Monday, September 05, 2005
Where is Eveyone?
By Jana Napoli, tango dancer
Tuesday morning, car packed with documents and some clothes and a mattress with Ana on top, we fled with ¼ of a tank (after I failed to be able to suck gas up a tube from another vehicles tank).
We also had with us the 87 year old man from down the hall and his dog (next to Ana on the mattress) and his loaded 38 (next to us on the front seat) and Peggy (Ana ‘s care giver from Trinidad who came like mother mercy the day after the hurricane to help get us out). Taking Airline Highway and River Ridge (to avoid the fallen power lines…where trees had already been chopped out of the path) to a calm I-10, a gas tank with an orange alert for empty, to Baton Rouge and my cousin Carl waiting for us in a parking lot.
We weathered the hurricane in Ana’s apartment in Metairie…only the plate glass windows vibrations to give me any fear, no ground water. I didn’t have cause to inflate the little 2 seated boat I had gotten Saturday (Ron, who stayed at the studio on Gravier downtown got to use his).
The problem came later as water poured in from the roof damage on our section of the complex. I bailed water for 18 hrs, bucket after bucket. I thought I would die before it abated. Every cabinet in the kitchen was pouring water. I could not keep all the carpets dry. In the apartment above the ceiling fell in. I knew the next rain we would lose ours, too. It was 95’ inside... mother and I and Peggy were walking slat cakes.
Tuesday night after I secured the now dysfunctional electric doors with 2/4’s, I took some steaks and the gracious cone head lady down the hall and her new husband brought their thawing pompano and lamb chops and in the quiet under the bright of the milky way we turned on the magic gas tanks in the barbeque pit in the patio and made our last dinner. Helen and her husband added pate campagne , from the chef at the now defunct Yacht Club. We jumped in the swimming pool that smelled of tarpaper to wash off the salt of an interminably long day and ate to the sound of crickets our last dinner.
Then back to the pitch black hallways to mother apartment with Peggy there waiting for the phone to ring from someone in Baton Rouge, to say they would be waiting for us. I watched the new moon breach the tree’s around 3:30 AM...
Adline (the woman who raised me always said to plant on a new moon if you wanted things to grow)
With a kerosene lamps and a candle I sorted through closets for what might be really important . What I could manage to carry down the steps and to the car. I got all the documents... Took all the family pictures out of the frames and made boxes and tried to keep things dry. I would never see anything I left behind again. We were all on the verge of a new life.
So where to go with Ana? How? When? Please send on for me, I don’t’ have my complete list with me.
Rondell is in Donaldsonville with his family. Annie is in NY. Ron is in Maryland. All the Ya/Ya’s are accounted for and safe. Much of New Orleans is setting up shop in Baton Rouge… which has doubled its population in 4 days.
There is a great need for Ya/Ya to work with disposed children from New Orleans here.
Please let me know you are all right...
We are in Baton Rouge at the home of Carl Napoli. We are safe. Tel 225-756-9659
