The earth opened up in Pakistan and 20,000 or more are dead. First we offered $100,000 in aid, then we were shamed into giving $50 million, a substantial sum though only one-third of the $148 million we gave in military aid this year. (There is always money for guns and bullets, only less for bottled water and medical supplies). Right now hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping without shelter in a mountainous place that nurtures chilly winds this time of year. Doctors Without Borders has sent teams and supplies and they need our help.

Across the border in Afghanistan, five suicide bombers have blown themselves up in two weeks, a chinook has crashed, and another US soldier has been killed along the eastern border. Iraq is, perennially, Iraq, where every day brings more despair, more tragedy. Most Americans are against that war, but does it matter? The violence continues, more and more people die, more families are torn apart by the deaths of those they love and our president continues to offer empty platitudes, desperate calls for patriotism. He is trying to convince himself, no doubt, just as he is trying to convince us. Doesn't he know we already know the truth?

In Guatemala, the clouds erupted in a flood of tears, leaving hundreds buried in rivers of mud. This time last year the story was drought, showing that April does not own the market on cruelty.

Many of our water-soaked neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi are still suffering on this Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples Day, including the United Houma Nation. Katrina and Rita left nearly 5,000 of their tribal members homeless and many others unable to inhabit their homes. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have been helping them, but not the Red Cross or FEMA, who has only worked with a handful of families so far. You can help them directly here.

On Democracy Now today, the United Houma Nation's Principal Chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talked about the troubles her tribe has faced these past five weeks and why Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer working for the Spanish crown who never set foot on the land that would become the US, should not be honored with a national holiday. "Let's face it," she said, "Columbus was a slave trader and an Indian killer...This shouldn't be a day of celebration, this should be a day of mourning."

And so it is.

I've realized that I'm becoming angry again. I'm not surprised; I'm missing S badly and it seems when I do I lash out at those around me, even those I don't actually know. I've gotten snippy in comments on other blogs (not here, because my snippy comment to one wingnut was appropriate, thank you very much!), and that's not good. I need to find myself again. This afternoon I'm meeting with my former co-workers at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. We're hoping to find a new location for a workshop that I'll facilitate. Their workshops are brilliant, really. They are free and open to all adults in the city. They're held in neighborhood locations that don't require much travel for the writers. They're based on the idea that "every person is a philosopher" and all work is valid. As a facilitator, I won't "teach" but rather make a safe place for everyone to share their poetry, prose, rants, snippets without fear of ridicule. Later, work by every writer who participates will be published in NWA's quarterly magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, should they want to be published. This little magazine has won two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards (one when I was ED), going against well-known journals like Another Chicago Magazine and Rhino. And in support of this magazine and the workshop, our group will host readings that are free and open to the public, where writers can meet one another, exchange ideas, and share their work with family, friends, and strangers. Cool, huh?

As usual, there's some fine writing floating through cyberspace:

Sam at Feral on loss and laundry (beautiful);

Clayton at Operation Eden on Charity Hospital, New Orleans, and the "Third World version" of America;

Rob at Realtique on cleaning house, rescuing pets, and being harassed by NOPD;

Harry Connick, Jr. at Habitat for Humanity on humanely rebuilding New Orleans;

Yan at Glutter on dissent and censorship, American-style;

Joe the Heretik on the "Tragedy of the Real" in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan;

and a shout-out to Daniel at All the Kings Horses, whose name and writing I came across at n+1.

Last night I saw Bill Maher's Real Time and Salman Rushdie asked what the difference was between yellow and orange fear, the daily alerts put out by what Rushdie calls Bush's "Ministry of False Alarms." I was shocked to find myself agreeing with nearly everything Andrew "Sully" Sullivan said. Ann Coulter was on too, but really, is there anything to say about her that hasn't already been said? The fact that she's still invited to be on television shows all that's wrong with our country.

I need to erase her face from my memory if I'm ever to get past this angry phase. Temper that heart, girl!

Last night I went to see Luna Negra Dance Theater's performance at Millennium Park featuring my friend Luis' backdrop for the world premiere of Quinceañera, a dance piece about the latin american coming-of-age party for girls on their fifteenth birthdays. The backdrop was beauitful: a lush sunshine dress with a fully opened rose around the waist, the folds and shadows reminding me of the pedals of Georgia O'Keeffe's desert flowers. Luis also created three stand-alone dresses that the dancers slinked up from behind at the beginning of the performance. Along with the Quinceañera piece, there were several others including one about Don Quixote that was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival last year and a fabulous piece called Flabbergast, where couples dressed in mid-century housedresses and ties with trousers moved among bead curtains carrying brightly-colored suitcases. Sometimes the suitcases overwhelmed the dancers, a clear visual metaphor for the difficulties of taking your life with you when you're forced for political or economic reasons to leave your home for a new place.

