Last Wednesday was a big night at our household. About 7 o'clock, there was a knock on our door, and behind it a very tired-looking delivery man who had come all the way from New Orleans. There it was. Furniture. It was a partial shipment, a sofa, a chair and ottoman, a TV stand, and a computer desk. More will come in a few weeks.
It was the first real furniture we have had since Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, we lived in a hotel for a week, my aunt's house in Baton Rouge for a month, and then my mother-in-law's home for two months before we bought our house in McComb, MS. Since then we have subsisted on a cheap futon that was our sofa by day and our children's bed by night, and on some surprisingly comfortable lawn chairs that we picked up at a department store in Metairie. My wife and I still sleep on the floor on an air mattress, as we have most days since August 29.
I am not looking for any sympathy -- this outcome is mostly our fault. After the hurricane, as we went around shopping for replacement furniture, my wife and I made two crucial decisions. First, we decided to buy all our new furniture in New Orleans. Second, we elected to get quality furniture. Since the storm washed everything away and we were starting from scratch, we decided to get the stuff we really wanted, and not to settle for whatever we could get. This complicated things, because by October every decent piece of furniture in southeastern Louisiana was sold out and on 10 weeks’ backorder. But we stuck to our guns. If we were going to replace everything we had, why buy cheap junk off the shelf and then have to replace it in a year or two? It seemed better to order exactly what we wanted, and then wait it out.
Furniture stores opened very early after Katrina. Within a month many homeowners were back in town, FEMA check in hand and ready to rebuild. Needless to say anyone who sold a product related to domestic life was doing great business. If it didn’t have mold it was good as gold. When we were shopping in October and November, it was a pleasure dealing with hardworking salespeople, many of whom had lost everything too, who had rushed back to the city to get their stores re-opened and to help returning evacuees get back on their feet.
At many of the places we went, construction crews were pulling up carpet and ripping out drywall in the showrooms while a few feet away salespeople closed the deals on bedroom sets for anxious people trying to restore order to their entropy-sodden lives.
And while this furious activity was going on, news outlets were telling America that New Orleans was an abandoned wasteland and that the people there were aimlessly wandering about waiting for government handouts.
Nothing changes a person’s appreciation for regular working people like a natural disaster. I remember checking out at a grocery store in early October, watching a man bag my groceries and thinking how glad I was that he came back to work. When no one is around to cut the grass, sweep the sidewalks, deliver the mail, or stock the dairy freezer, you begin to appreciate these things. Not just the heroes in the boats and helicopters that were on TV, but the regular people who do nothing more than show up for work every day and collectively make the world go round.
So how could we go to another city to buy furniture, when these salespeople, in ordinary times beneath anyone’s notice, were working so hard to bring our lives and their own back to normal? We ordered our furniture, and went home to wait the customary 8-12 weeks for it to arrive.
The sofa is great. The kids will be sleeping on it until their beds arrive. As for me, I’ll just keep pumping up that air mattress for a little while longer.