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.
No comments:
Post a Comment