Last night, we had CMT’s Hee Haw Weekend Marathon on while Amy worked up a dose of Emeril’s spicy tomato glaze. My parents didn’t watch Hee Haw much when I was a kid, although my dad developed an unhealthy attachment to Willie Nelson in the 1980s (unhealthy inasmuch as he really loved that duet with Julio Iglesias). My in-laws asked if I listened to Buck Owens. I told them I never did, but that Amy was pretty broken up when Owens died this year.
I made my first visit to a Wal-Mart yesterday. Where I live (northern NJ) it’s not a huge feat to avoid them; my grocery needs aren’t extensive and the only store I know of nearby is up in Western Samaria (aka Rt. 59 in NY state). Down here, it’s more of a necessity, especially post-Katrina. I took one step inside and Got It: huge, well-lit venue, cleaner than any of the local markets, good selection of food products. And then there’s all the other stuff: a family passed us with a shopping cart filled with food, back-to-school clothing, and a color inkjet printer. Wal-Mart doesn’t carry everything, of course.
In the “efnic food” aisle, we bumped into Amy’s cousin Wade, whom I last saw during his visit to NYC with his wife. He pines to retun to the city.
I always wonder about how different regions see each other. It reminds me of that scene in Annie Hall, when Woody Allen tells Tony Roberts, “Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual, pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here!” But Wade really liked visiting, and no one down here’s given me any crap for, um, being who I am. Even if the housepet is a little judgemental.
The news here is focused on yesterday’s six murders — the murder rate is skyrocketing this year — but the top story is that Reggie Bush signed his rookie contract with the Saints. In the Times-Pic, it takes top billling over a misguided idea to build a “Jazz Park” to replicate Chicago’s Millennium Park.
Tonight, we’re staying in New Orleans at the same hotel we stayed in leading up to our wedding. I’m flooded with memories of last March, and so is Amy. We had a little snack (if that’s possible) at Café Du Monde, and reminisced about the end of our wedding evening. I love being in this city, but I have a hard time imagining how it’s going to recover from the disaster last year. I’m glad we did what we could to boost the economy via our friends’ alcohol consumption.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in mid-summer, so it’s kind of dead outside. I was hoping to get some good pictures, but there really isn’t much to see that I haven’t snapped in past trips. We’ll be dining at NOLA tonight, then getting up earlyish to fly home. If I do manage any good pix tonight, you’ll be the first to know.
So you go back to New Orleans, and …
“I’m flooded with memories of last March, and so is Amy …”
… flooded, hm?
I winced a little, but I’m looking forward to what you have to say about New Orleans almost a year on from Katrina. Your perspective on Wal-Mart is a reminder of the differences between NYC and the rest of the universe, the South — and New Orleans — in particular.
I want to blog about that Times-Picayune article you pointed out, but sitting on a chair in London (soon to be a bed in New York, then a couch in Washington), it seems like I don’t have any room to talk planning and design when I’m thousands of miles away and have no real frame of reference.
And, belatedly, thanks for the link!
Yeah, my wife pointed out my completely inappropriate and inadvertent word-choice on that one, but I didn’t get around to fixing it when we got back from NOLA last night, so I figure I’ll let it stand.
I’d love to check out your ruminations on the Millennium Park in Chicago. It was easy enough for me to goof on the Gehry element (wow! curved metal! you don’t say!), but it did seem pretty well populated when I visited a few months ago.
Of course, Chicago has plenty of athletic fields in that area for other uses, so it’s not like the Park was built at the expense of any other recreation.
Anyway: safe travels, keep writing, and thanks for the back-link!
where
oh where
are you tonight?
why
did you leave
me here all alone?
I searched
the world over
and thought
I found true love
you met another
and —
you were gone
Pbbt!
Over on this side of the world (UK) we don’t really hear how New Orleans has coped since the disaster. I guess with it being the US we just assumed that by now everything would be getting back to normal.
A lot of people in the states have no idea how messed up the situation is. One of the big problems is that a very poor area that got wrecked (the lower 9th ward) remains, by its very nature & location, really susceptible to this sort of devastation. So there’s been little clearance to rebuild there, because people are fighting over whether there should be a certain elevation level for all rebuilt homes, whether such a code would make it cost-prohibitive to rebuild, and whether the area should just be written off and the owners paid for their land.
No one wants to make potential voters mad, so it seems that there’s plenty of half-assing in this rebuilding process, which I’m afraid will leave the city right back where it was.
There are plenty of other rebuilding problems, but we were happy to find that electricity was finally restored to the traffic light at the exit ramp by the Superdome.
Pretty recently, I read an article (can’t recall where) that showed how cities recover from a major disaster is more contingent on how the city was doing BEFORE the disaster, not how much funding is pumped in. By just about every metric, NOLA was a city in decline before Katrina hit, so it’s going to have to buck the odds pretty seriously even to get back to where it was. Sigh.
hey Gil – you need to check your facts – “My parents didn’t watch Hee Haw much when I was a kid …” wrong! !!! – we watched the first season or two religiously – in fact I recall that very first show where Buck Owens sang “Johnny B Goode” and I became an instant Owens fan – let Amy know that I too was very saddened by his recent death – and your father loved Roy Clark (and that was before the hair transplants) –
Hmm. Since I was around 3 years old at the time, I was probably up in my room, reading Playboy.
I didn’t know Dad had hair transplants (ba-dum-dum)!
I really am fat………….
I seem to recall Hee-haw played at the house. Still you remember the prime tv watching times of our early youth: 6 p.m. on Saturday night (Star Trek, TOS of course) and 11 a.m. Sunday morning –the Abbott and Costello movie of the week.