Dylan and I enter a low lying, inconspicuous white building on Race Street in New Orleans' Garden District. Once inside, we walk shyly down the hall towards an open room in which a light skinned African-American woman is trying on a pair of stilts and a darker skinned and bearded African-American man sits with a drum in his lap, before several children. "We're here for the drumming lesson," I observe, haltingly. "Come on in," says the woman with stilts. "I'm Carolyn and this is my husband, Curtis," she explains, gesturing towards the bearded man. I greet them both, and introduce Dylan, who is staring at the floor, self-conscious and unsure. Dylan is then ushered, by an adolescent boy, the couple's assistant and son, to a seat before a large drum. Our lesson has begun.

New Orleans continues to confound me with its admixture of good and bad, its balanced throb of vibrancy and destruction, its rapid alternation between carefree and careless. Come September of this year, as my family traveled north towards Oxford, Mississippi, the destination site of our evacuation for Hurricane Gustav, I felt in the shadowy depths of my most private heart that life might actually be a good deal easier for me if New Orleans were flooded to the rafters by another storm.

My thinking, as morbid as it sounds, was that such an event would resolve, once and for all, the ongoing ambivalence with which many of us struggle (particularly those of us who were not born in this town), in our daily lives post-Katrina. Such an event would take the onus off of us—or off of me—to choose whether to go or to stay; would clear my path out of purgatory into some other, less edgy, more "normal" enclave of this country; let me ride the winds of hurricane season right out of the godforsaken gulf region into some place safer from death—Austin, Athens, Asheville, Berkley (the place of my birth), or Charlottesville (my hometown). Give me civilization, replete with a large but progressive middle class, a taste for culture and diversity without conflict. In other words, Sesame Street.

As it turned out, Gustav had other plans, veering closer to Baton Rouge, which it knocked out of commission for weeks, downing power lines and blocking the streets with fallen trees.

So we of New Orleans returned, reluctant and baffled, to our homes and resumed our daily grinds. The choice had not been made for me, or for any of us, not this time. And, after a few weeks, after we had taken the boards from our houses and the weather began to cool, we were able to turn our thoughts away from ourselves to the economic bailout or coming election, forgetting that only a month prior our lives had been suspended once again before the threat of environmental ruin.

Last week, however, as I was reading my son Dylan his bedtime story, I heard what sounded to me indisputably like a rapid series of gunshots very near by. "Excuse me a moment," I told Dylan, setting his book down calmly. I walked down the hall and into my husband's office. "Did you hear what I heard?" I demanded to know. Chris looked up from his book and nodded. "It was fireworks," he replied sanguinely. "I thought they were gun shots at first, too, but they sped up towards the end of the sequence." "Oh," I answered, replaying the seven evenly spaced pops in my head.

The next morning, as I was tying Dylan's shoes, my briefcase under one arm, his backpack slung across the other, Chris peered over the newspaper in which he was immersed and observed, "You were right…those were g-u-n-s-h-o-t-s last night." "Mhmm," I answered grabbing Dylan's hand and waving as we maneuvered our way out the door. I did not want to pause long enough for Dylan to sound out the letters. Later we learned that a man on a bicycle had been shot by someone in a passing car one block from our house. On the same night, a neighbor's car had been stolen.

I was once again face to face with the "bad" and "ugly" elements of my city. Those elements that seem to go hand-in-hand with a population that is poor, uneducated, and distrusting enough of the majority to reelect to the senate a man facing federal indictments and a mayor who sits idly by as large sections of the former city are left to blight. What stratum of my brain had I managed to disengage, I wondered, to cohabitate with such tangible threats to the health and well-being of my family? Regardless of what governmental agency, corporate monopoly or racist ideology we might ultimately blame for global warming and class warfare, the resulting dangers were and are nevertheless the same.

Of course, there is the fact both Chris and I have work here; jobs that we might not so easily reinvent elsewhere. There's also the economic reality that, even if we were to find jobs elsewhere, we might not be able to sell our house anytime in the near future. And then there are our friends. How hard would it be to find our niche socially in a new place, that is, to start over, at this point in our lives?

But the real truth, I feel, is more complex. Despite my ongoing ambivalence, my sense is that there really is something to the passion that native New Orleanians exude about their city. That somehow, in spite of or maybe with the risk of hurricane season, corruption, and crime, there's gold. Perhaps it is the case that the higher the stakes, the deeper the pleasure. And what is that pleasure, you ask? It is difficult, I find, to put in words. But I know that it has to do with the fact that somehow here every circle of friends is linked, indissolubly, to every other circle of friends—that no one is separated by more than two degrees; with the fact that the art here is spontaneous and ubiquitous (witness the two-month retrospective "Prospect 1," in which artists from all over the world have injected their art into a vast array of environments across the city, from school buildings to houses to the exterior of motels). It has to do with the fact that my son attends one of three public charter schools, which offers, in line with the region's colonial history, a French immersion program. Or with the simple fact that we know and greet our neighbors, many of whom have lived in our neighborhood for two and three generations. And that, throughout the year, these neighborhood families find occasions to come together, break bread, listen to music, and celebrate life.

Or with the fact that I can take my son, as I did this Saturday, to a free drumming lesson at "La Casa Samba" where a husband and wife team teach children and adults in the dancing and musical traditions of Brazil. As I stand in the distance and watch Dylan, pounding hesitantly, newly, with a single drum stick on a bass drum, alongside three older children who tap away, confident, happy, and immersed in the Caribbean and South American rhythms that fit so well in this city, as if this island in Louisiana were, itself, displaced, I think to myself that this is, indeed, good and maybe, just maybe, we will prevail.

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