From New Orleans, little memories linger

Orange juice.

It was early enough on a May morning that the sweltering heat hadn't quite set in. We were headed out after a night's stay at La Maison Bleu on Canal St. in Mid-City, set to hop the Canal streetcar to pick up a rental car.

Breakfast was quite over, but the guest house's owner insisted he run out to grab us some orange juice. Just another moment of New Orleans hospitality.

Through the utter insanity of this week, I generally held together until I came across this photo yesterday: La Maison Bleu, half submerged like the rest of the city, a few desperate stragglers begging for rescue from the porch.

That's when the tears started, quietly.

Intellectually, you can get your head around the sheer magnitude of what Katrina has wrought. But no volume of words or images — and I say this with full respect to my newsroom colleagues — can surpass the power of memory.

It is all unspeakably horrible. Not just the wholesale death and destruction, or the violence and desperation in the aftermath. Not the cavalier and lackluster official response as lives were crushed and corpses floated in the streets — a governmental misstep so profoundly inept that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has already made himself a folk hero by angrily speaking truth to power.

It is not even that most of us, sitting hundreds or thousands of miles away, ultimately have little recourse but to open our wallets and hearts, and hope for better times down the road — though of course, it is our mandate to do all that, and more.

The details hurt most
No, the true magnitude comes during that moment of transformation, when the impersonal nature of grand-scale horror suddenly becomes intimately personal. These are not just images of a far-off trauma. This is a city many of us know only too well.

Jon Bonné / MSNBC.com Aboard a Canal Street streetcar.  New Orleans' main arterial is now underwater.

Our cultural skin is tougher now than it was five years ago, but New Orleans was one of America's playgrounds, for better or worse. It has been a city of extraordinary hospitality, and the casual visitor's memories are meant to be memories of joy.

For some it is the chaos of Mardi Gras, the jostle of the French Quarter and a rainbow rain of beads. For others, it's a smoky night of jazz.

For me, New Orleans has been America's food city. Others could boast of more restaurants, or better haute eateries, but it was hard to imagine any city with a more intrinsic passion for food. Despite its modern miseries, New Orleans remained a city of plenty, one of the few locales in America where rich and poor alike had a firm appreciation of a decent meal.

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