Just minutes before the show began my friend Lisa called from her home on Napoleon Avenue near Fountainbleu in Mid-City, New Orleans. This afternoon we finally got a chance to talk while she was taking a break from cleaning out her basement. Luckily the floodwaters missed the living area by inches, elevated as it is about eight feet above ground, but the basement was wrecked with debris smashed against the walls and mold crawling through the insulation. She and her roommate are staying with her sister in Metairie (which along with Kenner is coming back again) and driving into town to clean and assess every day. Before the storm, Lisa parked her truck in the neutral ground, the New Orleans name for the parkway separating the north-bound traffic from the south-, hoping that it would be spared. Normally it would have been. During Isidore and Ivan, the neutral grounds of many Uptown boulevards were safe because the waters only rose a feet or so. Of course this storm was different, and the water line on her truck comes just below the top of the vehicle. When she called her insurance company, they settled the claim over the phone based solely on her address. Knowing how much the neighborhood flooded was enough.

Lisa told me that today was a beautiful day in New Orleans, the temperature perfect and the full light of the sun shone down on them while they worked. In all directions, she told me, were piles of debris pushed in front of houses by the waters or stacked there this past week, waiting to be cleared. She drove around the city a little, where she was allowed, and said the place is essentially a ghost town. Most residents still haven't come back in, and it seemed the guard troops were driving out as Lisa was driving in, though she has seen a couple of humvees cruising down Claiborne Avenue.

Lisa's family is originally from Mexico. They moved to Texas several generations ago and then settled in New Orleans during the middle of the last century. Her father speaks Spanish though Lisa does not. This past week her dad met three men from Equador who had been brought over the Mexican/US border by coyotes trafficking in laborers to work in New Orleans. They were hired by a local meat shop owner who wanted them to clean out the coolers sick with rotten steak and chicken breasts, and repair the outside of the building. He told them to cook up some meat and take a couple of drinks from the shop when they asked for food and water, and they were locked in the shop to sleep. After several days of hard labor, the owner refused to pay them, telling them he would call immigration if they didn't work for free. That night after they'd labored for hours the men sneaked out and escaped and found themselves at a latin american market. Lisa's dad met them later and hired them to help them clean out his family's home.

During the eighteenth century New Orleans played a major part in the slave trade. Men and women stolen from their west African homelands were taken to the Caribbean, through the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz, and then to New Orleans, where they were sold by the French then the Spanish then the French again (and then Americans) to wealthy landowners and homesteaders. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," became one of the major slave trade ports just as it was home to the most free African-Americans in the country, who helped create a culture world-renowned for America's indigenous music, jazz, and our most distinctive indigenous cuisine. One of the neighborhoods badly flooded by Katrina was Faubourg Tremé, the birthplace of Louis Armstrong and home to the notorious Storyville. It is the oldest, continuous black neighborhood in the United States.

Lisa and I talked about how this one disaster has caused the displacement of so many New Orleanians, scattered as they are across the country (even in rural Arkansas), and how it has simultaneously brought displaced persons like these three men from Ecuador to New Orleans. How will New Orleans change in the coming months, years? When so many of its residents, new and old, are here and there?

I talked to S this morning and he was in somewhat better spirits. He had felt some of the earthquake that struck the Pakistan/India border yesterday, but he had no idea how tragic or devastating it was until I told him. Our conversation was typically short. Perhaps we'll be able to talk longer tomorrow.

Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

Just as Friday turns to Saturday, a photo of decay from San Quintin, Baja.

As usual, a few good reads out there in the blogosphere these days:

Phila at Bouphonia lays out a pandemic flu scenario that is the stuff of nightmare. Sadly, he's probably not far off from what will happen should the avian flu spread and evolve to grotesque proportions. As if there weren't enough to worry about these days! Yikes.

If you missed poet Sharon Olds' letter to Laura Bush, read it here. She was invited to come to the White House and she refused.

