noelleprice (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} noelleprice) wrote,@ 2007-05-27 17:45:00 |
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Trailer-living patrons of the Saints
This is my sweet little Louisiana home. I can not begin to describe to you what a palace it was for me, given that it was my ticket out of the sardine can that was my 10-to-a-room church bunkhouse. I could not have been more thankful. I thought that after a while the novelty would wear off. It never did. I eventually decorated it with my Mardi Gras loot, a Jaimi Kercher calendar of California wilderness scenes, and some other favorite special items. I had a whole bunch of yummy seasonings and spicy sauces and herbs and oils on the back of my tiny stove... I used that trailer for all it was worth. That first picture is taken from the bathroom door looking toward the bed alcove. You can see my little kitchen table and "loveseat", as well as my keys and headlamp hanging on hooks. This one is taken from the opposite direction... the light's not as good this way...
And here's the obligatory bathroom door mirror pic.
I am wearing my Saints sweatshirt... which makes for a convenient transition into another important topic, which is the near impossibility of understanding post-Katrina life in the vicinity of New Orleans without assigning proper significance to the Saints. Yes, I am talking about a football team. I am also talking about just about the only thing that was going right in New Orleans for a good part of the past year. And no one is more surprised by this (the diehards won't admit it, but deep down they know this is true) than the Saints' fans themselves. This team is dearly beloved by its more-than-half-crazy multitudes, but any of them who have been on board more than a couple years have become inwardly resigned to the certain knowledge that it will all end in tears, notwithstanding the fact that every time the team has won a game in the last 30 years, there's been someone somewhere saying, that's it, this is the year - we're going to the SuperBowl.
Imagine the collective surprise when in this, the year of great frustrations, stupidities, and dimensions of personal and shared agony that are difficult to enumerate, for the first time in their history the often bewilderingly self-destructive Saints came very near to going all the way. Most of the Habitat staff gathered every Sunday at the home of Craig, one of the construction supervisors, to watch the game, drink some beers, and eat good grub. Craig is a die-hard Saints fan. He's from "da Parish", which is to say St. Bernard, which pretty much means that the house he grew up in as well as the houses of all his friends and family no longer exist, except as shells on overgrown lots where no one is certain there will ever be life again. But damnit, at least the Saints had a winning season. And that is something.
Driving through the business district of New Orleans, a friend saw a homeless man holding a cardboard-and-black-marker placard that my friend referred to as "a sign of the times":
Please help
Will work for food
No home
No job
Go Saints
As popular Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose observed after the Saints' first win in the Superdome once it finally re-opened after the horrors of its use as an unsupported shelter in the first weeks after Katrina, it is important to keep some perspective on these things. It is, after all, only a football game.
"Like hell it is."
This is my sweet little Louisiana home. I can not begin to describe to you what a palace it was for me, given that it was my ticket out of the sardine can that was my 10-to-a-room church bunkhouse. I could not have been more thankful. I thought that after a while the novelty would wear off. It never did. I eventually decorated it with my Mardi Gras loot, a Jaimi Kercher calendar of California wilderness scenes, and some other favorite special items. I had a whole bunch of yummy seasonings and spicy sauces and herbs and oils on the back of my tiny stove... I used that trailer for all it was worth. That first picture is taken from the bathroom door looking toward the bed alcove. You can see my little kitchen table and "loveseat", as well as my keys and headlamp hanging on hooks. This one is taken from the opposite direction... the light's not as good this way...
And here's the obligatory bathroom door mirror pic.
I am wearing my Saints sweatshirt... which makes for a convenient transition into another important topic, which is the near impossibility of understanding post-Katrina life in the vicinity of New Orleans without assigning proper significance to the Saints. Yes, I am talking about a football team. I am also talking about just about the only thing that was going right in New Orleans for a good part of the past year. And no one is more surprised by this (the diehards won't admit it, but deep down they know this is true) than the Saints' fans themselves. This team is dearly beloved by its more-than-half-crazy multitudes, but any of them who have been on board more than a couple years have become inwardly resigned to the certain knowledge that it will all end in tears, notwithstanding the fact that every time the team has won a game in the last 30 years, there's been someone somewhere saying, that's it, this is the year - we're going to the SuperBowl.
Imagine the collective surprise when in this, the year of great frustrations, stupidities, and dimensions of personal and shared agony that are difficult to enumerate, for the first time in their history the often bewilderingly self-destructive Saints came very near to going all the way. Most of the Habitat staff gathered every Sunday at the home of Craig, one of the construction supervisors, to watch the game, drink some beers, and eat good grub. Craig is a die-hard Saints fan. He's from "da Parish", which is to say St. Bernard, which pretty much means that the house he grew up in as well as the houses of all his friends and family no longer exist, except as shells on overgrown lots where no one is certain there will ever be life again. But damnit, at least the Saints had a winning season. And that is something. Driving through the business district of New Orleans, a friend saw a homeless man holding a cardboard-and-black-marker placard that my friend referred to as "a sign of the times":
Please help
Will work for food
No home
No job
Go Saints
As popular Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose observed after the Saints' first win in the Superdome once it finally re-opened after the horrors of its use as an unsupported shelter in the first weeks after Katrina, it is important to keep some perspective on these things. It is, after all, only a football game.
"Like hell it is."
