Watching “Treme” a finished HBO series set in New Orleans just post Katrina. I missed it when it was being broadcast originally because I didn’t get HBO, but it’s showing on Amazon now, so, well, here I am just a few years late, checking out the fictionalization of the area’s history.
It’s a mixed bag for me. Definitely well written and well acted, hell of an interesting tale told, but sometimes it’s a bit uncomfortable to watch.
They say that smell is a major memory trigger, but I’m doing that trigger backwards. Whenever they show a waterlogged house, walls speckled with a representation of god knows what fungal mutation gone wild, I find myself remembering the smell, completely indescribable but totally familiar, unforgettable, the pervasive inescapable odor of disease I breathed through a stifling humid mask as I dragged every thing I owned, sodden and ruined, out to the curb, day after day for weeks until it was done, until I had what closure I could find and finally walked away.
But that’s just the weird flash odor aura I keep getting from the show.
Weirder is a scene that just passed.
One of the “entrepreneurs” who descended on the city to wreak profit from “rebuilding” drives to a city neighborhood, parks in the lot of the old Schweggmann’s.
Schweggmann’s was a group of massive grocery stores owned by the local Schweggmann family. Schweggmann’s had been a fixture in New Orleans for over a century. In the 1950’s one location was actually the largest supermarket in the world at over 150,000 square feet, but in late 90’s the chain failed and closed for reasons I cannot recall. Everyone from here remembers when Schweggmann’s was pretty much the place to “make groceries.” (That’s the local phase for going grocery shopping.)
The man turns off the radio, playing “Mardi Gras Mambo” of course, steps out of his car and turns a full circle, surveying the landscape about him. The camera sweeps over the graffiti-ed walls of the huge abandoned grocery store, the empty parking lot with weeds growing through the cracks, and then to the row of houses across the street. We see five skinny two story houses, built elbow to elbow on narrow city lots, old old houses who’d seen a lot of wear before the storm and now stood in the sort of disrepair only disaster can inflict on old structures. Only one house has been visibly rehabbed, its windows unboarded, its wooden exterior now painted a pale yellow with white trim.
A siren wails in the background and a few lonely cars pass on the street behind him as the man sighs and pronounces in disdain, “The glory that was Rome.”
It’s the yellow house that catches my eye. I know that yellow house.
That’s the house, not yellow then, from which my grandmother would send my mother across the street to make groceries while she cleaned and pressed the clothes for my grandfather and three uncles. That big window on the first story is the front parlor where my siblings played and I sat in a playpen while my mother helped my grandmother ease her stroke stricken husband through his final sad days.
That’s the house that passed out of the family when my grandfather died and my grandmother became a familial nomad, living a year with the family of one of her children before moving on to the next.
And just a bit after this particular piece of film was filmed, that house, freshly painted yellow and remodeled and modernized inside, went on sale.
I saw pictures of the house on a real estate web site. The kitchen and bathroom were unrecognizable. Instead of going with the character of the poor man’s Victorian, they’d gone stark and modern. Someone had decided to do something decidedly odd in the “master” bedroom, popping out the ceiling and exposing beams in a way the old house was never meant to go. The living room, though, that they’d done right. It was nice to see that they’d saved the pocket doors that had been the glory of the double parlor in the grainy pictures in my mother’s album. I remember especially the picture of those doors as background behind my grandfather in his WWI uniform and puttees.
(Once drowned, twice shy, I didn’t buy the yellow house from my family’s past - it was too big and out of my price range anyway - but instead acquired and moved into this newly bright blue old house, out here in the no flood zone burbs.)
“The glory that was Rome,” the man pronounced disdainfully, standing across the street from my grandmother’s house.
How very strange, it occurs to me,
my grandmother’s maiden name was Rome.
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