Do You Know What it Means
to Miss New Orleans?

Thomas Lavie was a lifelong resident of the Crescent City. Then came Katrina.

By Wayne Wood

This story ends in Nashville, but it is, through and through, a New Orleans story.
Thomas Lavie, M.D., sits in his new office in the Vanderbilt Mental Health Center with New Orleans guidebooks on the shelves and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five playing softly, and remembers the last normal night in his hometown, the Friday before Hurricane Katrina.
“I was at L.S.U. I went out to dinner with a friend in New Orleans. We were walking around afterward, listening to music from the clubs. When I got home my wife, Claire, said the hurricane was headed right for us.”
Lavie was concerned, but he and Claire were both natives and lifelong residents of the Crescent City, and they had heard storm warnings their whole lives. Hurricanes were a concern but not a crisis. Saturday morning they made evacuation plans. The couple’s two daughters, Sophia, 10, and Juliet, 8, picked out what they wanted to take. Claire packed what the family would need for a few days and also threw in a few family photos. Tom worked on boarding up and securing the house.
In those last hectic hours at their house, Tom had some decisions to make. He is an accomplished painter and had dozens of his paintings at the house. He is also a collector of books and music—he estimates that his music collection ran to about 5,000 CDs, many of them of his hometown’s gift to the world, jazz.
During some previous evacuations, he had carried paintings and some of the books and CDs on lower shelves downstairs to an upstairs bedroom, an area less likely to flood. This time, in a hurry and skeptical of the need to do so, he did not.
“We got on the road Saturday to beat the traffic,” he says.
That house where the Lavies lived was less than a mile from the house where Tom grew up on Bellaire Drive along the 17th Street Canal. Claire grew up only a few miles away from there.
“I was born and raised there, went to medical school there, and worked there,” he says. His mother and father lived there. Claire’s mother and father lived there. Lavie’s four brothers and one sister all lived in the area. “We’re sticks in the mud,” Lavie says of New Orleanians. That’s not an insult, it’s a description. New Orleanians just don’t feel the need to move around much.”
When he left work that muggy late summer night, the last normal Friday night that New Orleans will have for years, Lavie was a leader in the city’s health community. He had a teaching position at L.S.U., was medical director at a public mental health center, and was in charge of the inpatient psychiatric unit at Charity Hospital.
Within four days, the family’s house would be functionally destroyed, almost everything in it ruined, and Lavie’s jobs would no longer exist.
The family had what they loaded
in the car that Saturday morning. And each other.

Flight to safety
As part of the preparation to evacuate New Orleans, the Lavies had made a reservation at a chain roadside inn in Shreveport. This forward-thinking move didn’t work out as well as it should have, since, as the Lavies learned when they arrived at this hotel, way more people had “reservations” than there were actual rooms.
Claire’s mom and dad had had better luck and were checked into a hotel in Toledo Bend, La., and Tom, Claire, and the girls ended up sleeping on the floor of that room for the rest of the weekend, assuming that soon they would be returning home to New Orleans. Naturally, the Lavies were working the phones, checking in with family and friends, making sure that everybody was OK The first reports out of the city were hopeful; it seemed that the brunt of the storm had veered to the east.
The next morning, Tuesday, was when the Lavies, along with most of the rest of the world, learned that New Orleans was in major trouble.
Claire was talking on the phone with her brother who lives in California and Tom saw the tears streaming down her face. Claire’s brother told her to turn on the television.
“That’s when we got the news,” Lavie says simply. “The levees broke.”
There would be no going home.
Tom phoned friends—former New Orleans neighbors—now living in Atlanta, and received the kind of offer that any of us would want in our time of need: You are welcome, come right now, stay as long as necessary.
So with their city in ruins behind them, not knowing the fate of the home they left behind, the Lavies pointed their headlights toward Atlanta.
“That drive was the most harrowing event of my life,” Lavie says. “I felt homeless, jobless, and thought we would be sleeping in the car—all the hotels were full.
We drove for 14 hours. There were no gas stations open. I had my family in the car, it was midnight, and I could see that 12 miles were left on the gauge.”
Then, out of the night, Lavie spotted an open gas station. They waited in line an hour and a half to fill the tank, and made it to Atlanta at 1:30 in the morning. "Our friends greeted us at the door, welcomed us, fed us. We stayed there six weeks.”

