I was sipping my coffee the other day and thinking deep thoughts about life.
I have lived in either Chalmette or New Orleans since I was born, so I understand what is more important than anything else: Saints games and hurricanes.
Me and my husband Lout and our three kids, plus all his Gunch relatives, used to live on the same street in Chalmette.
Then Lout decided to fix the dish on top his favorite bar, the Sloth Lounge, to get better reception during a Saints game, and ZOT!, he gets hit by lightning. So that’s the end of him. Poor heart.
Two years later, Katrina comes. Me and the Gunches all get out of town, naturally, and we wind up at this campground up in Alabama, where the whole lot of us shared a pop-up tent. That meant we had to sleep in shifts.
Finally, we come home. And we find out home ain’t there no more. All our houses are gone with the wind, to be poetic about it.
So we all lived for a while in government trailers. Unfortunately, they had showers too small for some of the Gunches to fit in, so they had to wait until after dark and wash off out back with the hose.
My mother-in-law Ms. Larda managed to get the insurance people to rebuild her house right where it was. It’s a shotgun double — her sons Lurch and Leech live on the other side of the double and they share the laundry room in back. Which means she does their laundry. Like always.
My sister-in-law Larva and her family moved to Metairie and she manufactures them little garden gnomes, which we all have in our gardens now. And on our coffee tables. And on the backs of our toilets. And anywhere else you can put a gnome.
My oldest daughter, Gumdrop, is married and lives across the lake in Folsom, and me and my other daughter, Gladiola, live in an apartment behind the Sloth Lounge, which my gentleman friend Lust owns. My son Gargoyle lives there too, when he ain’t off at LSU.
Anyway, this one day last week, both of them have plans to be out of the house for a couple of days. I get home from work early and decide to take an actual afternoon nap.
I don’t usually take naps. Which maybe explains why when I woke up, I thought it was morning.
The clock says six. I drink some coffee and start getting ready for work. But then it don’t get light.
It keeps getting darker and darker.
I think there must be a really big storm coming in.
I am a professional walking tour guide, but I decide we better cancel the tours for today.
I called my scheduler, but he don’t answer. Odd.
Then I remember I got a morning dentist appointment, so I scurry out the side entrance and drive over to the dentist’s and THERE IS NOBODY THERE. Closed. That shows they got good sense, I say to myself, but they COULD have called and cancelled.
I go back home — now it’s almost 10 by my car clock, and this time I walk in the front door of the bar and am surprised that it’s full of people at this hour. And then I see Lust and ask him why it’s so dark. He looks puzzled and says it ain’t no darker than usual at 10 o’clock at night.
Oh.
I open my mouth and shut it again.
I think about it. A person with good sense would not blurt out they been running around thinking it was daytime. That person would never live it down.
I got good sense.
I order a drink.
