The scenes from New Orleans are out of a post-apocalyptic film, people firing on helicopters, bodies floating down the street–while our president eats cake. I read yesterday that it was going to take 4 days for certain supply ships to arrive. 4 days. We could capture a foreign capital in that time. I watched Laurent Cantet’s Les Sanguinaires last night, a tiny gem of a film about a group of friends trying to get away from all the pre-Millenium hysteria by spending the week on a remote island, only to discover that they can’t get away from each other, or human nature. D and I saw Junebug earlier in the day, a totally delightful film about what binds a family together and how oblivious people can be to what’s in front of them. It’s a very complex film with amazing little details and perfomances, presented in a very simple narrative. I think that I prefer to lose myself in films these days. They end.
I had a wonderful time in Florida. The hurricane made it a bit windier, and there were actual waves at the beach, but the Tampa Bay area remained just out of Katrina’s path. Karl, my dad’s cousin from the old country, came down from his adopted home of Canada for the week. He had recently visited the town in Slovenia that my dad’s side of the family is from, and shared pictures of people who all looked like my brothers and sisters, as well as photos that my grandmother took when she returned to the family home in the 50’s (she emigrated to the US while in her late teens), and pictures of my great great grandmother and her family. I also discovered that another of my dad’s cousins was part of the naval team that captured the German submarine that led to the solving of the German “enigma” by Alan Turing and hastened the end of WWII–an actual war hero in the family. I thought we were all active pacifists. And I also learned that our hero’s family is from East Moline, as the name would suggest, a town just east of Moline, the town where my boyfriend Big Chrissy’s family lives, and where I visit all the time! I’m sure that the next thing I’m going to discover is that Chris and I are cousins and that our love is rooted in a genetic twist of Freud’s ideas about narcissism.
I’m leaving for Alabama next Wednesday to spend some time with Mom and Dad and my sweeter than sweet tea southern buddies.
Pictures and stories ahead…