first half-way decent night of sleep I'd had since August. I think it was the first time I slept the whole night. Especially since somewhere between ordering the mattress and having it delivered, a catfight happened on the air mattress, and it now had a slow leak that left me half on the floor each morning.

One weekend in November, my in-laws came to help drag our stuff out to the front. They had not been to New Orleans at all since the storm. It was the first time they'd seen "it." They were pretty speechless.

That day, we saw, finally, the elderly woman next door. If you remember correctly, we were unsure of whether she had evacuated or not, but the national guard's markings on her house indicaetd that she'd made it out. She'd left for the storm, but left her cat Ginny, who we called Splotchy, outside. She never did find out what happened to her. This is horribly sad to me. Hopefully, she was one of the rescued cats who was adopted by someone in another part of the country. I'd like to think that's what happened.

Thanksgiving was approaching, and it was a strange feeling. How odd to feel thankful at a time like this. There was a lot to be thankful for, this was true. Here's a partial list:

1. None of my family members died.
2. My grandma was placed in a home in Hammond, La., and was now an hour away, as opposed to the 6-hour drive to Houston.
3. We had a mattress now!
4. I got more money on my car insurance than I thought, and I bought a sweet new car.
5. We were not scattered across the country any more.
6. Most of the family didn't lose their homes. Or their businesses. In fact, everyone lost one or the other. At least everyone was left with something.
7. We'd made it through the first couple of months.
8. Yeah...that's about it.
9. Ah wait...one more thing....Mark was finally home! He was sprung from the RV and was allowed to come back to New Orleans! However, he now works from 5 p.m. until midnight. I will not see him, really, except for weekends.

We had dinner at my Uncle Dan and Aunt Connie's house, one of the few houses in Lake Vista that didn't flood. Lake Vista is the subdivision between flooded Lakeview and flooded Gentilly. They live at the end of their cul de sac, and had zero damage, other than tree damage. Every tree suffered some sort of damage, be it broken branches, total uprooting, or a loss of leaves. It looked like spring when it was still summer. And it stayed that way until ... well, they still haven't really all come back. The trees all lost too much.

To get there, we had to drive through my neighborhood, standing (or not, in some cases) so forlornly and so desolately. There is nothing sadder than a house with no windows or partial windows, a busted down door, and a coffee-colored water mark somewhere near the roof. The grass is gone, the shrubs are dead. The piles of debris are at least as tall as the houses. Children's toys litter the piles of rubbish, and you can see clothing, photos in frames (or what used to be photos in frames), and snippets of your neighbors' lives. All on the ground, mold-ridden, soggy, and brownish. Untouchable. Heartbreakingly thrown into a pile.

Makes it even harder to put Thanksgiving into perspective.

We had to pass my father and Uncle Dan's service station. Piles of debris as high as the station. Gas sign still showing a pre-Katrina price of $2.49. Broken windows on the garage. No electricity, just like the houses. No life at the pumps. The missing ice machine, which was reportedly spotted on someone's roof a few blocks away. A shell of a building.

Thanksgiving gets harder and harder to swallow.

Then, a couple miles down the road, we reach my aunt and uncle's street. The first part of the street, including the house they used to live in, has water marks. It gets increasingly lower as you reach the end of the street. And then, an oasis. My relatives have a lush-ish green lawn. Flowers back in the garden. Flooring. A pang of jealousy rushes through. It's a good thing they're such good people. Otherwise, I'd have hated them. Would you blame me? Does that make me a horrible person?

The meal was a little toned down. The mood was solemn. But it was the first time we'd all been together since the storm. And that was a good thing.

That weekend, we shopped around, and finally bought a bedroom set. A dresser, a headboard/footboard combo, and two night stands. Delivery date? Eight weeks to get to the store, up to two weeks to get to us.

Next time: Part 14: Christmas: either very easy, or very hard.

Part 9: Storm me once, shame on you. Storm me twice, shame on me.

Recap: Mark was living in Baton Rouge in an RV for work, my parents moved back home, Geoff was staying with Calie's family in River Ridge, and I was living with my in-laws in Morgan City. School was calling me back on Sept. 26, but Hurricane Rita was headed straight for Texas and southwestern Louisiana.....Morgan City included.

The winds of Rita from the outer bands of the storm were teasing Morgan City early in the afternoon. I gassed up my car while waiting for Mark to come in. I was truly a nervous wreck. Katrina had changed a lot of things, and apparently, I was also changed. We'd had no rain in the almost month since the storm had hit, and the thoughts of wind, rain, darkness, thunder, lightning, and a possible hit by another hurricane were not doing anything for my mental state. I was in an extremely frenzied state, made worse by everyone telling me to leave. When I think back to that point, which was about 3 months ago, I am still uncomfortable. We've had some rains since then, and it is very unsettling. Luckily, it's only rained maybe 2 or 3 more times.

