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Most of our framed photos are out of the bubble wrap now and propped against a wall in the study. A few half-opened boxes still litter the two-bedroom, two-bath shotgun double we now call home.
When we arrived at this new house in New Orleans, some of the city was still without power following Hurricane Isaac. Traffic lights were out. Trash and trees and leaves were everywhere. Parts of the town stank of accumulating garbage. When I hugged my sweet Grandma shortly after our arrival in the city, her skin felt damp, sticky and hot from three days with no air conditioning.
It was like the city said, "Welcome to New Orleans. You sure you want to live here?"
I can't say that hasn't given me pause. Though my family -- My Amazing Family -- has been warm and supportive since we brought one of the newest and most popular members of our clan into their permanent daily lives, New Orleans' post-hurricane landscape reinforced many of my original misgivings about returning to my beloved hometown.
We traded in our pristine life by the water for a largely industrial landscape peppered with litter, construction zones, potholes and things that don't work. We knew we were doing this when we pulled the trigger. We believe in the reasons we did it. But the reality is sometimes jarring.
Over the last three weeks, as -- one box at a time -- we've transitioned from a state of chaos to near-normalcy, the city around us seems to have done the same.
Garbage trucks arrived. Bucket trucks left. Cleaning crews combed major streets and parks to pick up branches and other debris. Private citizens picked up some of the slack in areas the City of New Orleans likes to forget.
As soon as I was able to clear a path from Aida's room to the front door, I started taking her on regular treks to all the hopping spots for two-year-olds.
Plum Street Snoballs. Audubon Park. City Park. Nix Library. Levee walks along the Mississippi -- downriver to the Fly and upriver to the Jefferson Parish line. Streetcar rides to Danneel Park and strolls to Palmer Park.
We've practiced her coffee house skills at Rue de la Course and CC's, split a turkey sandwich at Maple Street Patisserie and watched a couple dance arm-in-arm over lunch at Oak Street Cafe. We visited the children's section at Maple Street Book Shop and, per her request, rocked on the front porch rockers after making our purchase.
Aida now counts the streetcars every time we pass Carrollton Station and exclaims "Streetcar!" when one rattles down the neutral ground before us. She got out of the car at my girlfriend's Lakeside Metairie house the other day, pointed to the green hill before us and yelled, "Levee!"
As we walk, I tend to point out all the places important to our family's personal history. "That's where Mommy went to school," I said one day as we passed my old high school campus while riding on the streetcar. The next day, as we walked on the same street in the opposite direction, she pointed from her stroller: "Mommy's school." Which of course warranted a Mommy tear, a Mommy cheer and a big sloppy Mommy kiss.
These moments have been incredibly satisfying. She now tells me, "I love Grandma" (who is her great-grandma) and "I love Papa Cat" (who is her grandfather) and "I love Uncle Joseph." Until moving to New Orleans, the only family members she mentioned voluntarily on a regular basis were Mommy, Daddy, Mamere and Sarah (who is not a family member at all, but a babysitter).
But, like a dysfunctional love affair, with the loveliness of New Orleans comes the ugliness.
On a tricycle ride up and down the block one day, Aida pointed to the ground in front of a recently renovated rental house on the corner. "What dat? What dat?"
"That's trash," I said.
"Trash," she said happily. "Trash!" After days went by and it remained and Aida kept naming it, Steve fetched a trash bag and we taught our daughter how to pick up trash. "Pick up trash," she says now.
As far as Aida knows, the concrete chasms and dramatic cliffs of sidewalk pushed from the earth atop sprawling tree roots are a part of a massive game of human strategy and skill. "Sidewalk challenge!" she shouts as we near hills of broken pavement. (She got that from me.)
Our second week here, Steve walked out to find the back of his car had been hit, most likely by someone speeding down the street and swerving to avoid a massive pothole.
On Monday, exactly three weeks after we moved in, I came home from running errands with Aida to find police cars and onlookers scattered down the street. A half-hour earlier, two blocks away, two 27-year-old men were shot, one fatally, in the light of day, after an argument inside a house spilled onto the street.
When Steve got home, he took Aida duty while I walked down the street to learn what I could learn. A young black man was crying. Sheets draped the scene. Neighbors clustered on their porches and spoke in low voices. Few people volunteered any credible details when I introduced myself and asked what they'd heard (and I didn't even have press credentials hanging around my neck!).
I picked out the Times-Picayune reporter at the scene by his pleated khakis, legal notebook and flip cell phone, and maneuvered close enough to him to try to eavesdrop on his conversation with the office. (He's not the one whose byline tops the online story, btw.) Apparently, I lack discretion because he called after me later when I'd decided to walk back home. He asked me about my experience in the neighborhood. I told him that in three weeks, I'd come to feel great about our particular block, but a shooting two blocks from where we are raising a toddler is obviously disconcerting.
"I mean, I don't know what your neighborhood's like," I said.
My uneasiness over the event has grown in the days since. As a once-upon-a-time crime reporter, I frequently showed up in other people's neighborhoods and reported on death and mayhem, then returned to my seemingly safe house in another part of town. It feels altogether different not being able to leave. It was like this when I was a teenager here in the late 80s. But, I was a teenager. Oblivious.
We checked the available crime stats on this address before we signed a lease. There were incidents in surrounding area, but this was a good block. And it's all about the block around here. Unlike in Florida, our neighbors all introduced themselves to us from day one. Each of the three houses on one side of us are occupied by families with babies or toddlers. On on the other, we have a sweet hairdresser named Mary and a kind butterfly wrangler named Linda. Our landlord bent over backward to make our house great for us to move in. But. Really? This?
"Nowhere is safe," my aunt messaged me from her Gentilly home.
We knew that. We knew that. We knew that. We came anyway.
Today I let Aida watch a little Sesame Street on the Roku. It was H day. So they showed a montage of kids playing on the beaches of Hawaii. The images of sand and seashore made me unexpectedly teary for our former life.
"I'm so happy Aida's going to be raised in New Orleans," my sister Ramona told me on the phone last week.
The moment she said it, my mind catalogued all the ways being a kid in New Orleans is tough: terrible schools, adult-centric values, crime, poverty, lack of future jobs.
"Really?!" I said before starting into my mental list.
Ramona interrupted me. "Character-building," she said. "Character-building."
I guess I'm hoping for something more.
I refuse to believe the richness of this city depends on things not working. There seem to be legions of organizations and individuals who agree, who are working to try to make things better.
We want to be in that number. I keep reminding myself that's why we came.
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| Aida's first Plum Street Snoball, Sept. 2012 |
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