A city that awakened her senses

T\o7HERE WAS ALWAYS NEW \f7 Orleans.

I would grow tired of wherever I was living, move on, get restless again and remember New Orleans. Always it was there, hovering, no matter where I went or what I was doing.

New Orleans was the place I returned to over and over in my mind, the place I never quit imagining would be my final stop.

\o7Is it time yet\f7, I would ask myself? Time, at last, to go home?

I was born in Louisiana and spent my adolescence in a moody backwoods Cajun town on a bayou not far up the highway from New Orleans. The Big Easy was a quick zip away, but it was also a world apart -- an exotic, multicultural, textured metropolis that wrapped its sensuality around you and left it there for good.

Visually, New Orleans educated you, its faded elegance exuding a reverence for the nuanced beauty of ruin and decay. The semitropical climate demanded that kind of sophistication. Paint peeling from walls: how wonderful. Keep it that way.

You got to know architecture intimately, all manner of it: Greek Revival, Neoclassical, Craftsman, Victorian, French Colonial, Spanish Colonial, most of it embowered by luxuriant vegetation. You learned what louvered jalousies and pedimented dormers were, and you learned that a cast-iron gallery was a kind of porch. You came to love the sound of street names -- Chartres, Calliope, Euterpe.

Just saying the name New Orleans, I am enfolded by the memories of its smells, as if the room in which I sit is saturated with them -- roasting coffee, magnolias, bourbon and stale tobacco, the Bourbon Street sidewalks in the thick heat.

New Orleans shaped you in a way no other place in the South could. It was soft and languid and sultry and dreamy, and it tolerated everything and everybody. It was both Southern and not Southern, familiar and foreign.

For years, until I left Louisiana at 22, I went to New Orleans every chance I got, to Mardi Gras, to the Jazz and Heritage Festival, to wedding receptions in opulent high-ceilinged mansions and parties in tiny Creole cottages, to lunches and dinners at Antoine's, Brennan's, Galatoire's, Court of Two Sisters.

Nine days after the great wrath of Hurricane Katrina and the greater horror of the bursting levee, I still can't absorb the full impact of our monumental loss. At first, I was oddly removed, especially following it from the helpless distance of L.A. Just a movie. Not real, not happening, not true. Not all those people, gone. Not all those homes, gone. Not all those historic buildings gone. Impossible. There's been some mistake.