Diane at DED Space points to another Katrina-related loss, the death of chef Austin Leslie. I shook his hand a few years ago at Jacques-Imo's. His fried chicken really was the very best. I bought his cookbook and S attempted the gumbo. First time he burned the roux, the second time didn't cook it enough. It's just a matter of time, though, before S masters it. I wonder how many were lost in the days after Katrina, killed indirectly by the stress and horrors of the storm. Leslie was rescued from his roof, taken to the Superdome, and finally evacuated out of Louisiana. It was clearly, sadly, too much.

Doc, marooned on the broken blog isle Sam has on her site, takes a cue from my master's thesis and improves on it: The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too. I feel honored to be honored by him.

Our president is now counting plots we've supposedly stopped, trying to distract us, again, from the reality all around us, as another soldier died in Iraq, making the total now 1945. I'm becoming so pessimistic these days, as the number goes up and our country continues to be governed by one incompetent party.

Daedalus at Washington Rox talks about surrealism and corporatism in an excellent post about the abstraction of war. S and I talked a bit about abstraction last week, though not in the political sense. He bought a copy of Claude Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning, a collection of addresses the structural anthropologist gave in the 1970s. I read it one afternoon and was struck by his dualist approach to myth and culture, and how he made no mention of the abstract nature of myth. I started thinking about myth as abstraction and how abstraction can be closer to "truth" than strict representations of "reality." Writers often talk about the truth of fiction, how it is through story that the heart is revealed. The same is true of abstract art, I think. A realistic painting of a bridge over the River Seine, say at twilight, shows the bridge and river as they appeared, but may not show the truth of the bridge and the river: the lovers who have crossed it; the blood that has spilled into it during the revolution, during everyday crimes; the salty tears that have added to its flowing waters; the joys and conversations and awkward silences that have happened in houseboats along the river's edges or on cruising boats as they passed under the changing light; all that has happened under the bridge, the scrapping up of foodstuffs by those who are sleeping there, the sharing of half-burned cigarette butts, or a stack of newspapers held down by a chipped-edged coffee cup. Through abstraction of color and shape, some of these truths can be revealed to us, even as they aren't shown representationally. To me, myth is no different than this. The most moving myths touch us in ways straightforward recantations cannot. Myths often have only a loose basis in "reality" but they often demonstrate more clearly the contradictions in life, the emotional renderings that are harder to show in strict historical accounts.

I'm not sure how this relates to the wars and the hurricane and our crooked leadership, but perhaps that is because right now we are in the documentation phase of history, too busy trying to record what is happening around us as it comes at us at this flushed, information-age pace. In the coming years we'll be translating it all through abstraction, revealing the truth hidden beneath the facts.

First LBJ and then Reagan had the "War on Poverty," but we all saw it for what it was, a war on the poor. Twenty-five years later, and here we are with an ever-rising percentage of us living below the poverty line, tens of millions without health care, and all making a wage nowhere close to life-sustaining. It took a disaster of epic proportions, and the disturbing images that it produced, for us to start talking about poverty again. All over the place are little hints and discussions about the role of class and race in the mess left from Katrina, and what role both should play in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Seeing that NOLA is one of the most corrupt cities in the country, making even the corruption of Chicago pale in comparison (well, maybe not pale), and that it has long been run by and for elites (first white, now mixed with the "talented tenth" of the black creole population), it will be a miracle if the city included any of its tens of thousands of poor citizens in the decisions being hatched out over martini lunches right now.

Salon ran a two-part roundtable discussion on how to rebuild, and I thought this from Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, was a highlight:


The Nation this week ran a number of essays about New Orleans and the role of class as well, including a gem by Adolph Reed, Jr., one of our country's most eloquent writers on class and race. I'm reading his book Class Notes right now on recommendation from one of his friends who I know here in Chicago. Reed was born and raised in New Orleans:

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.

[snip]

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Also in this week's Nation, Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenat ask 25 questions about the "murder" of New Orleans, and Naomi Klein calls for a "people's reconstruction." I don't have much hope at this point that the reconstruction will be mindful of class given how rents have already skyrocketed in the city, landlords are evicting tenants before they even return, and soaked-through houses are being gobbled up by hungry developers. It's sad, truly sad, that so many who were left behind when Katrina first stormed in are being left behind again, and will most likely continue to be. When I read Clayton Cubett's blog about his mother's loss, I thought of how many tens of thousands of others like her there are down in the Gulf Coast, and how most of them don't have a child or relative who is financially capable of helping them out.

