Some of you, most of you, probably are somewhat aware that, for a hobby I perform this archaic task which was once referred to as "writing". To write is to place a graphite stick or dye-filled tube to paper and, using said material, draw small symbols onto bleached and pressed dried wood pulp. If you do this for long enough and with a certain pattern, you get what are called words. These words are used to form sentences; the sentences paragraphs, and the paragraphs essays or chapters. The things you are reading right now are also words, though they are on a computer screen. This passage up until this point has taken me around four minutes to write. If I were to have written it out, it would have taken perhaps ten minutes.
Now that I've cleared up what writing is, for those of you who may have forgotten, or in some cases never learned, allow me to explain, as the title promises, WHY I write. That is, why for the past eight years, I have made writing my main and most-practiced hobby. Why writing instead of football or underwater basket weaving.
The first story I actually sat down to write and said "OK, I'm going to write a story." was about the immediate and long-term effects of nuclear war. In retrospect, it was only about fifteen lines long and not very well-written but there was a very clear message that was essentially "If we keep fighting and something like this happens, many people will die and those that don't die will suffer a fate worse than death." If I do say so myself, pretty deep stuff for an 11 year old who, up to that point had never written anything outside of history essays and short little nothing-bits in English classes (more on those in a bit.)
My grandmother was a writer and my #1 influence. That is, my father's mother. She had written a fictionalized depiction of her childhood in Mississippi in the 1930s and 40s. To this day, I regretfully must say that I haven't read it in its entirety, though I did help name one of the chapters. It was my grandmother with whom I sat, watching her read and learning to articulate my words into beautifully crafted sentences. When I wrote my first story, the one about the nuclear war, she was the only one who really batted an eye. She saw something in my writing that no one else saw. She actively encouraged me to continue writing. I did so and went on to write a set of humorous stories about an anthropomorphic rhinoceros in the autumn of 2003. These rhino stories as they were dubbed, became an instant hit with my grandmother and her book club. From her friends in the book club, I received even more encouragement to continue writing. Around that same time, I received a writing tablet from a friend of my grandmother's. I set to filling it with stories and ideas. It became evident that, since I had nothing better to do, I may as well write. Surely I had a computer at the time. I had video games I could have been playing. I could have been outside tossing a ball with friends, but instead, I was inside writing. Often, I was writing for my grandmother, so that she could read over and comment on what I had written. Reason 1, I write to become a better writer.
When I was in third grade, there were two times in which I recall having to write short stories. They were of course nothing in scale compared to the 80-something combined pages of two stories I would go on to write later down the line, but they were my shadowy beginnings. The first story was about Santa Claus and his reindeer. I don't recall the exact assignment, but my story went something like this: Santa was busy preparing for Christmas eve but Rudolph was sick. He had a bad case of sinusitis that was troubling his abilities at using his nose so bright to guide Santa's sleigh that night. Santa called the vet and Rudolph was provided with some hay-flavored NyQuil and the swelling quickly subsided. My classmates thought it was brilliant, as did my teacher, who eventually showed the story off to the other teachers in the same grade level.
The second writing assignment which I was required to do had something to do with a family of monkey children who couldn't read. Our job was to write a story about how the monkeys were to learn to read. Ever the problem-solver, I suggested with my story that the monkeys use Hooked on Phonics. It was all over the TV at the time and the kids on TV seemed to have no problem reading after using the lovely kits offered by mail. I talked this over with a teacher's aide who was in the classroom at the time and he loved the idea. He informed me that it was something that no other student had thought of and that it was also humourous. I finished the story and turned it in. Later in the week or month, I can't recall, I was sat down before the teacher who had given the assignment (she was actually something along the lines of a 'writing coach') and told that the story I had written was not only simply wrong, it showed that I wasn't actively trying to aid in the monkey's illiteracy. I will never forget essentially being told that I couldn't write something based solely on another person's opinion.
Reason #2: Entertaining those whom my writing entertains and spiting those who dislike what I write.
