FIRST PERSON Elegy for my city BY HEATHER HEILMAN

I was in a grocery store in suburban St. Louis a few days ago when Arlo Guthrie’s "The City of New Orleans" came piping in on the sound system. I never cared much for that song. But that day it reduced me to a weeping wreck right there in the produce aisle.

I came to New Orleans for the first time on the Amtrak train named for the song. I was a young newlywed on honeymoon from Memphis. I loved the city immediately, passionately, on sight. My marriage failed, but my love for New Orleans persisted and grew. When I finally moved there in January 2000, I felt at home for the first time in my life.

And yet, New Orleans always seemed like a disaster in progress. It was a very poor city with an astonishingly bad public school system and a serious crime problem. Everything I’d heard about graft and corruption in local politics and public service seemed to be mostly true. And, well, it would take many more words than I have here to begin to describe the state of race relations in New Orleans. You should know that the population of Orleans parish was more than two-thirds black. I think it would be fair to say that people tended to like and get along with those of other races who they knew personally, and on the surface everyone was usually very friendly. But things looked less friendly when you considered the relationship between large segments of the population.

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? On top of all that, consider the following: giant flying cockroaches and the ferocious Formosan termites that feast on and destroy the city’s architecture; the soupy miasmatic year-long humidity and the oppressive heat that lasts from May through October; the thousands of tourists puking in our streets and acting like obnoxious buffoons because in New Orleans anything goes; ancient potholes that could swallow a Corolla whole; alligators and scary yellow-toothed nutria rats in the canals; and hurricanes.

Hurricanes. We’d spend half the year with an anxious eye on the weather report. I evacuated a few times. Sometimes, crawling up I-10 at five miles per hour, it would take all night to get to Baton Rouge. And it hardly seemed worth it when the storm took a sudden right turn and aimed for Pensacola instead.

So why live in this accursed place? Why stay?

On the Saturday night before Katrina hit, as I was frantically making arrangements to evacuate, a parade came down my street with three brass bands and costumed marchers. "Only in New Orleans," I commented to my neighbor, who doubted the storm would really be that bad.

There were a few times during my time in New Orleans when I was riding through a poor neighborhood and traffic stopped so that an honest-to-god jazz funeral could pass. The band was wearing black uniforms and playing something like "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on the way to the cemetery, or (my favorite) "I’ll Fly Away" on the way back. The family was crying and holding on to each other and all their neighbors were following behind.

Every day in New Orleans was a day that could happen nowhere else.

On Sundays I would sit in the big Rue de la Course coffee shop, with its 12-foot ceilings and rows of swirling ceiling fans, and watch the parade of hipsters and freaks, beautiful people and neighborhood folks go by on Magazine Street. I’m a chronic introvert, but I’d always be drawn into a conversation with someone. It was a city with street life and real neighborhoods. My daily life was populated with people I knew from the block — I might not know their last names or even their first, I had never been inside their homes or they mine, but we talked almost daily.

The nights in New Orleans went on and on. People would stay shuttered up inside during the day to escape the intensity of the sun and heat, then come out at night when the temperature was more pleasant. Many bars and some restaurants were open 24 hours. It was easy to stay out till the sun came up without even trying.

New Orleans was a music city that rivaled and possibly surpassed even New York and Austin. There were amazing bands of just about every variety — I could list a hundred of them off the top of my head — and you could hear many of them for free or at least dirt cheap most days of the week. In New Orleans, people danced instead of slouching in front of the stage trying to look cool.

I won’t be the first to note that New Orleans had fabulous food. I could cry when I think of all the elegant restaurants I will never eat at — Bayona and Peristyle and Upperline. But let me just tip my hat to the genius of half-and-half po’ boys, with both fried shrimp and fried oysters. I also think it’s remarkable that in such a small city, there were four shops that I knew of that made high-quality ices, gelatos, and ice-creams in-house, Angelo Brocato’s being the most venerable. I’ll miss them more than the sno-ball stands, but then ice cream is like heroin to me.

New Orleans was so beautiful that it hardly seemed real. It almost needed that ugly ring of suburbs to balance it out, to keep that concentration of beauty from being unfair to other cities. Huge oak trees with thick branches that hit the ground and rose again, brightly painted shotgun houses and the wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter and the old mansions in the Garden District and Esplanade Ridge — I never became immune to that gorgeousness. A month before Katrina hit I finally moved into one of those shotgun houses. It was moss green with purple shutters.

I’m not sure what all that that adds up to, but it’s not hastily-assembled subdivisions and big-box stores and lunch at Applebee’s. New Orleans was significant not only because it had its own unique culture and style, but because it retained that culture even in the onslaught of the strip-mallization of America. It’s significant now because it’s a casualty not just of Hurricane Katrina, but of global warming and of oil and gas dredging in Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Our oil-hungry way of life was an accomplice and co-conspirator in the destruction of New Orleans.

I keep writing of New Orleans in the past tense, but New Orleans natives were constantly eulogizing the city long before Katrina. They were in perpetual mourning for the old days, for restaurants that had been closed 20 years, for the soda fountain at K&B and the old department stores on Canal Street. I finally feel like a real New Orleanian, now that I too can say, "I remember when."

I recognize the foolhardiness of rebuilding without also restoring the wetlands and rethinking the levee system. Many people won’t return, those whose jobs have relocated, and the poor who were stranded in horrible conditions for days on end. I don’t know whether their plight will finally force the city to face its — and the nation’s — long-entrenched apathy toward divisions of race and class. But I want to see New Orleans come back. Some cities have a soul and some don’t. New Orleans had it in excess. I’m looking for reasons to hope that its soul will survive.