I was struck by the lack of philanthropy in New Orleans when I first moved there three years ago. It was so different than Chicago, where though there is poverty and shameful segregation, there are also a lot of individuals and organizations commited to social change and working hard in neighborhoods across the city to make life better for the city's residents. When I first moved to New Orleans a close friend introduced me to two of her cousins, local socialites, because she thought they might be able to help me get a job in the non-profit sector. Before moving to New Orleans I was Executive Director of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a small community arts program in Chicago, and I wanted to stay in the same sort of job. They told me in very frank terms that New Orleans was about church and family and Mardi Gras, and that it was to those three areas that money went. Over the next three years I found out how true this was. There was money in New Orleans, no doubt. Dick Cheney came to town for a lunch before the election and raised $500,000 in an hour for David Vitter's successful senate campaign. But the money wasn't going into the communities that needed it the most, unless you count the aluminum doubloons made in China that were thrown out to the masses during the many days and nights of Mardi Gras.

The poverty was obvious in that city to anyone who lived there. I wrote about it the day the hurricane struck, thinking like so many others that New Orleans had once again been spared the worst. Reading over the note I sent to that prominent Sir back in the fifth grade, I thought how my grammar and spelling were better when I was "9 1/2 going on 10" than many of my college freshman students in New Orleans. It was heartwrenching and frustrating to see how low their level of skill was. They had so many interesting ideas, so many stories they wanted to tell, but they were crippled by their failed educations. (And it wasn't just the public school students, by the way.) Many had to take remedial English for several semesters (with no financial assistance) before they could take my freshman comp class. And many others failed my class, then failed again, trying to get to a basic level of competence. That level was far below what was expected of me when I was a freshman in high school (the students had to write a four-paragraph argumentative essay at the community college and a five-paragraph essay at the university). The class ended with a pass/fail exit exam that was neither administered nor graded by the instructors that determined whether the student passed out of freshman comp or had to take it again. Some of us instructors talked about how much cash the public university system was making off of this freshman comp business and how, perhaps, the elementary and high school system was kept at a lower level on purpose to create legions of low-wage workers unable to critically think (and therefore question their lot in the city) while simultaneously being sold the idea that they needed college educations to earn anything more than minimum wage, only to go to college and pay to take the same class over and over again because they were so lacking in skills. It seemed like a racket, and perhaps it was.

Part of me thinks that the evacuees I met in Houston are better off there -- their kids will get better educations, the parents higher-paying jobs. But the other part of me thinks this is a monumental failure of the city of New Orleans and its elites and they owe it to these residents to include them in the city this time around. I've never understood how some people can be so blindly selfish as to think that if they protect their own little corner of the world that's enough. Don't they realize that everyone benefits when everyone is taken care of?

In the Garden District, signs are posted on telephone poles declaring that the neighborhood is "Patrolled by Off-Duty NOPD." We lived on the northernmost edge of the Garden District Private Patrol route, which was fine with us since we heard gun shots nearly every night. (Not that the private patrol made any difference -- after all, we heard gun shots every night even with them rolling around in their Ford SUVs). The first time I saw that sign I thought how absurd it was -- why wouldn't the neighborhood be patrolled by on-duty NOPD? -- and how completely opposite it was to my hometown Chicago where you can't go a night or day without hearing sirens (this is a fortified city with 14,000 sworn officers) and where even in my working-class and immigrant neighborhood cops respond to calls within minutes. I got rear-ended on St. Charles one fall and called 911 to have a cop come by and write up a report. Several cops drove by and told us we had to wait for a "traffic cop" who, they promised, was "on the way." After a full five hours of waiting for the mythical "traffic cop" we drove ourselves to the police station on Magazine and Napoleon and got harangued by the lieutenant in his office lined with Rex posters about how we were supposed "to wait at the scene of the accident and not move the vehicles." It was infuriating, and we were two white women with out-of-state plates and on the main tourist drag outside of the Quarter. Imagine the lack of service in the 9th Ward.

Will New Orleans change for the better? I don't know. But if I still lived there I'd stock up on supplies and pretend I lived in the middle of nowhere with no prospect of governmental support. Because that's probably the way it will continue to be.

Monday night I went to see Lhasa at the HotHouse with my mom, Luis, his wife Diana, and two of their friends. Lhasa clutched her left hand in a fist, held it tight to her stomach while she sang, her face contorted as if each word was a struggle to get out. Opening for her was DeVotchKa, an odd Denver trio that uses a theramin in their show. Nifty!