I told my parents that the outer bands were hitting us, and my father said that that was probably not true. But when I got out the car to fill it up, a big gust came through and caught the door, ripping it from my hands as I went to shut it, and slammed it into my arm. I had a bruise for about a week. I grimaced, I guess, when that happened, because an old man made a beeline for me. He evidently thought I grimaced because I didn't know how to pump my own gas. He came to demonstrate where to put my card, to tell it I want a reciept, how to put the nozzle in the car, how to select my gas...all after I politely declined his assistance by telling him, with a twinge of pain behind my heart, that my father owns a service station, and that I could handle it. He even called me sweetheart or something else patronizing. He stayed there explaining it all to me until I was done, then left. Sigh.

I drove to my in-laws' in sporadic rains, feeling better about the car, but worse about the weather. Around 7 that evening, Mark made it back to Morgan City, and we settled in for what was, to me, a very long evening.

While she was no picnic, Rita was not as bad as she could have been. She spared Houston, which made us happy. My grandmother's assisted living center originally evacuated to a hotel in Alexandria, but when the do-not-return orders were issued, they moved to other ALC's in their chain. My 86-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer's ended up in Houston. As Rita loomed, my family worried. My mother called Houston, only to find out that they had decided that they had enough staff prepared to stay, and that they would. Rita looked to be as bad, if not worse, than Katrina. The thousands of evacuees who ended up in Houston had to evacuate for a second time. A JCC kid I've known since she was 4, who will be 15 in March, called my cell phone panicking, because she was in Houston and was packing up to leave again. I tried to comfort her, but could not, I am afraid, because I had enough on my mind. They ended up in Dallas until after the storm, if I'm not mistaken, then moved back.

So anyway, we were all Very Concerned about my grandmother. We would not have time to make that 6 hour drive to get her, plus do it again on the way back, to ensure her safety. In addition, none of the family could provide for her needs, especially if New Orleans caught any of Rita. All we could do was worry. There were two ALC’s run by this company in Houston. Hers decided to stay. The other loaded up the residents and evacuated them. But they never reached their destination, as the bus caught fire and killed all of the passengers inside. My uncle in Philadelphia called very upset because he’d heard about one of them. My parents hadn’t heard yet, and there was brief panic until we found out that it was the other ALC. My grandmother was safe. However, Kurt, my cousin Alicia’s husband, knew someone who was on that bus. It seemed that the tragedies would keep arising for our city.

Instead of slamming Houston, Rita wobbled a little more easterly and did a number on…southwest Louisiana. We had probably category 2 winds in Morgan City. Morgan City found more than half its residents without power. A storm surge drove salty waters into the drinking water. A tree across the street fell. Leaves were everywhere. Small branches were everywhere. The fence broke. Shingles were in the street. We never did lose electricity, but it blinked on and off all night. To take our minds off what was going on around us, we played poker, microwaved popcorn, and ate ice cream, since we figured we would lose electricity and would therefore also lose the ice cream. But all that happened was a lot of flickering. And serious wind damage. My in-laws said Rita was worse for them than Katrina was, if that tells you anything.

That night, as the storm raged on (WHY do they only strike at night????), I had even more trouble sleeping than usual. As I mentioned earlier, sleeping was, and, occasionally, still is, an issue for me. I did not get much that night. The sounds of the fence breaking, the wind slapping the house, the rain beating down, and things slamming into the house, were a bit much for me. I had vowed I would never stay for a storm again, and there I was. But where could I have gone?

The next morning, as things slowed down, we watched as the Industrial Canal breached again. The Lower 9^th Ward was in even more trouble. We heard that the patch in the 17^th Street Canal levee appeared to mostly hold up, but that the area by our house was flooding again. I believe I posted a picture of that from my father. But most troubling were the shots of lower Terrebonne Parish and lower Lafourche Parish and the areas around New Iberia. They looked like my neighborhood. Luckily, many had learned from New Orleans and left, but there were, of course, the old sticklers who never leave and refused to leave. I felt for those people. We were joined by an unspeakable bond.

I was supposed to go to Metairie on Saturday, but with the winds and some road closures due to the standing water on the highways, we were unable to leave until Sunday. Mark was off all weekend, and so he was able to help.

For having nothing, we sure had a lot to bring to Metairie. We had been shopping, so we had more clothes than we left with. People sent care packages, so that was all extra. We brought the two plastic drawer carts that were bought for us to store our clothing in with us, as well as a wire rack for the couple pairs of shoes I’d acquired, through hand-me-downs and Houma trips. On top of that, we had the things we’d evacuated with, cats included. Junior and Menou, my in-laws’ cats, were not very sorry to see my Lily and Shazzy leave. However, poor Nala and Icarus, my parents’ cats, had a lot in store for them. They were already resettling into their now carpetless, mildly funky-smelling home, and now we were bringing our two cats to disrupt their routines. What fun would await that introduction?

It took Mark to take the cats and the things he was bringing back to his RV that night, plus a trunk-load, plus me and a trunkload and a back-seat-load, plus Mr. Loy and the plastic “furniture” they were lending us, to get everything to Metairie.

