I know. Try to pick your jaw up off the floor.
Both of my parents spent the majority of their lives in Southern Louisiana. The only one out of the five of us who was actually born in Louisiana, though, is our baby. Lucky duck. Quentin and I were born in California, the parents were born on military bases in Texas and Florida.
My father's job took my parents to SoCal when they were newly married and the oil business was at its height there. They had two kids and then opportunity came knock-knock-knockin' and they followed it home to Southern Louisiana, where they stayed. Family was close, work was convenient and plentiful, and who wouldn't want to come home to a place that just gets in your blood and doesn't let go of her iron-clad grip on your heart?
I consider myself fortunate to have grown up where I did.
Mandeville has its faults, please don't get me wrong. I know its many sins. 12 years non-stop in the same place will do that for you. But we never wanted for anything.
Being Southern is something I always took for granted until I was 20 and Hurrican Katrina came ripping through our back door. I never looked back and from that day forward, I have spent countless hours coming to terms with my heritage and who I am and what it means to me to be from an area that millions of people feel like they know.
I relish where I'm from because it is such a huge part of who I have become and who I want to be when I close this ex-pat chapter in my life.
New Orleans is ubiquitous when people think of parties, carnival, food, music, tragedy. Our city has a tumultuous past and what promises to be a future full of more of the same.
I will never forget the summer after Katrina when I was working at a tiny summerstock in the backwoods of Pennsylvania and one of the actors went on a rant about how he thought it was ignorant and foolish to campaign to rebuild a city in such a precarious and naive position: below sea level, on a notoriously tempestuous couple of bodies of water. I was stunned and all I could say was, "It's their home. How would you feel?"
John Besh, a New Orleans chef, said something that stuck with me: "I don't think New Orleans has a place for people that are lukewarm. I think you're either with us or against us. You have a city here made of people who want to be here and that makes all the difference in the world."
Preach.
Right after the Hurricane, my mother and I's favorite Times-Picayune columnist, Chris Rose, wrote with amazing clarity and honesty about our situation and the mindset of the people. He struggled publicly down the dark path that so many of us internalized. The anger at the human error for letting it happen, the hopelessness, the darkness, the despair. And then he began to pull out of it and compiled his columns into a book that I purchased at the New Orleans airport on a trip back to Pennsylvania. He had this to say about our culture:
"I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We're South Louisiana. You probably already know we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you'd hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.
We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't.
Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love south Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on the pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.
We're resilient. After all, we've been rooting for the Saints for thirty-five years. That's got to count for something. Okay, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.
But what the hell."That stuck with me. To this day it is the most honest explanation of my home that I can offer anyone. I own an LSU sweatshirt that may be my most prized article of clothing. It was my mother's when she attended LSU.
I want to be buried in it.
Maybe now you understand a little better who I am. Or even maybe a little of why I am the way I am. Why when people make fun of "ya'll" I argue a little louder in favor of it and use it as many times in a sentence as I can. Why when I speak on the phone with home, I get in touch with my roots and the Southern drawl gets more pronounced. Why everything I have done since the day I left my home has been bringing me one step closer to returning. Why people say they love their home and I just smile with the knowledge that they don't know what they're missing. {I know what they are missing and they are better off not knowing.} Why I have known since I was 18 that I would one day retire in New Orleans, but that I would have to travel the world before I would fully appreciate the Dirrty South.
And oh honey do I appreciate it.
I leave you with another Chris Rose quote from another of his post-K articles -
"She is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else. And even if they do, they always come back.
That's just the way it is."
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