“Vacation’s over”
It’s been a while since we took as many consecutive days off and completely unplugged from work. What a pleasant vacation with good friends and a beach for Diana. After a 1700 mile round trip we’re back at work again.
When I last left you this is what I reported:
“We’re currently debating where to go for brunch and Saints game watching. No firm conclusions have been reached. It’s a process with Anne involved.”
We ended up deciding on a new restaurant, Treps, from the owners of Cafe Amelie. On arrival, the wait was going to be a long one. No worries, Clesi’s next door was serving delicious gulf oysters for the ladies (Denny was on soccer duty). Look at the size of some of those oysters.
Laura met us at Trep’s for the second course – I enjoyed a really good beet salad (so good I ate a good portion before taking a picture) and some of a cochon du lait sandwich. We had plenty of leftovers.
We started off Monday in New Orleans with a nice walk in Audobon park. The trail round the park is 1.8 miles long and we managed two laps, enjoying the very old live oak trees along the way. The trail was busy but most folks were consciously keeping their distance.
Having worked up a good appetite, I thought we’d try some tapas for lunch at Baru on Magazine street. Although their website confirmed they were open, Baru was fully closed. Plan B – the Rum House just down the street for some salad and Caribbean tacos. Foiled again – under a complete remodel but offering counter service next door. Diana suggested The Vintage champagne and coffee bar across the street and we enjoyed a good lunch on the sidewalk.
We took advantage of New Orleans restaurant week, where many places offer reduced prix fixe meals, for dinner at La Petite Grocery – one of our favourites with consistently good food. I enjoyed crab bisque, Parisian gnocchi, and butterscotch pudding. The pudding has been on their menu for over 10 years for good reason – served like a pot du 
creme with excellent flavour. Diana ordered from the regular menu and loved her steak tartare and scallops. Such a nice treat to enjoy a fabulous meal with Denny and Anne.
On Tuesday we enjoyed an impromptu visit from Kenny (Fire Chief for one of the nearby stations) and then started our drive to the Florida panhandle in the afternoon. We drove through Mississippi and Alabama – two states that we don’t think either of us has spent any time in previously – stopping for dinner in Mobile, Alabama. Arrival at the house in Florida was around 7pm.
Denny, as usual, selected a very comfortable house for us, with spacious front and rear patios and modern kitchen and bathrooms. The master bathroom reminded us quite a bit of our remodel – I’m sure it wasn’t anywhere near as complex to accomplish.
Wednesday began with breakfast tacos with chorizo and a trip to the local 
beach in the morning. On the way back from the beach we all rented bikes at Big Daddy’s for easy transportation to and from the beach (parking was very limited) and then Diana and I made a run to Publix (local grocery store chain) for dinner supplies. We cooked up chicken fajitas on the grills at the expansive common area by the community pool.
Thursday was very much a repeat of Wednesday but we ventured further down the beach for even better privacy and spacing and stayed longer. The ocean was starting to get quite choppy from the impact of Hurricane Delta further east in the gulf. The undertow was getting pretty severe.
On Friday we drove to Grayton Beach state park – this is where the New Orleans krewe typically stays in cabins (not available this year). The beach here was lovely and extended for miles in both directions.
After Grayton Beach we drove into Seaside for lunch at a taco stand. This is an interesting town that was built as a master planned community in 1981. All the houses are very similar and the place has a kind of Stepford Wives feel to it – all very perfect.
The Truman show movie was filmed here, taking advantage of the sameness.
Friday dinner was steaks on the community area grill – perfectly cooked by Thom and Alex.
Saturday was a rain day and so we were treated to lots of loud poker and other card games at the house.
The weather cleared up on Sunday and we spent the morning at Goat Feathers beach – I’m not sure that’s the official name but the access is beside the Goat Feathers seafood shop and so that’s what it’s called by the krewe. The sea continued to be very choppy with double red flags indicating nobody should even think about going on. Denny picked up some lovely fresh shrimp there and made an excellent pasta to go with them. He’s such a great cook and makes it look so easy.
Monday was a driving day – from Florida back to New Orleans. We arrived around 3pm and were able to meet up with Kenny and Kara, and later Denny and Anne, for a snack at Val’s, a new Mexican restaurant that is very similar to Suerte in Austin. They server street tacos and other authentic Mexican fare. The elotes (corn on the cob with “fixin’s”) are delicious.
After that snack, I picked up some pizza from Midway just down Freret Street and we settled into the Webster Street couches to watch the Saints on Monday Night Football.
