New Orleans – Thoughts

Shuttling on the Eurostar, between London and Paris, my mind drifted, inevitably, to the apocalyptic scene in New Orleans I had been watching on BBC a few hours earlier. As I walked through the door of my Paris home, I made my way to the fridge, to fill it with the stock of berries I had brought along from England, and noticed thecheerful magnets on the door – a mix of jazz musicians and wedges of enticing red watermelon – souvenirs I bought in New Orleans more than fifteen years ago, the one summer I was there. That same summer, a tornado hit Baton Rouge, our base on that trip, because my then young teenage son was attending a violin summer course on LSU campus. Overnight the building where we were staying became an island, as we were flabbergasted to find out when we woke up the next morning, besieged by water. And we were staying on the second floor!  The only hope of escape was by wading our way, barefoot, through the oozing waters which reached our armpits, my son holding his violin case with both hand above his head and I doing likewise with my handbag.  Later friends who were astonished by our brazen (or reckless I should say) action, told us that we had been lucky not to have come across water snakes and other such delights: the ugly, opaque greenish waters left us blissfully unaware of the perils lurking underneath.   As I looked at a smiling sax player on the fridge door, my thoughts continued to wander back to my mother’s connection to New Orleans, thirty years earlier, thanks to which I was first offered Paris as a gift. In a kind of convoluted way, this ties up with Bonjour Paris. I was still a very young teenager at the time,  and my mother  was involved in community work and was invited as a guest of honour by the Mayor of New Orleans, who even offered her the key of the city as a gift.  Her visit to New Orleans was part and the culmination of a very long itinerary through various American cities, to which she was invited,and she was going to be away from home for a very long time. It was in order to make up for this long absence and my sadness over our separation, that she gave me the gift of a trip to Paris.   So where does Bonjour Paris fit into this? Those of you who have been my readers since I first started contributing to Bonjour Paris may remember my first, introductory article in which I described that very first arrival in Paris, at Gare du Nord, as a young starry-eyed teenager, and my shock, as we walked out of the station, to find a Paris filled with unkempt, harassed, working-class women, dragging about their swollen feet in shabby charentaises (woolen slippers). Where were all the brittle Audrey Hepburns and other slender Vogue models that should have been gliding glamorously on the streets of the world’s capital of fashion! My 90-year-old mother still remembers how I turned white in dismay and disbelief. It’s the same mother who taught me how to travel and how to look and how to listen, without whose influence and sophistication, wisdom and understanding of the world, I would have never written "Around and About Paris". And it’s the same mother who time and again spoke to me about New Orleans, the French Quarter, the people black and white, poor and rich. Once I was done with the fridge, I switched on the computer, and there was that special Bonjour Paris newsletter devoted to New Orleans. Small world indeed. I felt I ought to add my personal touch to the overall picture, a little expression of attention and care for the anonymous many who are suffering this tragedy, before the media swamp our memories with another flood of sensational news that will push New Orleans into oblivion to make space for the next news item. How many of us are still thinking of the tsunami with the same degree of intensity as we did last winter? Have you noticed how the crowds who attended the 9/11 ceremonies yesterday had dwindled this year 2005, a mere four-year span after the tragedy? The BBC report I mentioned above included an interview with some spokesman of US officialdom, who was being put under attack on the issue of poverty and race discrimination and the way rescue had been mishandled. I do not recall his name or position, but I do remember him declaring – mark my words – that the poor in the United States have a higher standard of living than the average French person!  In support to this outlandish comment, he brought forth the argument that everyone in the US has a car! Is a second, third or umpteenth-hand rusty jalope a criterion by which an individual’s standard of living is to be measured? Doesn’t it rather point at the fact that the US has never invested in a public transport infrastructure which makes it a vital necessity to own a car (and thereby increase global warming)? And let me tell you a secret. I gave up my car about ten years ago and have never been so happy. Especially now that Paris city hall is giving buses the royal treatment and pushing private drivers out of the streets. As for Kristina, now Ophelia, and other tsunamis and future mega tsunamis, yes, it’s a good thing (albeit a nuisance) that my local supermarket no longer provides plastic bags for my shopping, even though it’s a bit late in the day. Besides, they still provide small plastic bags for the fruit and vegetables… But then we all know that life is full of contradictions. Besides again, even if we do develop a collective civic sense,…