We awoke this New Year’s morning, having slept in from reassuring two stressed-from-the-fireworks cats at midnight, to a text from a dear friend.
Are you two ok? Just seeing the news
It took only a second to see why on nola.com with a story with weight far larger than my phone’s small screen size could handle. A cascade of memories, seared in perpetuity from the tragedy in Charlottesville—where we lived and loved for over 12 years—came rushing in, tackling and laying wayside the warm glow from yesterday’s parade down the French Quarter’s river side. You may recall, as we mentioned in our Christmas in New Orleans post yesterday, the city has held a special spot in our hearts since we first met here on a date and later where we wed on the weekend following 9/11.
This feels like a sucker punch.
New Orleans, like most cities in America, proudly exhibits a unique joie de vivre making it particularly special, along with the troubling aspects continuing to defy easy solutions. New Orleans has displayed a visible, volatile mix of this duality from its beginnings. In a sentence, we have always loved this town because its richness of humanity in all its manifestations. Bourbon Street is infamous for its debauchery and yet so many other things. In fact, we’re due to arrive back with friends at Galatoire’s in a couple of weeks for their bucket-list Friday lunch.
The restaurant is smack dab in the middle of last night’s carnage‘s three-block span, bearing witness to yet more humanity. The kind we don’t like to think about or even admit to ourselves.
While we’re not experts in terrorism or hate crimes, we’re painfully aware of the incredible levels of suffering one must be experiencing to pre-meditatively harm so many others. In America, as in so many other places around the world, people are suffering. This isn’t a post about why that is. It’s merely recognition it exists and that we could have a role not only in it, but also its solution.
There’s a poem from W. H. Auden worth mentioning here. In As I Walked Out One Evening, he says,
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
It’s a New Year’s resolution I think is worth trying. Maybe, once in a while when we remember to do so, we can practice recognizing and having compassion for our own suffering along with the suffering of others. Both those who do harm and those who are harmed. We’ve all been on both sides of it. And while it can be really hard to express compassion for those who have harmed others in such deep ways as what happened a few short hours ago, letting our neighbors know we care about them has positive impacts in ways our puny little human brains can’t conceive.
But it’s still there in the middle of all this: Our love. Duality of life is integral to our humanity. And so is our compassion for one another.
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It would be odd for us to have a post sans photos. So here’s a small selection of our favorite photos that capture the beauty and uniqueness of our soul city, prefaced by a couple from our 2001 wedding (images by Johnny Chauvin).
We love this town. Today with mourn with her.
