New Orleans was always a city of contradiction to me -- beautiful and heartbreaking; unbelievably kind and loving though callous and heartless too. Mardi Gras seemed to gather and collapse these contradictions into a compact two weeks: millions spent on plastic beads and curios made thousands of miles away from the city (bought by the city's wealthiest few to throw down to the city's most) and an outlandish celebration of the love of life by everyone, regardless of station in life. It was a garish expression of wealth and excess, but also an expression of community and togetherness, as families from all over came together on the streets of St. Charles Avenue with their ladders-turned-stands, their filled-to-the-top coolers.

We lived on the corner of Washington and Carondelet, on the northern border of the Garden District, itself a study in contradiction. Some of the largest and most expensive homes blocks away from falling-apart public housing and small shotguns which really were shacks. Our apartment was in a centuries old mansion that had been converted years ago into three apartments, one snaking around from the back of our apartment to the top of the garage, a half-doughnut shape, and two others, one on top of the other, in the bulk of the house. We were on the top floor (and our roommate Rebecca still is -- or at least her stuff still is, we hope) with outlandishly tall windows looking out into the branches of live oaks and to the 'ghost house' across the street, a peet-green chopped-up mansion where the ghost of a twelve-year old girl had breakfast each morning with our neighbors, Eric, Molly, and their baby Etienne, in their apartment that was in such disrepair it was nearly no longer an apartment. Below us were Johnie and Steve, a couple that know love and give love in ways that are still surprising to me years after we first befriended each other. Steve works on the oil rigs outside of town for two week stretches, leaving Johnie home with Larry, a gentle man who has battled the effects of HIV and AIDS for years. Steve and Johnie invited us to our one and only Mardi Gras ball for the Krewe of Amon-Ra, the largest gay krewe in the city, and it was there that I saw what Mardi Gras is really about, a supersonic exclamation of the power of life over hardship.

Behind us was George, a voodoo-practitioning filmmaker who had a radio show on WWOZ, one of our nation's truly great independent radio stations. He cleared our place of evil spirits before we moved in because the man who had lived there before had an appetite for violence and usually fed on his girlfriend. When Rebecca moved in a year before us, she found an apartment splattered with blood, and this after she had just returned from a year in Angola operating emergency medical centers during a war. The spirits were definitely gone by the time S and I moved in with her; George had not only pissed on a coconut and kicked it out the door (yelling "Out! Out! Out!"), but in most of the corners and crevices of the place we had earthen-black statues stuffed with nails and shanks Rebecca had brought back from west Africa, guarantees that our place was full of good juju, not bad.

Kiddy corner to us was a one-level, impossibly small apartment complex jutting up to the sidewalk incredibly close, which children would ride around on tricycles while their mothers sat in lawn chairs inches away from sewer drains. The windows in that building, not much bigger than slats already, were covered in tin foil to reflect away the burning sun and heat. Across from them was "Amie's Paradise," a sprawling mid-century complex where two Mardi Gras Indians lived, a mother and a son who were kind enough to let me photograph them a couple of years ago.

Behind our building on Carondelet was a building you would miss if you weren't looking, it looked so much like so many other sliver-thin brick buildings built during the Vietnam War. Last summer a drug dealer moved in there, bringing with him more gun shots and more nervousness around the neighborhood as all of us watched our backs when we parked our cars or walked back home from the jingling street car. Next door was a shotgun in the process of renovation, butter yellow with black trim, owned by a nice gentleman who would sit on his placemat porch with friends, smoking cigars, and make small talk with us when we walked by with our dog. He complained about the bands of wild dogs that ran through the city, some with their collars and leashes still attached, who would scavenge for food and poop on the grass. (The first time I saw these dogs I thought of Mexico, where there are yellow dogs and black dogs and muddled dogs running around town too.)

Our neighborhood was one of many across the city, a neighborhood of neighbors. We knew each other. We looked out for each other. New Orleans had heartless people who would rob you at gunpoint, or worse, rob you at the government level and beyond (the president of KBR lived on St. Charles), but it also had the most generous, loving people I've ever met in my life. People who, though they had little themselves, would give you the chair they were sitting on, a warm bowl of red beans and rice, or a lift to the market. They gave smiles in stores, even when the lines were long and people were frustrated. They called you "baby" and "honey" and "sweetie" even as they were clearing your plate or filling your water glass. There was a sense of community like no other place I've been.

And now they have been abandoned. Our government has abandoned them, and our community, our larger community, has let it happen. I can't hold back my tears. What a very sad day.