Storm Warnings

Keeping my head above water, for now

I just landed in New Orleans to visit my son at Tulane, and a friend who lives here texted me this message: “Cat 2 and we are still in the cone.” A dribble of rain was running across my cab’s windshield. It took a minute for me to decipher her text as a weather report, predicting a Category 2 storm. What impeccable timing! My son had made reservations at all his favorite restaurants—he’s only been here a month and he already has a list—and his phone has been pinging all day with notifications that this restaurant and that one are closed in anticipation of the storm. I wobbled a moment in the airport, wondering if I should turn around and fly out fast, but my maternal instincts won out. We’ll manage. I may be eating Cheez-its from my minibar rather than enjoying the best of New Orleans’ cuisine, but there ya go.

Being here reminds me of a book recommendation I’d like to offer: Sheri Fink’s brilliant Five Days At Memorial, about the catastrophe at New Orleans’ oldest hospital in the days following Hurricane Katrina. It’s dark and sobering, exquisitely reported and written with urgency and style. I’ve thought about it many times since reading it—the measure of a really great book.

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

I have another recommendation for you! I went to Chicago before coming to New Orleans, because I was the lucky recipient of the Founder’s Inspiring Writer Award, from the American Writers Museum, and I had gone for the awards dinner. The previous winners were Henry Louis Gates and Viet Thanh Nguyen, so I’m pretty damn stoked about it. You’re probably now saying “What the hell is the American Writers Museum?” Which is exactly what I said when they called to tell me about the award. Before the ceremony, I toured the museum, in downtown Chicago, not at all sure what to expect. The museum is quite new, and it’s not huge, but it’s fabulous. It traces the history of American writing and highlights the significant figures within it. This sounds dry, I bet, but it’s anything but. It’s got cool things on display like typewriters (a novelty for you young folks) and Jack Kerouac’s scroll of paper on which he wrote On the Road, among other things, and the exhibits are so well-designed and engaging that you want to look at everything. It’s pretty great, so if you’re in Chicago, put it on your itinerary.

In the meantime, the storm is inching in. When I checked into my hotel, the desk clerk warned me, gently but with the weariness of someone who had been through many storms, that the building did not have a back-up generator, and that if I wanted to cancel she wouldn’t blame me. I had visions of being in a dark, hot hotel room with a dying cell phone and that little bag of Cheez-its, inching down the service stairs on my broken ankle, and I fretted. Do you know how many hotels in New Orleans have generators? Not very many. I finally found one and booked it, a little embarrassed to be so worried. But the weather maps that are on the television in every local bar are blood red, showing the path and wide reach of the storm, and I have begun to feel that the very center of it is pointing at me, like a red dagger. I packed for this trip like a dummy, all little summer tops and shorts and sandals, excusable only by the fact that it was 108 degrees the day I left Los Angeles, and I simply couldn’t think of normal fall clothing. I know this is New Orleans, where it is humid and sultry, but it is actually fall here; no one is wearing shorts. They’re in storm gear. Wish me luck!

SHOW NOTES

—The docuseries “Wise Guy”, about Sopranos’ creator David Chase is one of the best things I’ve seen in ages. It made me want to go back and rewatch the show, too.

—The American Writers Museum has a small but groovy offering of merch. I scored a tee shirt from outofprint.com which is such a great company—they’re the clever folks who print classic book covers on tee shirts and totes and do literary-themed socks and so forth. I got an adorable Wizard of Oz tee, with the first-edition cover, which depicts the Cowardly Lion.

—I’m writing this on my phone, in a dim hotel lobby, so please forgive typos or formatting glitches and goofs. This is as good a time as any to also thank you for reading this and supporting Wordy Bird. I am truly grateful!