Just as we were leaving, my cell phone rang. It was the insurance adjuster for my car. For having a good driving record and low mileage, I got some additional money. Four years ago, my father paid $4,000 for my used Toyota Corolla. I had a $500 deductible, but got $200 for contents. So before the deductible, they were going to give me $4,100 for it. Something went our way! We technically turned a profit on an 11-year-old second-hand car!

We made it back to Metairie that Sunday afternoon. When I moved out, my parents figured that I was gone for good. So they hurried me along to get my belongings out, and turned my room into an office. That’s where I am now. Sitting where my cedar chest once stood. That’s still here…but it’s been converted into a wrapping paper holder. Where my bed once stood, there is a desk. A file cabinet replaced my dresser. What makes this even sadder is that those pieces, save for my old cedar chest (this one is the one from when I was a kid, not the one Mark’s uncle built for our wedding), is all gone. Saturated and hacked and rusted and peeling and disgusting. Even the ugly old carpet, which tormented me for most of my life, was gone, save for a square under the big file cabinet that didn’t get very wet.

Geoff moved into his apartment in March or so. He left because he wanted to. I left because I was married. So while they figured I wouldn’t come back, there was a possibility that he could some day. So his room sat empty, except for a TV and the exercise bike…a sad attempt at an exercise room. They left the TV for us and put the bike back in the garage. We unloaded the cars, then Mark had to go back to Baton Rouge while Mr. Loy had to get back to Morgan City. Sitting in the windowsill were some of Geoff’s He-Man figures. He’d found his Foo Fighters poster and hung that on the wall, then tacked an old issue of The Nicholls Worth (sadly and ironically enough, it was the first issue in full-color, which I’d done for….9/11.) and a He-Man thing on the wall to make it have some of our personalities in it. He taped a note to the door, which reads, “Mae and Mark -- It ain’t much, but I did what I could to make my old home your new home.” It touched us. It really did.

He and Calie stopped by later. They helped me sort through our belongings. Geoff’s old mirror still hung on the wall, so we put the two plastic carts under it like a dresser. I took the shoe cart and put it in the closet. We stacked some things along the walls and in the corners. Geoff found my dad’s little workbench in the garage and put the TV on it, then got the old Nintendo out of our parents’ room and hooked it up. My dad bought an “elevated air mattress,” which was double the thickness of a standard one, and we inflated it and put sheets on it. My mom washed Geoff’s old comforter and we threw it on top. Then, I made a nightstand by stacking the photo albums and the huge Tupperware bin of the smaller albums and loose pictures next to the bed. I hung the clothes up, and set up the litter box, some food, and some water for the cats, then let them explore. Poor little things.

I don’t think I discussed Lily’s cold. A week or so after we were in Morgan City, Lily’s eyes started running. It looked like she was crying. I looked up “Do cats cry?” on the Internet, and discovered that cats do feel sad and depression, but that it is manifested in behavioral changes, not tears. If a cat is “crying,” then it’s because of allergies, something getting in the eyes, or an illness. That night, while we were in bed, we heard a tiny little, “Achoo!” We made an appointment with the vet. I asked if it had anything to do with our rough evacuation and current situation, and the vet said it was possible. Some cats get a form of herpes, which causes them to get colds. The colds come out when they are stressed out. We were given an eye cream, which she did not want to take and she fought us every time, and an antibiotic, to be given orally. The first few doses were given while Mark was still in Morgan City, but then he had to go to Baton Rouge that week. I had to administer her medication all by myself twice a day for the rest of those two weeks. I gave up on her eye cream, because she was too rebellious and it was too hard to do on my own. But she finished her antibiotics the day before we came home. That was a good thing, because Nala and Icarus would not catch her illness. Shazzy, Menou, and Junior all made it without catching it, so we were very relieved. We paid for the vet and the medicine with a donation sent to us by one of my fellow forumers. It had come in the mail the night we discovered she was sick. How lucky we were!

That first night sleeping on an air mattress in Geoff’s old room was strange. It was nice having dinner with my parents. It was nice being with my own family for a change. But things were so very different. The most obvious, of course, being that I was living in Geoff’s room, with clothes I didn’t recognize, on fake furniture, in a house that no longer held carpet. We have to walk with something on our feet, because the foam backing on the carpet would not all come up, but it flakes off when you walk on it. When the weather started to change, it was going to be very cold to walk on. We have to be careful, because the carpet tacks along the walls and in the doorways where the carpets either changed or became tile floors are still there. Plus, several little things had changed. Minor things, like my mom changing the kitchen drawers and cabinets a little. And big things, like Geoff being gone. I was now only an hour away from Mark instead of two, but I still would only see him if he had a couple of days off. Entercom’s return to New Orleans was indefinite. So while my situation was sometimes improving, it was also hitting brick walls. Luckily, I would have work the next morning. Not class, but the beginning of moving campuses.

Stay tuned for Part 10: Moving week begins