Like any married couple, my husband and I have a lot of inside jokes and a kind of shorthand in how we talk to each other. Lately, we’ve actually gotten all the kids and my mom hooked on a history channel show called Alone in which 10 men are sent out into complete isolation in the Canadian wilderness and have to fend for themselves. There are numerous predators – about every 10 minutes a little text box comes up on the screen to remind us that, “Bears, wolves, and cougars all hunt on Vancouver Island.” Apparently to frighten off a bear, one is supposed to yell, “Hey, bear!” and the bear will be spooked by the human voice and will lumber off. I have no idea why I found this so hilarious – mostly, I guess, because it seems like you could say anything and scare off the bear; it’s not like the bear will understand and appreciate the direct address – but I couldn’t stop laughing the first time a contestant said it.
So of course now, every member of our family greets one another by saying, “Hey, bear.” When my husband walks in the door at the end of the day, he typically now yells, “Hey, bear!” instead of the standard, “Honey, I’m home!” Even Georgia will sometimes wander around the house saying, “Hey, beaw! Heyyo, beaw!”
Likewise, my husband and I frequently make fun of sports clichés – not just the Bull Durham-style clichés that the athletes spout off during every interview but the sportscaster clichés, too: “It’s all going to come down to defense”; “The only way Team X will win is by scoring more points than Team Y”; “They just have to want it more”; “Hm, going for it on fourth down is a big risk here, folks.”
And when the Saints are playing in a nationally televised game, which guarantees at least 15 minutes of Katrina coverage, one of us will always look at the other and say, “After Katrina, Drew Brees really took a chance on this city …” and the other will reply, “And with his shoulder injury, the city took a chance on him, too.”
All of which is to say: There is nothing that I feel like writing about Katrina right now that wouldn’t ultimately feel forced, clichéd, rehashed. I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings, but I can’t handle even reading anything more about the 10th anniversary of Katrina and I certainly can’t handle writing about it. I have, at this point, nothing to say about the whole thing that would be any more original or insightful than: “After Katrina, Drew Brees really took a chance on this city – and with his shoulder injury, the city took a chance on him, too.”
“I think,” I told my friend last week, “that I am just going to make my blog entirely pictures of cute things in hats. We don’t need anything else about Katrina right now; we need picture of cute things in hats. I just can’t with Katrina right now.”
Et voilá! (Note: Some babies are mine.)