The 1725 mile round trip concluded on Tuesday with an uneventful drive from New Orleans back to McKinney. I was pretty tired by lunch time on Wednesday.
I took Diana on a very exciting date this morning. We got our annual flu shots. I heard something about “placating me and Alicia”.
You might remember that I shared a video of Damon’s cousin’s parrot performing Stairway to Heaven with him a few months ago. Well, that parrot and cousin made it on to the Kelly Clarkson show last week. Quite funny.
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Meet the newest member of Team Kelly — Tico the Parrot 😱
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I was very optimistic about my reading on vacation – I packed five books, thinking that a book every two days seemed about right with all that free time. I only finished one book – “The Yellow House” by Sarah M. Broom.
This is a memoir of Broom’s life so far, she’s 36 and spent her childhood and much of her adulthood in New Orleans. The story starts with her grandmother and continues on through her 11 siblings and their time in New Orleans East, growing up in the “Yellow House” – a much touted new part of the city that never really took off and has become very rundown over the years.
I enjoyed some portions of this book much more than others. The multi-generational first portion about Broom’s grandmother, mother and siblings dragged a bit. When she shifts to her early adulthood, world travels, and ultimately her family’s experience with Hurricane Katrina, my interest was much bettered captured.
Here are some of the portions that stood out to me and were “dog eared”:
The quote on the first page of this book does a great job of summing up the driving force of this enlightening memoir:
“The things we have forgotten are housed.
Our soul is an abode and by remembering houses and rooms,
we learn to abide within ourselves.” Gaston Bachelard.
Broom describes her maternal grandfather while at the same time skillfully sharing much of the Louisiana history:
“Lionel Soule was descended from free people of color; his antecedents included a French slave-owner, Valentin Saulet, who served as a lieutenant in the colonial French administration during the city’s founding days. Having a French or Spanish ancestor confirmed your nativeness in a city colonized by the French for forty-five years, ruled by the Spanish for another forty, then owned again by the French for twenty days before they sold it to America in 1803, a city where existed as early as 1722 a buffer class, neither African and slave nor white and free, but people of color who often owned property – houses, yes, but sometimes also slaves, at a time in America when the combination of “free” and “person of color” was a less-than-rare concept.”
Describing New Orleans East and the NASA factory – something I hadn’t heard about until reading here. Interestingly we drove through New Orleans East for the first time on our way to the Florida panhandle – nothing much to see there for sure.
“It was called a “Model City…taking from within an old and glamorous one” that if successful would have made New Orleans “the brightest spot in the South, the envy of every land-shy community in America.” And then, too, it was the space age. Men were blasting off; the country electrified by the Apollo missions and the thought of explorations to come. Few Americans knew that the rocket boosters for the first stage of the Saturn launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, were constructed in NASA’s New Orleans East facilities, in the Michoud neighborhood, where my father, Simon Broom, worked and his son Carl would later work.”
An interesting musical tidbit:
“That September of the move, in 1964, the Beatles came to town. The Congress Inn was nothing special. But it was a place where fewer fans might converge and it if was damaged, no one would care. This motel would not suffer as might the Roosevelt Hotel downtown, which had begged Beatles management to cancel the group’s reservation there.”
Describing the start of the torrent of bad decision making that would ultimately result in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina:
“Soon after it was built in 1956, the environmental catastrophe that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) wrought would become evident. Ghost cypress tree trunks stood up everywhere in the water like witnesses, evidence of vanquished cypress forests. The now unrestrained salt water that flowed in from the Gulf would damage surrounding wetlands and lagoons, and erode the natural storm surge barrier protecting low-lying places like New Orleans East. This is what happened during Hurricane Betsy: one-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour winds blew in from the east.”
A horrifying detail of class war during the Hurricanes:
“People in the deluged areas recalled hearing dynamite, an eruption in the middle of their scrambling. “The levees were blown on purpose,” my brother Michael says. Levees had been below before by the federal government, during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to divert water away from more “valuable” neighborhoods.”
A much more extreme version of my experience on getting my first eyeglasses at the age of 20:
“When I am then, my mother discovers that I cannot see beyond a hand in front of my eyes. I have been acting a clown in school to distract form this nonsight. The children sitting all around me are annoying blurs, the chalkboard black waters with scratches of white.
“Trees have leaves.”
According to Mom this is the first thing I say the moment I can see.”
As the “Yellow House” falls more and more into disrepair:
“To describe the house fully in its coming apart feels maddening, like trying to pinpoint the one thing that ruins a person’s personality.