When some people get upset or overcome with emotion, they repress it. Then when another stressful event occurs, they repress those feelings too. It gets to the point that they have all of this pent up emotion, frustration, sadness, anger, and it materializes itself in various ways. Some people can't take in any emotion at all without going off in a violent manner. This goes for happy emotions as well as angry and sad ones. I know people who get physically angry at the slightest little inconvenience. Some people I know get sad and immediately project their sadness to the people around them so that everybody has a sad day. My grandmother died barely two years after I began writing short stories. Needless to say, the loss of a mentor is never an easy thing, let alone if that mentor is your grandmother. Emotions bottled!
A month later, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. Among the innumerable people that the storm affected was your humble narrator. I was twelve feet away from the impact zone when an 80' oak tree came crashing through my grandfather's room. I saw the mirror fly off of the wall, I saw the mess of attic insulation and green foliage soaked by rain come through the roof, and then I saw the inward rush of air slam the door shut in my face. Later down the road, when school was finally resumed, we were on the bus in front of my middle school. A teacher came aboard and told us that the power in the school was off and that we were to go inside anyway and sit on the floors in the halls, backs against the lockers. We were corralled into the school like prisoners of war where we were told that we weren't allowed to speak or leave. It was September, though the outside temperature was still around 80 degrees even though it was only 8 in the morning. The interior of the school was even hotter. It had been locked up all weekend and the air conditioning was out with the power. The already-antiquated school had been overrun with mold and mildew in the tropical heat of south-central Louisiana. We were eventually allowed outside and given meager breakfasts. Again, outside the temperature was only rising. We were made to stay seated on the front lawn of the school, still not allowed to leave and still not officially permitted to speak. One boy eventually got up and tried to walk home but he was ran after and forcefully returned to the front lawn by teachers. I won't make this another Katrina blog: I already have a collection of those, however: Emotions bottled!
I continued writing that autumn and I watched, as my emotions darkened and I entered into a dark period in my life, my writing also became darker. I began writing about shadows that were alive and of demons, and of bizarre world-ending scenarios where many people were as equally dead as I felt.
I eventually lightened up a little bit but not by much. Summer of 2007 arrived, when I somehow came to be in a relationship with an actual human female. I began to write poetry of my own volition; poems of happiness and love and of the magic that can be shared by the romantic entanglement of two people.
A year and a half later, that relationship died along with the joy in my writing. Twenty days later, I watched my father die. That same day I lost the ability to feel the bulk of my emotions except through writing; that same day, infinite universes which I had yet to create through my pen were condemned to suffer silently with me. To this day (as of this writing,) my writing style is still made up largely of dark environments only with bursts of color from key people or the people in my stories who are truly good.
Reason #3: Emotional management and an auxiliary way to feel emotions.
An added note to the above statement. In the event that someone may read this: I can still feel emotions, though not in the same way you can. Whereas you may feel a plethora of emotions due to what I would see as an inconsequential event, I feel the most basic of emotions readily: anger, sadness, happiness, and my most favorite of all emotions, beautiful indifference. It's the more-complex emotions I have trouble grasping. Example being a friend of mine had a person near and dear to their heart terribly wounded in an accident and I simply could not see why they felt the way they did. Writing is what allows me to project and receive those higher-level emotions. Without a pen and paper, I'd be a completely emotionless shell of a human being.
The fourth and final fathomable function of my pen-to-paper process is an easy one. When I was in middle and high school, for better or worse, I always found a way to get more downtime. Be it I finished my project early or was a truly slovenly slacker, I could more often than not, be found with a five-subject notebook before me, turned to the fifth section, drawing story webs and writing out fun fragments of stories because I had nothing else I'd rather do. I started writing for my own enjoyment and not solely to show to others in the winter of 2005. For a while, I was over my dark period of writing as means of emotion management and onto writing for personal enjoyment. This reason hit its peak in November of 2006 when I had moved to Mississippi from Ohio to spend more time with my father. Moving mid-school year caused problems in one of my classes. It was a computer class and, due to the way the school computer system was set up, I couldn't be added to the system to do the work that my classmates were doing. I was placed at a desk and told to keep myself occupied until class was over. I grabbed a notebook and began writing and never looked back. To this day, the first story I wrote in that class is one of my personal favorites out of all my works. Among the more epic pieces I have written and all the ones I hope to write in the future, that one story, as well as the story about nuclear war mentioned in the beginning of this article, will be marked as the thing that drew me into this life of creating simply for the sake of creating.
