you know what it means, to miss new orleans?

New Orleans is more an idea than a place to me, yet it's a pretty powerful idea. I was there only once, in 1991. January. I went there by train from North Carolina, to meet a friend who was traveling on business. She had come all the way from Japan, so surely I could make it to New Orleans? I took the train because being unemployed I had much more time than money, and I seem to remember it took 24 hours -- is that even possible? It was evening when my housemate dropped me off at the amtrak station in Durham that would barely pass for a bus shelter in many towns. And night was falling again when the train pulled into New Orleans. (Someone had just come into the train compartment and said, "We've just started bombing Iraq." The first Persian Gulf War! How long ago it seems now, how innocent.)
I remember best the wonderful strangeness of New Orleans, how it was like nothing in my previous experience. It did not seem like America at all to me, with the strange tropical vegetation and the iron balconies, the excellent food and the eccentric graveyards and shotgun houses, the Louisiana accents and the French place names. It was a place I always meant to go back to and never did.
Another friend moved there about a month ago, to start a job at Tulane, and then I was sure I would go back. And then it was just a disaster scene on television, a place of unbelievable horror, something to avert your eyes from or watch in horrified fascination. Unreal city.
What made it real for me again was listening to NPR, the earnest reporters talking to survivors and refugees. I could hear it in their voices, their wonderful accents and odd turns of phrase, what never survives in newspaper accounts: the strangeness and vitality of that place, its refusal to be like other places despite the attempts to homogenize it and Disney-ify it. I seemed to hear in my head Louis Armstrong -- has any other American city named its airport after a musician? -- the muse of New Orleans, the man who told the world of his hometown's strange beauty, its joy and melancholy. (Though mostly at a safe remove actually from New Orleans, and that's part of the reality too.)

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I think New Yorkers have had a specially strong reaction to the New Orleans disaster because of 9/11 (though perhaps that is just an illusion created by being here). Because they also know what it means to have the place they know and love turned into a strange, terrifying disaster zone, to have everything change in the blink of an eye. And because New York and New Orleans, as different as they are, share a common bond of strangeness, of not really being part of America, though for reasons that are for the most part, entirely different. And of being beloved by outsiders, who see in those two cities ... well, something. Something exotic and otherly and a little dangerous.

But Robin is right, every place has its ghosts. Littleton has its own cross to bear, a disaster perhaps less spectacular in terms of body count but unusually horrible in its own way. If you are inclined to believe unquiet spirits roam the earth anywhere, you have got to think it's there. (And in Poland! Where the unquiet spirits are practically coming through the windows. But Poland is another story, and one I don't have the energy to tell right now.)