Use Me While You Can

It was a year ago this morning that I sat next to M on her bed in Hattiesburg as we watched Katrina pass over, around, and through us, and I put my hand on her leg. It was a non-verbal way of trying to say, "thanks for taking us in," an expression of tenderness and connection, of despairing fear coupled with a modicum of hope leftover from our 17 years of loving each other. That really was the point where we were finally over. It was a moment that will remain indelibly carved into the granite spaces at the deep center of my memory.

It's taken an entire year for me to get that, to figure out how complete and permanent it was; I've flopped backward and forward in my lack of understanding, my hurt frustration, and my desperate need to be loved still, and more. But we were done that morning just as surely as the folks in New Orleans, who didn't know how hopeless the situation really was, were doomed to be left and lost and forgotten.

What I didn't know at the time was that I was one of those people too.

I did not suffer in any way like they suffered for I had the resources and the opportunity to escape the worst of that storm's fury. I had only lived in New Orleans for a month and my roots were only just beginning to grow down into that bayou dirt. Nonetheless, in that moment, with my reality divided between two, even three places, with no home and with all that I had collected over 51 years of living given away, lost, or about to be; life as I had known it, was ending.

I wake up this morning in the place where this journey started 390 days ago (the day before I moved to NOLA) and it almost feels like nothing has happened, like this morning's awakening was simply a normal rise from sleep and the close of a strangely disconcerting dream. As if the last year – the last 18 years, in fact – has been a sort of Wizard of Oz experience where everything that happened was simply an unconscious drama played out on the cinema screen of my nocturnal perambulations.

Even now, as I write this, tap tap tapping on my laptop keyboard, I look up through the kitchen window to the view of fog shrouded trees and brown dried grass, Bruce Cockburn's music wafts passed my ears, and I feel an odd disconnection of body and mind; I struggle, literally, to grasp for the straws of maya that pass for the previous 365 days of living. They are vanishing before me, even as I reach to snatch them and pull them in, placing them in a shoe box, securing it with tape and tucking it in underneath all of the other junk in the back of the car that currently passes for the closest thing to permanence I possess. Maybe… if I'm lucky, or wise… some day I can open the box and sort through all the scraps and figure out what the hell happened.

For now, what I have to help me make it through is the anger I feel at the callousness, incompetence and veniality of those who could have prevented that other disaster and who could have, in the ensuing year provided the kind of help necessary for a true new beginning for people I know there who have nothing, or nearly nothing, still. Could have, that is, if they were not otherwise distracted by their grasping, greedy, misguided quests for fortune and fame.

I am also sustained by my connections, new and old connections, to people who love me, root for me, and support me just as Dorothy's friends took care of her as they meandered through Oz. Without each of those (you) folks, without the prayers, generosity, thoughtfulness, hopefulness, humor and encouragement I have received, I really don't think I would have made it this far. In fact, I am CERTAIN that I wouldn't have. Honestly.

I really have very little idea where I am going from here. I feel nearly as lost this morning as I did surrounded by the snapping trees and pounding rain of Katrina's fury and this day feels like starting again, again. On the other hand, maybe that's the point of every day.

As it has done for all of my adult life, Bruce Cockburn's music reaches across time and experience to describe this moment perfectly; it sets me, at least temporarily, back on the path.

"I've had breakfast in New Orleans, dinner in Timbuktu
I've lived as a stranger in my own house too
Dark hand waves in lamp light
Cowrie shell patterns change
And NOTHING will be the same again…"