ASSOCIATED PRESS Ted Mack relaxed outside a bar on Bourbon Street last Tuesday in the historic French Quarter in New Orleans, La. Some bars are open in the French Quarter despite efforts by city and national authorities to completely evacuate the flood-besieged city.

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Sweet home,
Louisiana

"I'm gonna lay down my burdens
Down by the riverside ... I ain't
gonna study war no more."

As my wife, Malia, and I watched New Orleans fall apart, we were indeed happy to be in Hawaii. But we were also heartbroken.

Stewart Yerton: Ten-year New Orleans resident mourns loss of colorful city

For 10 years, until this spring, New Orleans had been our home, the place where we -- an Alabama boy and Hawaii girl who had met in New York -- had built a life together: our place, the great city where we were engaged, married, bought our first house and became parents. Our daughters will always be New Orleans natives, something I will teach them to honor.

In brief, New Orleans was the place where Malia and I became adults.

So there was our place, becoming hell.

It may be hard for people out here in paradise to understand why anyone would want to live in a mosquito-infested swamp of a city, situated below sea level, prone to hurricanes and floods, with a crumbling infrastructure and huge underclass. Indeed, as much as I Ioved the city, it was hard for me at times to understand why I was living there.

For the benefit of anyone who connotes New Orleans with dead bodies and people behaving like animals, or those who say the city should not be rebuilt, here is what we have lost, hopefully only for now:

A city of tuba-and-bass drum brass band music, thumping down wide streets under the live oaks hung with Spanish moss; the birthplace of Louis Armstrong; a city of coffee houses with smoke-stained walls; a literary mecca whose curlicued wrought-iron balconies and pink stucco facades inspired William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, Anne Rice and Richard Ford, to name a few.

A city of straw fedoras and seersucker suits, cotton sun dresses and the annual Bywater Halloween Party, where, if you didn't have a costume, you had to be naked; a city of fortune tellers, ghost tours, mimes and clowns; a city where it was respectable to be nothing more than a theatrical misfit, as long as it was done with style.

Now under water is the home of the musical Marsalis family (Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and pere Ellis) and the Neville Brothers, Fats Domino, the Connicks (Harry Sr. and Jr.), Better Than Ezra; the place where an ailing Bob Dylan recorded his meditation on mortality, "Time Out of Mind"; the home of powdery beignets and fried seafood po'boys and cold, salty oysters served fresh from the Gulf, sliced open at the bar and doused with Tabasco and eaten straight from the shell, one by one as they were shucked.

A city where $20 would buy you a three-course fixed-price lunch at the best restaurants in town and $10 would buy you a Barq's root beer and giant muffaletta, stuffed with salami and ham and olives and wrapped in white butcher paper to eat by the Mississippi River while the saxophone outside Cafe du Monde sang about marching saints and satin dolls.

For the benefit of anyone who imagines Canal Street as a boulevard of looting and death, imagine it filled with the lights of parade floats, some as long as barges and shaped like dragons, alligators or dinosaurs, festooned with glittering flowers and fairies, glimmering with thousands of fiber-optic lights, throwing off beads and stuffed animals and toys and moonpies to crowds caught up in a frenzy of good will, a positive inversion of the chaos that engulfed the street after the flood.

To anyone who views African-American New Orleanians as little more than helpless victims or senseless destroyers, consider the Mardi Gras Indians, tribes of the working class who spent all year and thousands of dollars sewing elaborate feathered and sequined costumes to be used just once, in parades to pay tribute to the Native Americans of Southeast Louisiana who gave refuge to runaway slaves.

Imagine the Tulane and Loyola University students, leaning and loafing and studying at the grassy fields of Audubon Park, atop the Mississippi River levee, while African seminarians, French restaurateurs, children of Vietnamese refugees and newcomers from Honduras played soccer together on Saturday afternoons, the whole scene dwarfed by freighters gliding down the nearby river.

These are just some of the things I miss, a few of the things that we have lost. Last week, Garland Robinette, a veteran news reporter and Vietnam veteran, broke down and wept during a radio interview with Mayor Ray Nagin. The trigger was Nagin's comment that "New Orleans will never be the same."

I can only pray that is not true.