five years ago

Yesterday's Katrina mention reminded me that I do in fact have a very vivid memory connected with it, which I shall get to shortly. That also made me reflect on how we all have those "where were you when you heard about..." kind of memories. I don't have any of those from my childhood. I was a baby when JFK was shot, and certainly too young to appreciate the significance of RFK or MLK or any of those seminal events of the 60s. I think the first memory like that I can identify is John Lennon's death, which was my freshman year of college. I had recently moved into the universe's most crappy student apartment in Allston, sharing a room with the Benevolent L's less-benevolent-but-more-crazee sister, and I had BCN on the radio as I was dressing for class in the morning. I remember feeling like, "What? WHAT?" I wasn't even a huge Beatles or Lennon fan, but the shock and sadness and momentousness of it was staggering.

I remember hearing about the Challenger disaster at work, in my office, pregnant with D. And then, as I've probably mentioned before, Chernoble when I was home on maternity leave, doing nothing but holding and nursing my newborn and watching TV 24/7 in between the 45 minutes at a time I was sleeping. That was particularly horrifying, not only because I was of course jacked on those postnatal hormone swings and apt to cry over anything and my empathy dial tuned to 11 with "oh those poor people", but also in a "what kind of world have I brought my baby into?" sort of way. Surprisingly, I remember less about hearing of Kurt Cobain's actual suicide than I do the first attempt the month before, with the radio (BCN again!) reporting of his "accidental overdose" on champagne and pills in Rome and how, instinctively, as a person pretty close to the suicidal ideation herself at the time, I knew with deep certainty it was only a matter of time for him.

But Katrina. Five years ago I was *just* about to start massage school, and it was, if I remember correctly, the very last Saturday I was going to have before I started working every single one. In honor of this, I met Mr Indemnity in the South End for brunch at Acquitaine, which was/is(?) one of the few places in Boston that serves brunch both weekend days, believe it or not. Acquitaine in an expensive-ish "French bistro" kind of place, but they have a dirt cheap prix fixe brunch, and at least when we went, it was good. FYI. In fact, part of this memory involves having what is probably the best glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice of my life, and I am not even an OJ fan. I rarely drink it. But it came with the brunch, and five years later, I can still remember how good it was. Anyway, Mr Indemnity and I ate our brunch in horror over Katrina. (I think there was news coverage on the TV over the bar, but maybe that's not true and I'm just inserting it into the memory.) We are both huge New Orleans lovers--though the lucky bastard has been way more times than I have--and we both were like, "What? Is it going to be gone? Is it going to be all gone? All that beautiful architecture? All those streets where you feel like you've stepped into another century or another world?" It was so sad and so scary and that was *before* the full tragedy of how many people died and how fucking mismanaged the whole disaster response was. It's hard to believe that it's five years. So much has happened in my life since then that it seems like it should be longer, but on the other hand, the terribleness of it is still fresh in my mind.

And that's all I have to say about that!

xoxo