Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Three

To understand where I was on January 1, 2006 one has to start five months earlier during the last few days before I packed up, threw away, or left behind all of my worldly possessions and headed off into the sunrise for New Orleans on August 5, 2005.

[Ex]Partner showed up in the house a day early, seemingly for the purpose of messing with my mind (or perhaps hers) and she did a good job of it, but despite the amorous state of confusion we acted out that afternoon, I was still on the plane the next morning.

Friday Night August 5, 2005 I was on Frenchmen Street with friends old and new, listening to music, sweltering in the heat, and generally feeling like I was HOME. The feeling continued throughout that first weekend, when, despite the overwhelming August heat I enthusiastically joined the summertime trumpet summit known as Satchmo Fest. This feeling continued the next night, and the next, and into my first full, real week...

In fact, it lasted for three weeks, and I was on track. In that short span, I had contacted a whole collection of new work contacts, had begun work on two large projects and was well on my way to reconnecting to people I wanted to work with on my film project. I had even launched a project that I had been struggling to get off the ground for nearly ten years. August 2005 was the very best month (personally, financially, and creatively) I had experienced in years. This move was starting to look like the very best thing I could possibly have done with my life.

And then Katrina crossed into The Gulf.

The next five months were spent on the road. Two days in Hattiesburg Mississippi with ex-partner and family, two weeks with my parents in Murphy, NC and a month back in California before finally being able to return to New Orleans (though not to my apartment).

As most people already know... I was one of the lucky ones.

For the rest of 2005 I slid back and forth between the semi-vacant apartment of a friend in New Orleans, the couches and floors of friends around San Francisco and Petaluma, and the floor of my newly acquired "office" space (a vacant warehouse room South of Market in San Francisco).

And that brings us to January 31, 2005 and the night I spent in San Francisco's North Beach with a bunch of displaced New Orleans musicians. They played... I ate... we sang... and drank... and drank, and I wound up dancing through Union Square like Gene Kelly at 1:30 in the morning.

It was a truly joyful and exhilarating way to begin 2006. It was also more than a little bit manic and a whole lot depressing. Lying alone (who would have joined me!?) on the floor of my warehouse "office," I regularly barred the passageway downstairs so that the rats I could hear scurrying below would not come up the stairs and nibble on my toes (I still don't know if rats can climb like that, but I was not about to see if I could find out). In New Orleans, their cousins would frequently scurry across the courtyard of the apartment complex where I was staying and jump into the toxic pool water for a swim. While I had a Whole Foods Market nearby the office in San Francisco (where I regularly picked up a pretty serviceable version of Gumbo), most stores in New Orleans were still shuttered at the end of 2005 and predicting where I was going to track down my next meal sometimes meant guessing the corner where The Salvation Army truck was going to deliver hamburgers.

I was VERY glad to be rid of 2005... but I did not have a clue about what I was going to do next. Actually, that's not really true. I had some very good ideas about what I was going to do next.

They were all wrong.