Reason #4: Personal fulfillment.
If you made it all the way to the end without cheating, I should write you a beautiful sonnet about how noble and patient you are, but really, it's 4:30 in the morning. Check back for more. Hopefully I'll remember to update my blog more often.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Legendary Summers - Part 1
As this summer may well end up joining them, I figure now is a good a time as any to explain my personal memory vaults which I have affectionately called, simply, "The Summer of ____________." These summers earned their respective titles starting around 2004 or 2005. I've yet to conclude whether the summer of 2004 is worthy of a designated title. What I can assure you is that the summer of 2005 most definitely has a name. That name is the Summer of Sorrow, or, depending on how I feel when I describe it and tell it's tale to others, the Summer of Anguish. So, let us start there, in a far off year that is 2005; where, in the span of time is but an infinitesimal atom, but to me is but yesterday.
The Summer of Sorrow
As I continue to post and update my blog, I hope you will come to find that I make it my personal goal to record even the slightest pieces of information. My 'recording system' as I may as well call it, works by picking up and storing both the slightest and greatest details. Recalling the normal run-of-the-mill events is just automatic, it takes effort to store the big and small. This may become somewhat evident as I go more into the Summer of Sorrow.
It was May of 2005 in my home state of Louisiana, in a quiet suburb of Baton Rouge. It was a warm day and my grandmother, known henceforth as Maw Maw, (as to call her anything else, according to my southern heritage, would be disrespectful.) called the family together in assembly. As was her fashion, this assembly took form of a crawfish boil, a southern tradition in which hapless crustaceans, sausages, tubers, and corn are thrown into a boiling pot of seasonings until red and delicious. At that point, Maw Maw had been ill numerous times. She had fought and won two cancer battles, emphysema, and at least two cases of near-lethal pneumonia. As was also her fashion, she was very stubborn, in fact, it seemed, too stubborn to give up even when confronted by ailments and illnesses that could easily kill younger and stronger people. She had grown up poor and had learned through a life of pure mind-melting awesome, that the only way to do things was totally epically. Also, a boatload of consistency and a handful of hard work paid off well too. What we had first thought of as a peaceful and happy crawfish boil would turn out to be much less than that. Once all the festivities had died down and we were all settled 'round the patio table, Maw Maw made it clear. She would not see 2006. She intended to live her last while upon the mortal coil doing pretty much whatever she damn-welled pleased. This included my grandfather taking her, my cousin Jake, and myself on a week-long trek across the Gulf South, stopping at all the resort hotels along the way. She made it so that my cousin and I were both fully geared up for the trip: new swim trunks, jeans, shirts, and sandals. We stopped at numerous hotels and casinos on our journey. The Imperial Palace and Isle of Capri in Biloxi as well as the Hotel Magic in Bay Saint Louis. We left in early June and returned in mid-June. Food, fun, movies, arcades, and cute girls abound when Jake and I hit the coast. We had been practically raised in those hotels, running about their halls, spending fortunes in their shops and arcades and movie theaters, swimming countless miles in their swimming pools. This, it seemed, would be our last and greatest tour.