Before the show I had dinner with my mom at her house, and she gave me this draft of a letter I sent to "Sir," a nameless man-in-charge (government-type, no doubt) when I was "9 1/2, going on 10":


Surprisingly, I never got a letter back from Sir about this idea.

When I wrote this I was in the fifth grade, and my mom and I lived in a railroad apartment on Pleasant Street in Oak Park, Illinois, a self-described progressive suburb just west of Chicago where Ernest Hemingway grew up (and so famously said it was a city "of wide streets and narrow minds"). We had a rickety black-and-white RCA TV and it was in my mom's room. I remember my favorite shows were re-runs of The Cisco Kid, Hawaii Five-O and Emergency!. Apparently I was quite concerned with keeping up with my "information" and worried about what an energy crisis might do to my quality of life.

I don't remember too much about my teacher, Mr. Morelli, except that he always had a five o'clock shadow and it looked green from his black hair and pale skin. I remember, too, that we had to memorize one poem that year and recite it and I chose "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost (which I still remember, by the way). I guess he had us write letters to powerful Sirs too, which I'm sure suited me just fine since I already saw myself as a political person.

I wonder, do fifth graders still send letters to powerful Sirs in their classrooms? And if they do, what do they write about? Their desire to learn "intelligent design" in science class? How prayer should be a part of school? The inequities of our economic system? Or are they still sending letters about our on-going energy crisis and the wars we're waging in relation to it?

S has not received any letters from kids, but he has received a couple from adult strangers, including an elderly woman from New Orleans who knows one of the men on his old lacrosse team down there. She sent a kind letter to him wishing him well and hoping he stays safe. He wasn't sure if he should send a response back now that her city has no mail service and is struggling to emerge from the flood. I'm not certain, but I think he sent her a card anyway, thinking one day it would reach her, even if it came a little soiled around the edges.

Ray in Austin pointed to Operation Eden on his site and I followed it. What I found was a heartbreaking story of one family's struggle after their home and their community were destroyed by Katrina. Clayton James Cubitt is a successful professional photographer in New York who came from a "poorer than poor" family in the New Orleans area. For a week he agonized over whether his mother and young brother had lived through the storm, and since then he has documented their experiences in unbelievable photographs and expert prose. He purchased a trailer for his family in March, and now that trailer is gone. He is raising funds to rebuild his family's life by selling prints of some of his photographs (I've already purchased two: Katrina Gothic and Mary's Left). Take his advice: scroll to the bottom of his page and read the entire story, from the day before Katrina struck. It'll break your heart.

There are thousands still working down there, volutneering their time to help their neighbors. Michael Moore is documenting the work of Veterans for Peace and other groups affiliated with Cindy Sheehan as they distribute food, goods, and health care in Covington (a north shore community on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans). Talk about true peacemakers! Man, there are a lot of goodhearted people out there.

Last weekend we talked to one of S's former unit buddies who is a professor at a small university in southern Mississippi. He's still in the national guard (a PR unit) and he worked for a month along the devastated coast, taking pictures for the military and helping with the distribution of aid. He was able to travel all over the place, on land and in air. I'm going ot twist his arm a little and see if I can post some of his photos here. We'll see! His darling daughter drew that picture of me that's underneath the calendar on the right of this page. I hope he's not called up for Iraq. He's got a few years left on his contract. Frankly, they need the guard in Mississippi right now. There's so much left to do.

I've been trying to get my mind back in order these past two days, still a little delirious from our two weeks together and the heavy days I've had since he left. It was so good to see him, to touch him. I hated saying goodbye to him again.

It turns out we were both apprehensive about seeing each other. I started to get nervous about it down in Houston, worrying that we would not know each other anymore, or worse that we would be irritated with one another after such a long absence. His flight was changed at the last minute so he ended up leaving Dallas later than he'd hoped. I was to pick him up near 11 p.m. instead of 8, and since it was a Friday night, there was crawling traffic around the airport made worse by late-night construction work. He'd told me I could get a pass and meet him at the gate, so I left the house early to get to the airport on time to get the pass. With the traffic, though, I missed that chance. I called him when his flight was supposed to land and left a harried message while my car idled near the exit for 294, still a mile or so away from the airport, then rolled down the windows and sighed. What the hell can you do.

