BEADS TO REMEMBER: By Jessica Shelenberger

My great aunt Dot-Dot was predictable. Upon every visit to her home state of Ohio, she’d cook up spicy red beans and rice and complain about the effects of her city’s humidity on her thin and wiry hair. And every year, just after the beginning of Lent, she’d wrap a Hush Puppies shoebox with thick brown shipping paper and send it to my sister and me.

“Lizzy! Jess! You’ve got a package!” Mom yelled. It was late February. I was nine and Lizzy was five. I grabbed the box before Lizzy, my fingers sticking to the ribbons of tape that had mummified the shipping paper.

I read the return address, scrawled in angular letters on the left corner of the box: “Metairie, Louisiana 70003.” My fingers traced over the letters of the unfamiliar city’s name. I tried to form them into a pronounceable word. Though it was an American town—our Aunt Dot-Dot’s town—it felt exotic and foreign.

I grabbed the scissors from the junk drawer and cut jagged lines through the glistening tape and rough paper. The box swished and rattled, sounding like an unopened box of macaroni and cheese.

We ripped the final shreds of packaging away from the box together. With our last tug, a waterfall of plastic Mardi Gras beads drenched our laps, rivulets of emerald and gold and amethyst pouring across our legs and socks and onto the linoleum floor. They scattered around us, plinking like marbles on glass.

Lizzy and I shrieked with delight. We layered the jewels around our necks and twisted them around and around our pale wrists. Lizzy roped two strands around her waist and wiggled, the plastic clanking like a can of coins. We bartered with one another for the booty adorned with fleur-de-lis charms. We paraded through the house, waving and flashing princess smiles.

Aunt Dot-Dot’s gift had only cost her a trip to the parades and some postage. But those beads made us rich. In the months to come, Lizzy and I would drag the beads outside to adorn our bikes and cats, we’d plop them into the bathtub to swish them in the bubbles, and we’d carefully coordinate them with our Barbies’ outfits. We were dazzled by this gift from the foreign city called New Orleans.

For years, my understanding of this Gulf Coast city was shaped by those boxes of beads. Any time I heard “New Orleans,” images of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras entered my mind. Amid the backdrop of wrought iron balconies and arched doorframes on historic brick buildings, I would picture revelers in costumes on parade floats, college coeds bearing it all, and drunken bystanders raising enthusiastic fists. Every imagined character was smothered in sparkling plastic necklaces. 'When the Saints Go Marching In' was the soundtrack to my images of the Big Easy, those splatting trombones and trilling clarinets forcing me to keep time with my foot. Oh Lord, I want to be in that number, I’d think, enticed by the celebration found in my daydreams.

For years, New Orleans essentially remained a foreign place to me, though I may have picked up a few more facts about the city after receiving my first box of Mardi Gras beads. Yet I wasn’t alone. Didn’t we all know so little about New Orleans the morning of August 29, 2005?

As the violent winds and dark waters of Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, causing major levy breaches and unimaginable flooding and devastation, we were glued to our television screens. We suddenly couldn’t get enough information about the Crescent City. Even after learning that Great Aunt Dot-Dot was safe, my thumb was sore and my eyes burned because of constant flipping between 24-hour news channels. While watching the horrific images, my stomach gurgled. I had a persistent case of heartburn. I couldn’t tell if my malaise was related to my pregnancy or if it was a physical manifestation of the loss I was witnessing on my twenty-eight-inch Zenith.

Our fascination with the City that Care Forgot continued after the flood waters receded, as those fetid waters uncovered more disastes. Engineering failures. Racism. Slow and insufficient disaster assistance responses. Poverty. Corrupt local governments. Crime. A greedy insurance industry. Poor educational systems. Environmental catastrophes. Our fascination with New Orleans was apparent. The flood waters mirrored the problems facing our nation. As we became acquainted with New Orleans through our TV screens, radio reports and printed reports, we got to know ourselves a bit more.

Three years later, the rebuilding in New Orleans continues. I am sure that many of the people who were once transfixed by the images of the city no longer pay any heed. Only occasionally will I hear a news story about New Orleans, mostly about celebrities’ efforts to help in rebuilding. It would be easy to forget this city and its residents, displaced, resettled and still mired in the problems left behind.

My husband, sixteen-month-old son, and I went shopping last weekend, hunting the best after-holiday sales. Hanging on a large display just inside the entrance to one department store were enough plastic beads to fill dozens of boxes from Aunt Dot-Dot. A group of teenage girls grab at them, letting the strands glide through their fingers, just as Lizzy and I had years ago. A few steps away, the store sells bright fuchsia bikinis with a fleur-de-lis strategically placed on each side of the top. Wheeling my red shopping cart past them, I imagine those bronzed girls prancing about in the bikinis with the beads tickling their shoulders and chests and bellies. Heads thrown back in delight, the girls laugh at their revelry.

My day dream is short-lived as the images of a defeated and drowning New Orleans gush into my imagination: swollen bodies swirling in the flood waters; filthy, thirsty babies wailing in anguish; a father desperately appealing to the viewing audience for information about his children. The images spill over me. A puddle of loss lies at my feet. I swallow hard.

My son tugs my arm from his seat in the shopping cart. He grunts and points toward the display of beads. After discovering a pile of plastic necklaces in my old toy box at my parents, he’s been enamored with the clatter the jewels make when hung around his neck. I want to gather up the necklaces and shower them upon my son, but I can’t bring myself to do it. He is not yet old enough to bear their weight.