The trip ended much too soon. My grandfather ran out of splendid hotels for us to stay at and my grandmother was getting a bit weak. We once again returned to our quiet little suburb. The rest of June passed without much incident. July brought my eldest cousins birthday and a week and days after that brought Jakes. Maw Maw had conjured the idea of renting a huge RV and taking it out across Mississippi, Alabama, and down through Florida to Key West. It was on her life-list to see the sun set off the coast of Key West. I, being the kind and noble secretary to my grandmother, began scouring the internet for choice RV parks and the quickest route there. In an attempt to appease my grandmother, my father took near-daily trips to RV rentals, trying to find the most accommodating RV at the cheapest price. By the time we had gotten to the point we could set Maw Maw's final plan into motion near the end of July, she was too weak to do pretty much anything. She was also slowly losing her grasp mentally. While her more-present anger was understandable (my family had refused her cigarettes; telling her 'no' in sickness or health was never a good idea.), she was also fumbling with everyday tasks. One of the most poignant examples of this is the last time I saw her conscious. She was trying to engage her asthma inhaler, something she had done two or three times daily for the better part of a decade. I did it for her, and it was then, just before she took the dose, she said her last words to me. Two words I will hold onto forever; "Thank you.". With the glare of the TV reflecting off of her wide grandmother glasses, she flashed her warm and soul-gripping smile. I knelt before her, as I was wont to do, and left the room. The following morning, I woke and was near-immediately taken by my mother to go searching for garage sales and things to do. We would be gone from that morning until about 12:40 that afternoon. When we returned home, I noticed that nearly everyone was at our house, aunts, uncles, cousins; everyone. I walked with my mother back to my grandparents room. It was there that I heard a sound that still echos to me within my most haunting dreams. A ragged raspy inhalation, no exhale. I looked and I saw my grandmother essentially suffocating to death. There was nothing the nurses in the room could do aside from administer morphine and other pain-killers. While she was hardly conscious, my grandmother was still very much alive. I later learned that what my mother had hoped would happen was that my grandmother would pass away while we were searching for garage sales and other entertainment. My grandmother dragged on until 9:45 that night. I recall walking into the room moments after she had died. Until that point, dearest Maw Maw was my best friend. I had few people in school that I could call friends. I was more an outcast than I am now. My mother and father were a bit preoccupied fighting with each other. While I was still cared for by them, I felt a bit left out beneath their quarrels. It was my grandmother who had helped raise me, who I had spent most of the past two years with, reading and joking and learning, and being mentored. She had become the wall that held the family together. As I put it in a poem I wrote when I was 14, just over a year after this happened, the wall had finally fell, and everything it held was about to come crashing down. My family drifted in and out of stages of lucidity from then until one day, the rubble of a once-splendorous family was totally blown away.
August 28th was a day of little consequence. Not much happened. My grandmothers friend, always in contact after Maw Maw passed away, invited me to a movie with her and her daughter. The film was The Brothers Grimm, a decent movie but no Oscar-winner. We went into the theater thinking that the day was like any other day. Little did I know that it was the last day I would see the world as I saw it.
We left the theater with darkest clouds above us and wicked winds swirling 'round. A storm was plowing through the Gulf of Mexico. Her name was Katrina and twelve hours from then, her and I would be very well acquainted.
I found August 29 in the form of a quiet room, darkened by storm clouds. I slept heavy and dreamless and found that, when I awoke, the power had been knocked out. The house was quiet and dark. I made my way through the house and out onto the front porch. My grandfather was standing there, looking at the rain. I tried to speak to him but he was off in his own mind. I called to him again and he spoke to me without looking. He said "Big storm." and that was essentially all he said the entire day. We dined on a breakfast of Vienna sausages and dried fruit. After that, I moseyed aimlessly through the house and my grandfather stood on the porch or out in the back yard. It was around 11:00AM that I remembered that I had a flashlight in my room; the pantry was dark, even with the power on, and I wanted some lunch. On my way to my room, I stopped and looked into my grandparents room. The way our house was set up was, at the end of the hallway, the floor branched into a T-shape. Straight ahead was the bathroom, to the left was my room, and to the right was my grandparents room. I retrieved the flashlight and left the room but stopped at the T to look into my grandparents room. Something seemed intrinsically off about the room. Due to all the time I spent within, I could feel if there was one atom off, and there was. In an instant, the gloomy room, home to so much ethereal pain and also so much knowledge and love, was cast in the glow of overcast sun. A great mass of green threw the mirror above my grandparents washbasin out and into the wall. I felt a rush of freezing cold air and the door slammed itself shut. I ran down the hall and out onto the back porch and into the back yard. My grandfather and newly-awoken parents were standing in the back of the yard, looking at the fence, and, more specifically, the 80-foot tall oak tree that was now resting upon it and the roof.
I'll continue on that in a moment, after I explain what that quaint ranch-style home in a Baton Rouge suburb meant and means to me. In my aforementioned autobiography, it is referred to as my Temple. That was what it was. No matter how horrid a day at school I had, no matter how bad I may have been feeling, no matter how sad I was, I could always find solace within one of its rooms. More specifically, after a very bad start at middle school, I found that comfort and protection within my grandparents room, beside dearest Maw Maw. With her gone and with my family near ruin, my temple was being destroyed from the inside. Now with a tree through the roof and a god-like deluge being deposited from above, my Temple, my most sacred place, the one place I had assured myself would never ever fall; was under siege from inside and out.
