things kevin hates

As you can probably guess, I’ve been watching Treme, as is every other blogger in New Orleans. There’s plenty of reactions out there, mostly positive but occasionally negative. So far I’m impressed. The attention to detail is phenomenal, the show feels right, and it’s gaining momentum as we start to delve deeper and deeper into understanding the main characters. I like this show a lot, and I want to throw myself into it. But I can’t. The hungry termite had a post in which she said that it’s “too soon” to see a show like this.

I’d say I have the opposite problem. For me, it’s too late.

I was lucky enough to miss out on the worst of it. I evacuated on August 28th, found a college 1500 miles away for the semester, made it back to visit for Thanksgiving, and wasn’t home for good until the middle of December. And I was one of the lucky ones—only eight inches of water in my house.* So things on Treme right now are worse than they ever were for me. For the first year or two especially Katrina was everything. Upon seeing an old friend for the first time since the storm, every conversation started with “Where’d you go?” and “How’s your house?” Every moment of evacuation, exile, and return seemed a vivid memory. But time moves on and memories fade. For a long time we were linked by the common bond of suffering. And that suffering still exists, to be sure. Just today I was driving through the back streets of Gert Town—South Carrollton is an inconvenient mess of construction and repaving—and the decay, the abandoned buildings and blown-out windows are still everywhere. Physically, the city still bears the scars of the storm, but psychically, many of us are so much better off now than we were a few years ago. I mean, we’re the Super Bowl Champions! There are people, here and elsewhere, who don’t get football, but there isn’t a city anywhere in the world that had so much to gain from a sports championship. But it’s about more than just that. We’re also having the most gorgeous spring I can ever recall (which, I admit, came after a late, long, cold winter). It’s the time of year when festivals are everywhere. Thanks to the still-continuing rebuilding process, our economy has been insulated from much of the recent recession. All in all, it’s a good time to be a New Orleanian. So going back to that time isn’t something I feel like doing. Maybe that means it’s too soon for me after all. But I would have been absorbed in this show had it premiered in, say, April 2007. I would have wanted to feel all of these emotions—perhaps because I had suffered so little, perhaps because it was my way of being a New Orleanian—whatever the reason, I’d have loved the show then. Now I like it and admire it. By now we’ve come far enough that the post-Katrina suffering seems worse than it seemed two or three years ago. When your house is still a mess, when you can’t find a grocery store or restaurant that’s open at reasonable hours, when prices for basic goods are sky-high, when your friends are still exiled in Houston or Dallas or whatever—it just seems like a continuation of what the first few months after the storm were, and the improvements are so gradual that you can forget them. But now so many things are so much better than they were in the time period Treme depicts, that to be plummeted into the worst of the worst can be devastating.

I don’t want to exaggerate what I personally feel—I’m sure there are a lot of people who truly can’t watch the show or, even if they can, can’t enjoy it at all. I feel sorry for those people because they probably suffered a hell of lot more than I did. I’m glad I can watch the show and enjoy it. I just hope it runs for four or five seasons and ends with a Sunday night in Florida in February 2010.

* When I was a kid, I’d see TV footage of people walking around houses with a couple inches of water and thinking, “Wow, that really sucks.” While I don’t want to minimize my family’s sufferings—they were the ones who cleaned and gutted and repaired and suffered from October onward while I was in a dorm room in Massachusetts—a tour of, say, Lakeview was enough for me to count my blessings.