I drifted to him waiting at the car pick-up area at Terminal 1, a dead-end traffic-wise. He put his bags in the back seat, sat down in the front. I burst into tears. We hugged and kissed and the light from the bug-juiced overheads streamed inside, surrounded him, made me cry more. He was in the car with me. Right there! It took a couple of minutes before I could drive us home, a couple of pets on his shoulders, his arms, his legs. A brush of my lips against his cheek. It was too much, finally seeing him, touching him. It had been more than seven months, and really two more before that when we'd said our first goodbye. I'd driven him to a buddy's house in the south suburbs, a mid-century ranch with a large American flag pinned to the garage door, a handful of smaller flags stuck in the frozen lawn around the walkway, and helped him load up the van for the drive to Indiana to catch a bus for Ft. Hood. It was a blinding-bright day, deeply cold. The sun's shadows were long and black, each bare hickory and oak cast across the salt-rimmed frontage roads as Brancusi sculptures. I hated that drive home.

When I drove away from S in Ft. Hood two months later it didn't feel as final as it had that day in Chicago. I wasn't driving home alone to an empty house but rather back to Austin to check in my car and fly away. (Perhaps it was that sense of false goodbye I wanted to preserve these past months, traveling as I have.) I have only a few solid memories of Kileen, Texas, those days were so blurred with worry and so intense. There were the crashed cars at the fort's entrances with LCD signs giving how many days since the last person was killed in a crash ("13 Days," "16 Days," then back to "0 Days"); the tanks and anti-aircraft guns sprinkled in front of dusty brown administration buildings and barracks, the 1st Calvary's and 4th Infantry's very own sculpture gardens; Hell on Wheels Avenue, Tank Destroyer Boulevard; the cardboard tents set up on tables in the PX advertising life insurance -- at a special Military price, of course! -- and the hollow-eyed men quietly eating pulled pork sandwiches and pepperoni pizza together, or alone; the tent-covered book sale outside the PX, where soldiers could buy, at a discount of course, romance novels, self-help books, and countless versions of the illustrated Bible; the internet cafe run by a middle-aged Vietnamese woman in a strip mall near tattoo parlors and pawn shops, and her stories of buying homes, renovating them, and selling them again; the screaming "We Support Our Troops!" banners hanging in the windows of competing car dealerships that sold brand new cars at high interest rates to young boys before they flew off to Kuwait and then to war; the check-in den at the mouth of the fort, not so different than a check-in den at a prison or jail, with every "visitor" required to show ID and car registration after taking a number and sitting and waiting, waiting to prove who they were to the tired bureaucrats behind the counter (I went in once and there was no one in line so I went straight to the counter. The man told me to take a number -- "we have a procedure" -- and to wait my turn, which was, surprise, next.); the "welcome home" messages outside the cav's staging area made out of green and red and blue and white plastic cups stuffed in chain-link fence pockets; the boy-young soldier with a prosthetic where his right forearm and hand used to be, shopping in the Target off the frontage road; and the mass of blackbirds howling at dusk in the squat tree across the road from my pasty room at the Super 8.

We drove home from the airport and it was a warm Chicago summer night, and when we got home he told me stories he'd stored for the past seven months, then I told him how I needed him to write me more while he's gone. We got it out, then made love and made love again, and filled ourselves with each other so much so that when I discovered yesterday that I'm not pregnant, again, I was more puzzled than sad. How could I not be when it was so intense, so true? (I already know the answer to that.) By our third day together we both said "It's as if I/you never left," and went on to just be together, again and again, day after day, as if there was no war and no hurricane and no political turmoil. We talked about our dog Casey and how silly and adorable he was. We went to silly movies and S baked three apple pies (he is the best baker I've ever known -- better crusts than my mom's or my grandmother's, which, honestly, were the best crusts ever baked, ever, before S started baking them). We both gained a few happy pounds, made every bite count as we filled up with that luscious goodness.

Saturday night we stayed up late getting his stuff packed. We stuffed four pairs of boxing gloves, thai leg kick pads, focus mitts, hand wraps, and a pair of five-ounce Harbingers into his green duffle, then topped it off with his shower sandals and a couple of mud brown towels. The rest of his gear he crammed into his sandy backpack, including one newly cleaned and pressed uniform, a little scruffy at the seams from river-stone washings and life in the harsh mountains. The next morning we rose early, stopped at the coffe shop to get a couple of lattes, drove to the airport and parked the car on White Sox, 3rd level, 3rd aisle, and I wondered out loud why the parking czars would have levels and aisles both numbered, not one with letters instead. He got to check in at the special "group" check-in, which on first glance seemed to be a shorter line but was in fact as long as the others. I was issued a special pass to go with him to the gate, then we went through security, and since S is a soldier he is also a potential terrorist, so they searched him and his gear, rubbed his hands to test for bomb-making residue, then confiscated his beard-trimming scissors. The TSA man felt bad, really, then threw the scissors in the trash. S told me that he was searched extensively on the way to Chicago too, and he said he resented being treated like a terrorist when he's fighting in this supposed "war on terror." "They treat us like kids," he said, "and fucking criminals."

