Monday, December 04, 2006

Spot the metaphor

The New Orleans Times-Picayune's Chris Rose has written another stellar column, this one in Sunday's paper. I think it's a gigantic metaphor, dripping in meaning and symbolism about modernity's murder of any notion of a humane society.

I think it's a classic case of telling a little story as a means of conveying the big story

But that's just me. What think you?

As far as crimes go in this town, the incident in the parking lot on South Clearview Parkway outside of Marshall's department store on Oct. 26 was hardly a blip on the screen.

An elderly woman was walking with an armful of packages. A couple of guys pulled up in a car. They grabbed her purse, knocking her to the ground. They drove off with a haul that amounted to 40 bucks.

Witnesses ran over to help the victim. The cops came. A report was filed.

In an era of brazen daylight shootings, horrific gangland executions and post-disaster fraud schemes that run into the millions of dollars, this was just a petty annoyance, a piece of paperwork, a statistic. Except for one lingering detail.

The victim, 85-year-old Ellen Montgomery, broke her left hip when she hit the ground. She had an emergency hip replacement operation at Ochsner Hospital and spent three days in post-op and then nine days in rehab.

Her son Jamie picked her up and brought her to his house in Gentilly. By mid-November, she was making good progress with a walker; despite her age and injury, Ellen Montgomery's life had been marked by an unbending will to get by on her own.

But on Friday, Nov. 17, she complained of shortness of breath and had trouble with her balance. Sunday the 19th, she collapsed in the kitchen. An ambulance rushed her back to Ochsner where doctors tried to revive her. But in the end, she died of a pulmonary embolism -- a blood clot in the lung.

The Jefferson Parish coroner's office determined that the blood clot was a result of the hip surgery and therefore a direct result of the purse snatching and thus she became another member of the mounting murder victim roster in Jefferson Parish.

(snip)

Ellen Montgomery was my friend and, at times, my muse.

In the Days of Pain that followed Hurricane Katrina, she was my only neighbor and it's funny; I guess as a result of some sort of ageism on my part, during the weeks we spent together last fall, I always had this self-delusional notion that I was taking care of this old and eccentric woman, helping her get through the traumatic aftermath of Katrina when, in fact, she was taking care of me.

But I bet she knew it the whole time.

We had first met shortly after I bought my house on Magazine Street in 1992. Her house had the classic pack rat/cat lady look to it, all paint-peeled and overgrown, hidden from the street by an iron fence and tangled trees that conjured Boo Radley or some other kind of weird or scary resident therein.

She lived there alone -- unless you count her 33 cats.

Our single encounter way back then wound up being a small life-changing event for me. I was single, reckless and in a world of financial and legal trouble. My car was wrecked and my phone service cut off for months because I couldn't make the bill.

My home had been burglarized three times in a six-week period, pretty much relieving me of all my possessions and distractions. I think I can say with certainty that it was the roughest patch, both personally and professionally, that I had ever known and would know until the fall of 2005.

I was 32 years old and welcome to any new idea or direction that might drag me out of my self-pitying ways. Miss Ellen had heard about me -- the troubled soul on the block -- and she offered what she thought was the key to happiness: a stray dog.

Lord knows where she got the thing, but its presence in Miss Ellen's house was none too welcome by the feline masses that had been living there for years. The dog needed a home and I needed something, anything, and that's how I wound up adopting an exotic silvery-blue mutt of some sort of husky derivation whom I named Alibi and who taught me the notion of unconditional love and who gave me something to do, something to love and something to look forward to in an otherwise bleak time.

Alibi left a lasting impression. In the years since, I have adopted four more homeless dogs.

After that, I rarely saw Miss Ellen. Truthfully, she had made a great impact on my life but in my typically self-absorbed way, I never really kept in touch with her. She had her life, I had mine, and there weren't many opportunities for a shut-in cat lady and a gregarious party boy to commune.

And that was my loss, not hers.

Read this column. Just go read it. Now.

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