Retrospectives: Ripples

9/15/05, Written during my displacement from New Orleans

One afternoon this past summer, as I was sitting at a window-side table at little Rue uptown, a thought occurred to me: Even if or when I don't live here full-time, I'll always be able to come here and be completely at home; Nola will always be a part of my life.

I watched the butter-yellow sun shine unbroken and felt at peace.

Three days before evacuating, I went down to Molly's on Decatur to buy myself a frozen Irish coffee for my birthday. I'd celebrated my 25th there with friends from both Nola and NY and also been there the year before for a less raucous 28th. So, it only seemed fitting to sit there reading Ginsberg's journals in the dusty, hazy August afternoon light, watching the moving still-life out the window, the way the shuttered shotgun saloons and balconies seemed at once to ripple and remain absolutely still, undisturbed by any debris that blew by, unchanged by time, impervious to anything outside that moment, their truth.

Dinner and drinks would come later, a zigzag jog among worlds: sushi in the artists' Warehouse district, drinks at the posh red goth martini bar, more drinks and backroom joints at a tarot-card-adorned gypsy cafe with the owner and my friend the bartender, round table of friends at hipster hunting lodge bar on another axis between my neighborhood in the Lower Garden District and the disturbingly still ghetto.

But, for then, there was only me, the long, old-timey wooden table with the high seat I sat perched in, the frozen whiskey, the chocolate, Allen and me.

And it was enough. It was

everything.