We roamed the United terminal, reminiscing about all of the flights we missed in the late 90s when that airline was so greedy they booked flights they had no intention of flying, and when the customer service lines stretched the length of the terminal in either direction (and if you've been to O'Hare, you know just how lengthy that is) filled with irate customers trying to get home. We stood around and held hands and made small talk. It's impossible to have a real conversation when you know it is going to be interrupted sometime soon with that call, "All rows are now boarding." I walked away when he handed his ticket to the check-in woman. I knew he wouldn't look back -- it's not his way -- and I didn't want to see him walk away from me down the aluminum tube to his plane. I follwed the signs out of the airport and found my car and drove home, where I stayed holed up until last night. I cooked an omelette, watched foolish shows on television and pretended to read "Massacre of the Dreamers," a collection of essays by Ana Castillo. In reality, though, I flipped through the pages, my eyes glossed over, and glanced up at the TV which may as well have been showing snowy static. That night just disappeared.

I have finally emerged, quicker this second time. The first time I stayed in my house for three days straight, only tumbling out to walk our sickly dog. I cleared our cabinets of canned goods that week and watched Sex and the City, the entire series, straight through. I feel like I've come a long way since then, seeing that my time-of-distraction was only a little more than 24 hours after this latest goodbye.

I know we're at the shorter end of this mess now. We don't think he'll be gone longer than five more months, so the worst is behind us. But I still miss him. I still worry. I can't wait to see him again and know, finally, that there will not be a third goodbye. Some, like my friends Daniel and Zach, have no idea when their last goodbyes will be. The army will not let them go. They've served tour after tour, their contracts long ago expired, and their families ache for them just as I ache for S. It's a travesty.


Here are S and Casey standing below a Live Oak at Audubon Park, New Orleans last December. The picture at the top of the post is from Ireland soon after we married six years ago.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

 -- Mahatma Gandhi, October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948

So here it is, almost exactly one month after Katrina roared into New Orleans, and the police chief has quit, and the rumors of violence that fueled so much of the racist-tinged discussions during those darker days have been proven false:


The AP is covering the story today, but they are still perpetuating the myth that the National Guard soldier shot in the Dome was shot during a fight for his gun, when actually the attacker was not going for his gun at all, and the soldier shot himself in the leg during a moment of chaos.

Why do these corrections matter? Because still there is a stigma, an expectation, of crime and violence from the thousands and thousands of New Orleans evacuees who are poor and black. When I was in Houston there was talk of the "sky-rocketing" crime since the evacuees came into town, and rumors of looting when New Orleanians were seen walking out of Target with shopping bags. The speakers may not have said "black evacuees" but it was understood that was who they were talking about.

And shock and surprise, FEMA continues to bungle up their efforts, now just west of New Orleans in Beaumont, Texas:


If they "steal" from FEMA will they be looters? Or heroes? Perhaps it will depend on their skin color.

S and I are enjoying our last few days together before he flies to Dallas this Sunday and then to wherever (the list of stops will be long, that's certain), and then finally back to Afghanistan. Our "tasting" dinner at Alinea was spectacular, but it was also breathtakingly expensive. Too much to even admit to spending on one meal. It must be the most expensive restaurant in this city, and probably one of the most expensive in the entire country. Oh well!! Too expensive for us is clearly not too expensive for many, many others. Two couples seated near us fly in from Philly once a month just to eat there. All of the tables were full. The couple sitting right next to us were celebrating their sixth anniversary too, but they were smart enough to have a simple glass of wine each and not indulge in the wine tasting option, a steady trail of fifth-filled glasses to go with each of the forteen courses (and we chose the "middle" tasting menu -- the largest has twenty-eight courses and was a "serious commitment" according to our waiter). We were in food- and drink-induced funks yesterday and literally didn't leave the house. We started moving about in the afternoon and cooked dinner, curled up again, and watched the first half of Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

Today we've spent hours running errands to prepare for S's trip back, and fuming at the radio as we heard the maddening testimony of Mr. Brown who has decided, suprisingly of course, that the failures in New Orleans were the fault of everyone involved except him. According to Raw Story (via Salon), he's been hired by FEMA as a consultant, which makes sense in Bush World and absolutely no sense here in reality. It's just so maddening!

