Elvis waz here

We're in Mississippi, tucked up in bed in a lovely old hotel built on the edge of the bayou. We may be sleeping in the same room Elvis slept in--who knows? I do know that he frequented this hotel from 1951-1957. He had a girlfriend down in Biloxi who "was a knockout in her black suit" as the hotel manager told me (she worked here in the 50's). Elvis played gigs at the same restaurant where we ate a pile of fried seafood tonight.

The hotel was built with mob money and appears in PBS specials about Al Capone. It seems to have quieted down quite a bit now, and the fabulous old pool that looks like it's right out of a Poirot set was filled with laughing children this afternoon.

We visited downtown Ocean Springs and explored an art museum full of pieces by a man named Walter Anderson. Some of his watercolors had been damaged in Katrina. Martin talked to his cousin about the hurricane, which was even more devastating than anything we could have imagined up in the east where we watched the coverage on TV. He has a scar on his arm from a flying piece of roof--he ducked out to try to move his truck and the air was full of debris, like mattresses. His friend actually floated for hours and then swam about a mile to reach his mother's house, where, three days later, he died from water contamination--and Martin's cousin says these stories are common. He describes it as seeming like the end of the world.

Martin, his sister and husband, and I wandered around a neighborhood this afternoon looking for Martin's cousin's old house, and we noticed that the streets, so shaded in Martin's memory, were flooded with hot sunlight; and then we noted the roofs of the houses were all new and the trees were almost all small. Evidence of Katrina is everywhere, not in debris or mess, but in small attentions, like the single red line drawn on the wall of the seafood restaurant we ate at the first evening we were here: Katrina, a red pen had noted, about eight feet up the wall.

Well, the children have fallen asleep, and I'm rather tired myself from swimming and walking and visiting, so I may follow. It's wonderful to be in such a different, fascinating, and beautiful part of the US with such good people. Maybe I'll dream of Elvis tonight.