Fingers over Ivory

Posted on August 31, 2005 in Disasters

I’m here, fingers hovering over the plastic keyboard like darker fingers hovered over ivory in jazz clubs in the Big Easy. The world gasps at the loss of New Orleans — America’s rustic Venice — which as everyone knows stands flooded with sharks swimming through the streets where automobiles coursed. New Orleans, a Sodom and a Jerusalem just like San Francisco, where bars stand beside churches, where the depraved rub elbows with the holy, where one cannot tell by a face or gender orientation, which is which.

Katrina saved her brawn for the towns of Southern Mississippi. I was in a Garden Grove coffee shop yesterday. The old fashioned kind where you had a nice, long and slick sit down bar where you could watch the cook working at the grill through a wide slit in the wall. I ordered pancakes and polish sausage from a thin waitress who wore her dark hair in a pony tail. She was about my age. Worry lines ran across and down the sides of her face.

Waitresses usually listen to customers’ woes. She told me about her sister who lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. Katrina silenced the whole of the Mississippi Delta and the coast to the east of Nawlins. For two weeks there would be no power, no telephone communications. And this woman did not know if her sister was alive or dead.

We discussed topography. Did her sister live on a floodplain or on a hill? The waitress did not know: they’d just bought a new house and she hadn’t been there. That southern Mississippi was seldom more than a few feet above sea level was a fact that I kept to myself. I told her to contact the local Red Cross. Ask them if they could take her sister’s name and address, check the evacuation centers. Then I paid my tab, left an extra dollar, and went off to help move the belongings of a hospitalized friend.

My fingers tremble over the keys as I think of that woman’s sister and all the people floating in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain who I will never meet . I think of a time when news of a disaster such as this would not reach me for months here in California and when I would not hear of the tsunami which hit South Asia a few months ago. The residents of southern Mississippi and Louisiana have returned to that world for a few weeks. Back to a time when the sound of fingers hitting ivory could only be heard in the room where the piano was being played.