I walked up calmly to my grandfather and parents and said, in the most calm and professional tone, "There is a tree in Paw Paw's bedroom." They obliged me and followed me to the wreckage. That was when we all got a more up-close look at what had happened. Three decade-old roofing insulation, leaves, timber, and drywall were strewn across the bedroom floor.
I could continue on into the reconstruction and the horrors that I saw, but to format that as I did the rest of this blog, in the form of long and detailed paragraphs would be to continue on about inconsequential drivel. I shall paraphrase and shorten as best I can.
The morning after Katrina made landfall, my mother and I set out into the ruins of our suburb. We encountered one house that I can still see so clearly. It had been split perfectly in half by a tree larger in diameter than the one that crushed our home. The news was full of people in New Orleans who's houses had been flooded, how the levees had broken, buildings who's windows had been broken out by the storm. It was as if a bomb had went off and the blast zone was the entire Gulf South and it's outlying areas, a wet bomb full of refugees, a lot of whom were about to come barreling toward my Temple.
I mean this in the most hate-free and exemplary way possible; New Orleans Hispanics and African Americans do not meld well at all with Baton Rouge Hispanics and African Americans. They come from two totally different lifestyles. While New Orleans is a fairly slow-paced city and the people who were being displaced were of a lower quality of life. Baton Rouge is a face-paced place with a relatively high number of well-to-do people. Needless to say, most of the natives and refugees didn't see eye to eye, the two groups I named made it more evident.
It just so happened that my middle school, the school I had been put through hell at, was teetering on the edge of social collapse. I witnessed a riot firsthand. A New Orleanian hit a Baton Rougean, or a Baton Rougean insulted a lower class New Orleanian, and soon all but one or two people had stormed off the gymnasium bleachers and onto the basketball court. People were being punched and kicked, teachers were in the fray, wrestling with students and trying to get things under control. My gym teacher, one of my few friends at the time, was bitten by a frenzied girl. This was several days after my classmates were herded into the school that had no power running to it, to be kept under watch in a moldy un-air conditioned school for an hour, then set out on the lawn of the school for several hours, unable and not allowed to leave.
Eventually, that November, my mother and I left for Ohio.
Thus ends my vivid recount of my Summer of Sorrow, one of the four summers I will never forget.
The Summer of Sorrow
As I continue to post and update my blog, I hope you will come to find that I make it my personal goal to record even the slightest pieces of information. My 'recording system' as I may as well call it, works by picking up and storing both the slightest and greatest details. Recalling the normal run-of-the-mill events is just automatic, it takes effort to store the big and small. This may become somewhat evident as I go more into the Summer of Sorrow.
It was May of 2005 in my home state of Louisiana, in a quiet suburb of Baton Rouge. It was a warm day and my grandmother, known henceforth as Maw Maw, (as to call her anything else, according to my southern heritage, would be disrespectful.) called the family together in assembly. As was her fashion, this assembly took form of a crawfish boil, a southern tradition in which hapless crustaceans, sausages, tubers, and corn are thrown into a boiling pot of seasonings until red and delicious. At that point, Maw Maw had been ill numerous times. She had fought and won two cancer battles, emphysema, and at least two cases of near-lethal pneumonia. As was also her fashion, she was very stubborn, in fact, it seemed, too stubborn to give up even when confronted by ailments and illnesses that could easily kill younger and stronger people. She had grown up poor and had learned through a life of pure mind-melting awesome, that the only way to do things was totally epically. Also, a boatload of consistency and a handful of hard work paid off well too. What we had first thought of as a peaceful and happy crawfish boil would turn out to be much less than that. Once all the festivities had died down and we were all settled 'round the patio table, Maw Maw made it clear. She would not see 2006. She intended to live her last while upon the mortal coil doing pretty much whatever she damn-welled pleased. This included my grandfather taking her, my cousin Jake, and myself on a week-long trek across the Gulf South, stopping at all the resort hotels along the way. She made it so that my cousin and I were both fully geared up for the trip: new swim trunks, jeans, shirts, and sandals. We stopped at numerous hotels and casinos on our journey. The Imperial Palace and Isle of Capri in Biloxi as well as the Hotel Magic in Bay Saint Louis. We left in early June and returned in mid-June. Food, fun, movies, arcades, and cute girls abound when Jake and I hit the coast. We had been practically raised in those hotels, running about their halls, spending fortunes in their shops and arcades and movie theaters, swimming countless miles in their swimming pools. This, it seemed, would be our last and greatest tour.
