Ouroboros

Sep 28, 2008 by

Katrina2 003

Ouroboros, the mythological snake that eternally consumes its own tail. Circularity of this nature is very much on my mind right now. You see I am back in Dobbs Ferry, NY, the village north of the Bronx where my wife and I (and our cats) spent six weeks in exile from New Orleans after Katrina and the leveee failure. Yesterday was my first time not working madly from before 6am till late in the night while on a business trip up to Manhattan. It was only after the workload ended that the bizarreness of being back here at exactly the same time we sought refuge within these walls has begin to hit me.

The picture above is of our last night here, a week before Halloween in 2005, when I cooked up a vat of my jambalaya as a thank you to all of the wonderful people who kept us together and vaugely sane during those times. (Lto R: George Rodgers, Mrs. McQue, Jim McQue, Collen and her husband, my friend Sean Hastings who put us up, Cynthia and Molly Rodriguez, and in the foreground my lovely wife Alexis who was at the time my finacee) Today I have another pot of jambalaya on the stove and am waiting for them to arrive once more.

It is surreal to walk these streets at this time of year again. So much is the same, yet seen through different eyes. I am not nearly insane with depression and fear for the future as I was then. I know where my family and friends are and what the status of my home is. I’m not glued to the internet, radio and telecasts trying to average out a rough idea of what was actually the reality of the situation. I am not out of work with a strained bank account.

No. This time I am visiting Sean and his lovely wife Jo taking a day to say thanks. Three years have gone by and the kindness and help of these people has loomed large in my mind ever since. I do not think I can ever properly express what those weeks meant, or how different so many things would have been had we not ended up here.

As we battle the corruption in our government, protest the Mayor’s self aggrandizing pompousness, and dodge the flying lead of the Crescent City streets I still find that it is the simple kindnesses of people like this that provide me the strength to keep going.

I love these people and I can never thank them enough. The food is a mere token of the feeling that come to the fore as I sit here in Dobbs Ferry.

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