By disposition, I am a stiff upper lip kind of a guy. My personal philosophy, borrowed in equal parts from the ancient Stoics and Buddhism, is that life is best lived with a certain reasoned detachment. Unhappiness is the difference between expectation and reality. That is, if we expect too much out of life, we suffer because life, with its imperfections, almost always fails to meet our ideal.
Sometimes, though, emotion has a way of touching reason on the sleeve and saying, "Sorry, I'm taking over here." These moments can be subtle or dramatic, but no amount of mental discipline can make them go away completely.
I am having one of those subtle moments now. March is with us, and in the Gulf South March means Spring. People in the North think we have no seasons down here, but this is not true. We may not ice over, but from December to February the trees are bare and the grass is brown. There will be a few frosts a month, and a light jacket is the constant companion of the wise. Shorts and T-shirts migrate to the back of the closet. Not that our winters are harsh by any stretch, but there is a definite change.
In my childhood, I always marked March 1 as the beginning of Spring. There could be a few chilly mornings still pending, but the frost was over. When these first truly warm days came around, I always felt my spirits rise. It was emotion, not reason, that marked the change. Often I would not even notice the grass darkening with green or the fresh shade cast by new leaves until my lighter mood tugged my shirtsleeve and told me so. Even in the days before the term seasonal affective disorder was coined, my heart knew the difference between winter and spring.
Not this year. The azaleas in my yard have been blushing pink for almost two weeks and I have barely noticed. There is no change in my winter mood, as if I have been frozen on the inside this time, and the natural warmth of Spring offers me nothing. I feel that Stoic sadness, the difference in expectation between what I feel and what I think I should feel.
Of course I know why. When your home town is wrecked by a hurricane it tends to rob you of something. Some have compared the damage of a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina to a rape, but I don't see that. For me, it is more like losing a brother.
A brother is someone who shares your history and upbringing. There is a deep emotional bond, but not necessarily a financial one. When your brother dies, you march on in your life and career, sometimes more successfully than ever before, but to a rhythm that has a lesser meaning. There is a part of your past, a person who can bear witness to what you are and how you got there in a way that no one else can, that is gone.
That is how I feel about New Orleans. I was very lucky; I lost very little financially, but my emotional loss is very close to a loss of identity.
All people who are from New Orleans share in a brotherhood. There are so many things unique to that city, things that only a person who has called the place home would understand. Some people love New Orleans, some hate it. Brothers do not always get along either. But there are so many things shared, so many things that cannot be duplicated elsewhere, that there is no replacing that loss, no matter how hard you try. You cannot replace a brother.
As I walk in my garden, newly mine since last fall, I admire flowers I did not plant and wonder if they will always be mine, or if storm winds will eventually blow me somewhere else. McComb is a delightful place, relentlessly green, peaceful, and full of kind people. It is good enough that I could stay here forever. But I cannot help but remember that I am not from here, and the place I am from has become a wasteland.
I can start over, but there is no replanting a personal history. My main hope for recovering my history is that New Orleans will rise again, and will become something resembling what I remember it to be.
The beauty of a flower, like an azalea in my yard, comes not only from the perfection of the object itself but also from the memories of all the flowers we have seen before. The present and the past meld, and in the moment we experience the past and the present together. This is the value of place. We see the same events and the same faces year in and year out, and each year they acquire new meaning. Perhaps this is why I see little meaning in the flowers in my own yard. They would look more beautiful to me if they were growing in New Orleans.
As time goes on, I expect my present will find ways to resolve itself with my past, so that once again the things I experience will find roots in similar experiences in the past. For now, I can only pray enough of my hometown will be rebuilt that I will one day be able to say, I am from New Orleans, and it will mean something again.