It seems to me now that as the house became more and more unwieldy, my mother became more emphatic about cleaning. Mom’s cleanings were exorcisms. At the core of her scrubbings was her belief in meritocratic tropes. That hard work paid off, for instance.”
A reminder that the city of New Orleans has never been a particularly safe place:
“One of 424 murders in 1994. Tourism rose.”
A detail that made me smile. Denny’s high school prom was held at the Court of Two Sisters and he can’t remember the name of his date:
“Just at the moment when Lynette was hired at the Court of Two Sisters restaurant on Royal Street, she was accepted into Parsons School of Design and left for New York City.”
A harsh description of her brothers trying in the only way they know to bring some discipline to another brother who is struggling with addiction and stealing from the family:
“It is a terrible thing to see love misfire in a million different directions: we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addictions out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too.”
More on the addicted brother, Darryl:
“I was afraid to look at Darryl in his possession, which is how I thought of his addiction. I did not look at him, had never truly seen is eyes. When I did, many years later, his was a face I had never seen before.
For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.”
Katrina strikes and two of the brothers have stayed behind and are camped out on the roof of the “Yellow House”. Can you believe they sat on that roof for 7 days before rescue?:
“CARL
We new they was coming but you go to getting mad anyway.
From the roof where he sat, Carl could see the staging area on the interstate where the rescued were dropped off. The airboats came straight through the area where before you could see a fence, where before you could see a car dealership and the train depot where freights docked for loading.
This new Old World seemed boundless.
They finally come get us, some white guys from Texas. They pulled up in an airboat to the pitch of the roof.
Seven days had gone by.”
Having survived the storm, the next blow to the family – the city deemed the “Yellow House” in “imminent danger of collapse” and bulldozed it:
“My mother, Ivory Mae, called me one day in Harlem and told me the story in three lines:
Carl said those people then came and tore our house down.
That land clean as a whistle now.
Look like nothing was ever there.“
Broom take s a volunteer job in Burundi and is amazed at the local popularity of Phil Collins:
“At first I thought the driver played him to make me feel comfortable hearing a language I new, but Phil blared from rolled-down car windows everywhere and would be sung on karaoke nights from stages where live bands performed covers. The men who worked for Alexis were singing along now, too. People here loved Phil Collins. By the end, I would like him, too.”
Broom takes a job in communications for Major Ray Nagin after Katrina. I once bumped into Nagin at a pizza restaurant on St Charles avenue:
“Nagin had survived the Water. He could say, I stayed. I was here. his not leaving meant: I am one of you. That was a Purple Heart in a city where outsiderness is never quite trusted. Before the storm, New Orleans had the highest proportion of native-born residents of an American city – seventy-seven percent in 2000, which meant that only a small fraction of New Orleanians every left for elsewhere. This was why the mass displacement meant so much.”
An anecdote about sitting on the balcony of her St. Louis street apartment and watching the goings on below:
“They told the story of how, in 2006, during the Tennessee Williams Festival screaming contest when Stanleys compete to yell “Stella” best and loudest, the winner that year yelled “FEMA!” instead.”
As Broom is deep into research on the father she never knew:
“My father is six pictures. There is my father playing the banjo, with Lynette in the frame; my father at a social and pleasure club ball with grandmother Lolo; my mother sitting on my father’s lap; my father walking Deborah down the aisle; my father in a leather coat and black fedora, sitting at a bar with uncle Joe, raising a beer, mouth open, saying something to the picture taker; and my youngish father standing in front of an old Ford, pointing his finger at the camera’s eye.”
Road Home is the organization that compensated residents when they acquired their land and bulldozed their houses. It took 11 years for Broom’s mother to receive any of the money:
“Eleven years after the Water, Road Home finally settled our case. Too much time had passed to claim victory.”
On the music front, I’ve had time to listen to a lot of new music but won’t go overboard all at once in this post. I’m listening to “Africaine” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers as I write this – such a great album that I forget about.
Here’s a new artist that I discovered on the trip – Tim Laughlin is Kenny’s cousin and performs a regular show from his balcony in the French Quarter. I really enjoy a good clarinet performance:
Here’s a piece by Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s wife, that I found in a book called “One Last Song” by Mike Ayers. The premise is asking a bunch of artists what the last song they would like to hear would be. This one was chosen by Julia Holter. I love the soothing repetition:
Lastly, I’ve been enjoying listening to some of the thousands of Grateful Dead archive concerts. Here’s my favourite version of “Sugaree” so far. Quite different than most of the others:
Stay safe and kind. This is not nearly over yet.