Wednesday, January 03, 2007
The Seven Fifty Four - Lost and Found
Found a lot (with a house yet to be demolished on it) in a neighborhood that once was nice, before Katrina, and you can see the original folks are back, hard at work rebuilding their homes. This lot/house had a garage on it too. $30,000 - great price. Across the street a new home - nice looking - is just about finished and just sold for $160k.
Housing prices are really starting to climb so a lot for 30k is pretty special. The picture on the right is the original floorplan/ad/description for the house when they had it built years ago.
I walked in the garage and you could see that the owner, who's an elderly gent, had a little shop and an office and the wood he'd stockpiled in the shop area was all askew and twisted and ruined; the office was all moldy. The rusted desk was still there with evidence of life as it had known, but abruptly stopped dead still. It's in that moment that you can sense the human toll. That this home was somebody's reason to get up in the morning to make a better life for their family, cooking breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners for years; somebody's sense of security, their peace and joy - the Christmas Eves, graduations, proms, weddings. Now just a target for the wrecking ball - rendered meaningless and being essentially given away to the highest bidder. And you look down the block and you see 30 more homes and the lives attached to them all permanently changed. And the next block is the same and the next mile and the next.
It's overwhelming. Then I found out next door to the house I was looking, the owner had drowned right there in his own home.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a lot on my mind and finally did my meditation where I feel all of myself as being one and the same with all of the universe and an expansive peace calmed my soul. Thanks God!
I'm glad I'm down here. I can't wait to do some good for someone. I should be settled by next month. I'm in a cute old New Orleans shotgun style home about 4 blocks from the French Quarter on a beautiful old avenue - Esplanade. My God, there is some spectacular ante-bellum architecture all around. A coupla blocks off the main drag tho, and it's the mean streets, so in the midst of beauty you have to remember that the undercurrent that aint so pretty is right around the corner. Gun shots on New Years Eve right outside - sounded like a 44 magnum - that deep fat cartridge sound - POP POP POP POP. You brace yourself.