And in Iraq? We've killed the number two guy, again (doesn't the story sound familiar?), and still more soldiers are being killed, more Iraqis forced to live under constant threat of death (and forced to see their friends and neighbors killed). As for this, I hope it's not true:

The Americans took one of the empty plastic water bottles they use to relieve themselves when on patrol, Mohammed said. When the Iraqi driver ran out to move his car, an annoyed American plunked him with the newly filled bottle and rolled on, Mohammed said.

But it wouldn't be surprising if it were true. This is what can happen when limits are pressed, when there is no end in sight to deployments let alone the war. Who knows what Bush's goals actually are for Iraq, how those goals will be achieved or when. He's not offering squat and neither is anyone else with even a smear of power. S had an excellent idea about it today, though. He says we should build democracy at the local level first, then let the government grow upwards from those local elected governments. As each locality was secured and governed, our troops could leave, eventually leaving the country all together. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) S is a peon (self-described) and no one gives a damn what he thinks. Still, it was nice to hear an actual idea today, nicer still that it was such a good idea.

If you weren't able to go to the massive peace march on Saturday in DC, check out Matt's reporting. He's got pictures. Cool pictures. Rock on, Matt.

Today is our sixth anniversary. How fortunate that S is home right now, and how wonderful! Tonight we are going to a new restaurant that is supposed to be spectacular, Alinea, for a very late dinner. We couldn't get a reservation until 9. Last year we were living in New Orleans and spent our anniversary at Le Pavillon, a classic hotel that serves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hot coco in the lobby late into the night, and had dinner at the world famous Galatoire's in the Quarter. The food was, well, okay, but the atmosphere! My god. Really, everyone who visits New Orleans ought to go there once. Hopefully one day both the hotel and the restaurant will again serve eager guests in the top-notch way they have for over a century.

We've been doing all the things we love to do together (some too secret to write in a blog - ha!) and having loads of fun doing them. Yesterday we saw Penn State, one of S's alma maters, beat Northwestern 34-29. It was all the more sweet because as an alum of U of I, I love ot see Northwestern beaten by any team at all, and because the game was full of late-quarter drama with the Lions squeaking out a victory in the last ten minutes or so. Plus it was one of those dreary early fall days, not to cold, with the threat of rain all afternoon. Lucky for us the sky didn't open up until we were waiting in line for the shuttle bus back to downtown Evanston. And Penn State won! Did I mention that already?

Friday night we went to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and hooked up with our friend Luis who had a piece in their exhibit in honor of Carlos Chavez, a Chicago artist and activist who died last year. Afterwards, we went to Flo for delicious nouveau Mexican. The place is owned by a couple of local artists who we know by a degree or two of separation. It's intimate and fun and the food is fab (plus it's definitely in our budget). The joy never ends.


Here's S in front of the score board. Ah, sweet victory.


Here's Luis next to his piece. Unfortunately, the museum didn't hang it on the wall, so it was hard to see that on the front of the doors there were also images, skeletons of the coyotes painted on the inside. Luis is a talented artist whose work connects the contemporary Mexican-American experience with the culture of pre-Colombian Mexico and modern politics. He's got a number of interesting projects going on right now. I'll post about them as they come along.

If only Rita could produce such beautiful and gentle waves. Instead, some have already died and the worst has come to pass in New Orleans, again. The only good news is Rita is weakening and most people have gotten away from the coasts, hopefully to areas that won't be subjected to the storm's land-locked watershed the experts predict will come in the days after. I think the weather-worry is that much worse since we now know (and many of us have known) that we have failed leadership, an atmosphere that compounds disaster again and again.

S and I are having a wonderful time together, though neither of us can stay away from the thrice-daily hurricane updates. In between though, we have gone to some of our favorite eating places, seen The Corpse Bride (wow!) and tonight we're headed to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum for the opening of their Día de los muertos exhibit. A friend of ours, Luis De La Torre, has a piece in the show.

Our friends are safe -- most still scattered across the country after being left homeless after Katrina -- and hopefully Rita will drift away from the most populated places. And this weekend is a massive protest against the Iraq War. (We'll be there in spirit.) If you've not seen it yet, check out Phil Donahue's mop-up job on the O'Reilly Factor. It's almost enough to give me hope.