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I rode my bike out to the lakefront and instead of taking the beautiful path they recently completed along the bayou, I took Marconi Street because I love when you pop out over the levee and see the blue lake all of a sudden. Lake Ponchartrain is one of the largest, if not the largest salt water lake.

I detoured back behind the mansions that have an alley way through the back and was happy to see that most have been restored and the grounds and yard furniture all looked in good shape. Then I headed towards the lighthouse and West End. The old red roofed lighthouse fell in the storm and so they have erected this McLightHouse – big and white and lacking in utter charm.

I tooled around West End Park and then went towards the point passing all the boathouses that are mostly still devastated. There are signs of recovery though – instead of the “For Sale – Slight Water Damage” hardee har har signs there were actual restored boathouses with signs that said “Bo Rivage” or simply “Boathouse #76”.

There were several people fishing along the point and one little boy was completely beside himself when a gaggle of ducks made their way over to where he was fishing possibly spooking his catch. As I came back around and headed to West End again, I was listening to my Ipod and Lee Greenwood was singing “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free” – I love this song, even though Ronald Reagan co-opted it for his campaign but today, looking at all the devastation that is still palpable, I wanted to strangle George W. Bush.

West End was made famous by Louis Armstrong in one of the best selling jazz recordings ever called West End Blues – it was originally a nationally renowned resort built in the mid 1800’s and named New Lake End. In 1880, the name was changed to West End with the additions of a hotel, restaurant and an amusement park built on piers over Lake Ponchartrain. The City of New Orleans followed and constructed a harbor and railroad and streetcar facilities along the New Basin Canal and the 17th Street Canal (which breached during Katrina due to faulty construction by the Corp of Engineers) and by 1921 had constructed a seawall 500 feet (150 m) out into the lake and filled in this space to create the large and oak lined West End Park.

My first inlaws owned Fontana’s, which was part of a chain of restaurants that lined the park – there was also Brunings, and recently Maggie’s, and Fitzgerald’s – all so familiar and so long gone. When the city put in a toll and made you pay to park, all of these business lost customers overnight as New Orleanians flatly refused to pay to park for what had always been free.

As we near the end of September the gloaming is coming sooner and sooner – it’s only 7 pm and already we are racing out to get on the porch and catch the dying light.

The nurse in charge today at St. Theresa’s used to work for mom at a nursing home when mom was director of nursing a long time ago.

She told me and mom that she remembers her well and that everyone was dependent on mom because she always had everything under control. She told mom, “Can I tell Charlotte, you are in here?” and mom nodded yes.

“She will be thrilled to know where you are, after Katrina, I went off for two years and then came back to work here.”

The nurse told me, “I knew the name, but knew her as Pat, not Patricia, and didn’t recognize your mom because her face is so swollen.”

It was a nice filling in of the picture. As just the other day, I was looking for something and stumbled across an entry to my blog in 2007, where me, mom and Jerri were sitting at breakfast and J and I were talking about how lucky we are in our lives and how happy we are and mom said she felt peaked. Two years ago, she was having trouble being out and about.

This morning I learned that mom has not been cooperating with the physical therapists – one of the nurses described her behavior of late to me and I said, hey, sounds like my mom. A long time ago she told me that if someone told her to do something she would do the opposite even if it meant harm to her. I asked her then, and you think this is a sound policy? Maybe you might want to rethink it. And sure enough another nurse said that mom is limiting her own recovery by stubbornly refusing to cooperate. I said, hey, I know!

I was having a drink with a long time source of mine in New York at the Capitol Grille and we were talking about home and architects and renovating. He found a magical place in the Hamptons and built himself a tree house that my house could easily slip inside of. I told him that there was nothing like being home and sitting on my front porch watching the bayou and the people and animals going by. Nothing like it at all.

Sometimes this old farm feels like a long lost friend……

Several of Kadinsky’s paintings are images of an apocalypse. His belief was that the apocalypse signaled a transition not an end – and I might have to agree having gone through the apocalypse called Katrina – it became a transition, not an end.

I would say that there is nothing that calls me back to my youth except for one single quality that haunts my older mind – innocence, ignorance, naivete – these are the qualities of youth you never recover or take with you through a transition.

I remember being in Marin and sitting on my sofa looking out to the large cedar tree in the yard and feeling as if I was underwater – suffocating. I woke this morning in my hotel room in New York with a similar feeling. A feeling that I’m underwhelmed by big things and overwhelmed by the details. It all translates into a sort of all repulse response to just about everything – I didn’t want breakfast, nor tea, nor to go out for a walk, nor to write, or read – it’s as if I was just there, a blob, sitting up in my bed wondering what next. Out my window was a collage of skyscrapers, all lit up, and active in the early morning. Beehives of activity.

How do people live here? I wondered. One on top of the other. On the 21st floor of the Grand Hyatt, it all seemed like a spooky forest – dense with no air.

I thought about my mom on the vent – sipping air through a straw is how the vent was described to me – and I felt like I was drawing from the same source. The window that barely opened only served as a flood gate for the noise that was beyond white, more like a disquieting yellow or searching red similar to what Kadinsky used in his art – world in motion noise emanating from the street all the way up to my small room.

I went to the Guggenheim to see the Kadinsky exhibit and still feel as if my love for his work resides in his earlier pieces – the thicker, darker hues, the Russian influence over the German and then French. Then I took a taxi to JFK. The driver was from Pakistan and we talked about the traffic that the UN delegation was causing – “Every year, the delegates come but don’t think about what it does to the poor guy who lives here.”

He asked me where I was headed and I said, “Home to New Orleans.”

He then asked, “How is it there now?” And I said, “We still have areas that are in recovery but on the whole we’re better, we’re good.”

I asked him how things were here since 9/11 and he said, “Fine, no problems.”

Because of a response I had gotten to my earlier post on 9/11 and its aftermath I asked how the city might have changed post 9/11. He said, “Restrictions. More restrictions.”

Intake Interview

What is today’s date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the
avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you
say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one
else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent
absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an
even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

FRANZ WRIGHT

If I were trying to find Obama in this city, it would be nigh impossible. At every meeting, every meal, I have come this *** close. Alas he keeps escaping me over and over. My dinner companions on Tuesday were late because Obama’s motorcade went by, my colleague was late on Wednesday because Obama’s motorcade went by, my source was late today because Obama’s motorcade went by. Damn.