Hurricane New Orleans

"The guy pushing the apple cart is not going to tell you to eat fewer apples." ~ L. A. Norma

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Smells battle for control of the night as we hunker behind leaky floodwalls awaiting storms and evacuation news. Tropical Storm Cindy arrived very early with nearly hurricane force winds and, like a Lulu in a blue dress, brought down trees and violated graveyards.

Temperatures are high as the levee, but Squalor Height's air conditioner is tucked under the front dormer, stilled and latched behind louvered shutters. Windows are wide open to the moist night with its smell of magnolia trees on distant corners. Confederate jazzman climbs over the walls and stalks something called "angel's trumpet," which has giant lily-like blooms that open at night with an intoxicating odor tempting to all night flyers and foolish teenagers, who make a potion from its leaves that sometimes sends them to hospital and a spot on the ten o'clock news. It is Summer in New Orleans and the living is dicey.

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Aboard the Good Ship SUGAR ISLAND

For lunch the day of Cindy's landfall, we ate fried crab cakes with halved tomatoes filled with bread crumbs, garlic, basil, Parmesan and drizzled with "Olive's Oil."

Olive's Oil was the nickname given a shipmate aboard the S. S. SUGAR ISLAND, a ship I first caught at the Domino docks near the Chalmette Battlefield, where America won - with the help of pirates - the last battle of its second war with England. Never mind that the war had been over for months, had we not won The Battle of New Orleans the Union Jack would have flown over Gallier Hall till someone forced it down.

I rode the SUGAR ISLAND to Israel, her bottoms bulging with grain. We topped off in Beaumont, Texas and while in port, Olive's Oil came screaming back to the ship with news that Elvis Presley had died in Memphis. "The World will never be the same again," she said.

L. A. Norma looked up from her crab cakes and asked, "Now she writes for the White House?"

We boiled and peeled two pounds of shrimp bought the day before for use in a sweet pea, basil, pepper, and garlic bisque (I never use salt, you likely would). The roux was dark, made with flour, "Olive's Oil" and patience. After lunch, Norma took us for coffee at Café Rose Nicaud, on rue Frenchmen. On our way home, we stopped for hurricane supplies.

"Camel cigarettes, chocolate ice cream, coffee and brioche," Norma said as she placed each item on the counter. "That should do it. No, wait. Batteries, too."

Earlier, we had laid in a case of medicinal red in case the next storm lasts longer than expected.

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Elvis has Left the Middle East

The SUGAR ISLAND crossed the Atlantic in little more than a week and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar bound for the port of Haifa, Israel, on the Mediterranean's far end.

We cleared customs on a gray afternoon and after dinner aboard ship, Olive's Oil and I took a walk along the stone wall of some forgotten Haifa street. On the wall was a poster for a Tel Aviv appearance by Elvis. A banner pasted over it read, "CANCELED." At the time, I thought the concert was real, but later learned Elvis never booked Tel Aviv and the poster was merely someone's creative comment on his death.

A young couple from Boston heard our American accents and advised us not to go on the other side of the wall, the Palestinian side. We thanked them and walked through the gate. It looked poor, quiet, resigned.

"It looks worse today," an Israeli I met years later in New Orleans told me

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A Gathering in Need

From the front dormer at Squalor Heights we heard fire trucks screaming along the streets below, in preparation for the coming storm. At the first sign of any big weather event - like hurricane winds or cold temperatures - citizens of New Orleans fall from ladders and set fire to their houses. It is a pathetic ritual.

After Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, I climbed up a three-riser library ladder to trim broken limbs. Stepping back to admire the work, I broke my left foot. We are a gathering in need of more help than medicinal red alone can provide.

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Morning Hope

At morning's first light, I retired to the kitchen dormer to read Remy Benoit's LOVING (Pharaoh Press): "This Spanish Flu," Benoit wrote inside a letter inside her story, "has been a terrible thing, spreading itself all around the world. I do not know why I was blessed to not succumb to it."