The trip ended much too soon. My grandfather ran out of splendid hotels for us to stay at and my grandmother was getting a bit weak. We once again returned to our quiet little suburb. The rest of June passed without much incident. July brought my eldest cousins birthday and a week and days after that brought Jakes. Maw Maw had conjured the idea of renting a huge RV and taking it out across Mississippi, Alabama, and down through Florida to Key West. It was on her life-list to see the sun set off the coast of Key West. I, being the kind and noble secretary to my grandmother, began scouring the internet for choice RV parks and the quickest route there. In an attempt to appease my grandmother, my father took near-daily trips to RV rentals, trying to find the most accommodating RV at the cheapest price. By the time we had gotten to the point we could set Maw Maw's final plan into motion near the end of July, she was too weak to do pretty much anything. She was also slowly losing her grasp mentally. While her more-present anger was understandable (my family had refused her cigarettes; telling her 'no' in sickness or health was never a good idea.), she was also fumbling with everyday tasks. One of the most poignant examples of this is the last time I saw her conscious. She was trying to engage her asthma inhaler, something she had done two or three times daily for the better part of a decade. I did it for her, and it was then, just before she took the dose, she said her last words to me. Two words I will hold onto forever; "Thank you.". With the glare of the TV reflecting off of her wide grandmother glasses, she flashed her warm and soul-gripping smile. I knelt before her, as I was wont to do, and left the room. The following morning, I woke and was near-immediately taken by my mother to go searching for garage sales and things to do. We would be gone from that morning until about 12:40 that afternoon. When we returned home, I noticed that nearly everyone was at our house, aunts, uncles, cousins; everyone. I walked with my mother back to my grandparents room. It was there that I heard a sound that still echos to me within my most haunting dreams. A ragged raspy inhalation, no exhale. I looked and I saw my grandmother essentially suffocating to death. There was nothing the nurses in the room could do aside from administer morphine and other pain-killers. While she was hardly conscious, my grandmother was still very much alive. I later learned that what my mother had hoped would happen was that my grandmother would pass away while we were searching for garage sales and other entertainment. My grandmother dragged on until 9:45 that night. I recall walking into the room moments after she had died. Until that point, dearest Maw Maw was my best friend. I had few people in school that I could call friends. I was more an outcast than I am now. My mother and father were a bit preoccupied fighting with each other. While I was still cared for by them, I felt a bit left out beneath their quarrels. It was my grandmother who had helped raise me, who I had spent most of the past two years with, reading and joking and learning, and being mentored. She had become the wall that held the family together. As I put it in a poem I wrote when I was 14, just over a year after this happened, the wall had finally fell, and everything it held was about to come crashing down. My family drifted in and out of stages of lucidity from then until one day, the rubble of a once-splendorous family was totally blown away.
August 28th was a day of little consequence. Not much happened. My grandmothers friend, always in contact after Maw Maw passed away, invited me to a movie with her and her daughter. The film was The Brothers Grimm, a decent movie but no Oscar-winner. We went into the theater thinking that the day was like any other day. Little did I know that it was the last day I would see the world as I saw it.
We left the theater with darkest clouds above us and wicked winds swirling 'round. A storm was plowing through the Gulf of Mexico. Her name was Katrina and twelve hours from then, her and I would be very well acquainted.
I found August 29 in the form of a quiet room, darkened by storm clouds. I slept heavy and dreamless and found that, when I awoke, the power had been knocked out. The house was quiet and dark. I made my way through the house and out onto the front porch. My grandfather was standing there, looking at the rain. I tried to speak to him but he was off in his own mind. I called to him again and he spoke to me without looking. He said "Big storm." and that was essentially all he said the entire day. We dined on a breakfast of Vienna sausages and dried fruit. After that, I moseyed aimlessly through the house and my grandfather stood on the porch or out in the back yard. It was around 11:00AM that I remembered that I had a flashlight in my room; the pantry was dark, even with the power on, and I wanted some lunch. On my way to my room, I stopped and looked into my grandparents room. The way our house was set up was, at the end of the hallway, the floor branched into a T-shape. Straight ahead was the bathroom, to the left was my room, and to the right was my grandparents room. I retrieved the flashlight and left the room but stopped at the T to look into my grandparents room. Something seemed intrinsically off about the room. Due to all the time I spent within, I could feel if there was one atom off, and there was. In an instant, the gloomy room, home to so much ethereal pain and also so much knowledge and love, was cast in the glow of overcast sun. A great mass of green threw the mirror above my grandparents washbasin out and into the wall. I felt a rush of freezing cold air and the door slammed itself shut. I ran down the hall and out onto the back porch and into the back yard. My grandfather and newly-awoken parents were standing in the back of the yard, looking at the fence, and, more specifically, the 80-foot tall oak tree that was now resting upon it and the roof.
I'll continue on that in a moment, after I explain what that quaint ranch-style home in a Baton Rouge suburb meant and means to me. In my aforementioned autobiography, it is referred to as my Temple. That was what it was. No matter how horrid a day at school I had, no matter how bad I may have been feeling, no matter how sad I was, I could always find solace within one of its rooms. More specifically, after a very bad start at middle school, I found that comfort and protection within my grandparents room, beside dearest Maw Maw. With her gone and with my family near ruin, my temple was being destroyed from the inside. Now with a tree through the roof and a god-like deluge being deposited from above, my Temple, my most sacred place, the one place I had assured myself would never ever fall; was under siege from inside and out.
I walked up calmly to my grandfather and parents and said, in the most calm and professional tone, "There is a tree in Paw Paw's bedroom." They obliged me and followed me to the wreckage. That was when we all got a more up-close look at what had happened. Three decade-old roofing insulation, leaves, timber, and drywall were strewn across the bedroom floor.
I could continue on into the reconstruction and the horrors that I saw, but to format that as I did the rest of this blog, in the form of long and detailed paragraphs would be to continue on about inconsequential drivel. I shall paraphrase and shorten as best I can.
The morning after Katrina made landfall, my mother and I set out into the ruins of our suburb. We encountered one house that I can still see so clearly. It had been split perfectly in half by a tree larger in diameter than the one that crushed our home. The news was full of people in New Orleans who's houses had been flooded, how the levees had broken, buildings who's windows had been broken out by the storm. It was as if a bomb had went off and the blast zone was the entire Gulf South and it's outlying areas, a wet bomb full of refugees, a lot of whom were about to come barreling toward my Temple.
I mean this in the most hate-free and exemplary way possible; New Orleans Hispanics and African Americans do not meld well at all with Baton Rouge Hispanics and African Americans. They come from two totally different lifestyles. While New Orleans is a fairly slow-paced city and the people who were being displaced were of a lower quality of life. Baton Rouge is a face-paced place with a relatively high number of well-to-do people. Needless to say, most of the natives and refugees didn't see eye to eye, the two groups I named made it more evident.
It just so happened that my middle school, the school I had been put through hell at, was teetering on the edge of social collapse. I witnessed a riot firsthand. A New Orleanian hit a Baton Rougean, or a Baton Rougean insulted a lower class New Orleanian, and soon all but one or two people had stormed off the gymnasium bleachers and onto the basketball court. People were being punched and kicked, teachers were in the fray, wrestling with students and trying to get things under control. My gym teacher, one of my few friends at the time, was bitten by a frenzied girl. This was several days after my classmates were herded into the school that had no power running to it, to be kept under watch in a moldy un-air conditioned school for an hour, then set out on the lawn of the school for several hours, unable and not allowed to leave.
Eventually, that November, my mother and I left for Ohio.
Thus ends my vivid recount of my Summer of Sorrow, one of the four summers I will never forget.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Here Goes Nothin'
Oh joy, a new way to spew my thoughts and observations onto the internet. Will this end up being a waste of bandwidth or a lifelong pursuit and leisure and cataloging? Hopefully I can keep this blog better than the first one I had. It ended up being a dumping site for teen angst, passive-aggression, and several curse words over my comfortable limit, but that was a long time ago. I leave the rest to you, the proverbial reader.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)