Tom and Claire on the front stoop of their New Orleans home

Shocks
The Lavies, like thousands of others who fled New Orleans, were in shock.
“The first couple of weeks were very, very rough,” Lavie says. “I had dreams of swimming underwater and rescuing my paintings. I constantly deluded myself that everything would be OK.”
Six weeks later, Tom and Claire were cleared to return to their home. Everything was not OK. When he talks about it, he switches from the first person “I” to the second person “you,” as if to make the pain less personal:
“When you went across the canal it was like The Wizard of Oz in reverse—it went from color to black and white. When we got to our house, it was worse than you thought.”
He had been hoping that high bookshelves might have saved some of his books from the rising water, but the flood weakened the walls and the shelves collapsed. Not a book survived. Tom and Claire were able to grab some clothes from upstairs closets, some personal items, some of Tom’s artwork.
“I grabbed a couple of CD crates. I wanted to see if they could be washed,” he says. (As it turns out, some of them could, although all the notes and artwork—vital to the jazz aficionado—are gone). For a while, it didn’t matter anyway. “I didn’t listen to music for a long time—I could feel no pleasure in it,”
he says.
“I lost more than 100 works of art. The things I had on the walls—I lost 50 percent of that.” Perhaps as a way to deal with the loss, shortly after landing in Atlanta, Tom had begun painting for hours a day, so at least he had some new art.
But now that they had been home, now that they had salvaged what little they could from their previous life, the Lavies had a decision to make—where was home going to be?

From Crescent City to Music City
Lavie says that Nashville first occurred to him as a possible home during the harrowing 14-hour trans-Dixie drive.
“I actually thought, ‘We could move to Nashville,’” he remembers. Lavie had spent a little time here in 1987 as a fourth-year medical student doing a rotation at Vanderbilt. Sometimes Claire would come up and join him and the young couple would walk together at Radnor Lake.
The more he reflected on that quick thought, the more sense it made. The Lavies wanted to stay in the South, but not in a huge city like Atlanta or Houston. They wanted a good middle-sized town, but—this makes perfect sense, too—not in the potential path of hurricanes.
Nashville just seemed right.
Lavie had picked up some temporary work since his jobs were destroyed by Katrina. L.S.U. had paid its medical faculty for two months after its hospital was devastated, paid half salary another month, and then Lavie, along with most of the other medical faculty, was furloughed.
Somewhere along the line somebody had given Lavie the name of George Bolian, M.D., professor of Psychiatry and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and, more to the point, a native of New Orleans. The two men exchanged a few e-mails about the fate of their hometown. It struck a chord with Lavie when Bolian wrote, “I feel like my childhood is being erased.” Another Bolian e-mail carried the subject line “Go Blue Jays”—a reference to their New Orleans high school.
“I’m not sure I really knew who he was,” Lavie says about the prominent position of his correspondent.
But when Tom and Claire had decided to relocate in Nashville, Tom sent a C.V. to Bolian and asked him to circulate it among those in Nashville who might be looking to hire somebody with his background.
Bolian wrote back: “I’m not going to circulate your C.V. because we want
you here.”
Now it’s official: Thomas Lavie, M.D., is assistant professor of Psychiatry and Medical Director of the Vanderbilt Mental Health Center.
His family is here, after a period living apart while Tom bought a house and set up life in Nashville and Claire and the girls lived temporarily in Lafayette, La., where Tom had had a job offer from the University of Southern Louisiana that later fell through due to post-Katrina hiring freezes in the state. Through all of the dislocation, Lavie reports proudly that his daughters maintained A averages in school.
“My kids are incredible,” the proud father says.

Thomas Lavie surrounded by wife Claire, Sophia, 10,
and Juliet, 8, at their new Nashville home

Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?
The Louis Armstrong CD has finished now, and the traffic noise drifts up from 21st Ave. South below to his Village at Vanderbilt office. Lavie’s thoughts go back to his hometown, to what he—and all of us—have lost. The fact that when summer began less than a year ago the trajectory of his life seemed to include none of this is still hard to grasp.
“Most people cannot believe that I am in Nashville,” he says, and you get the idea that among “most people” he counts himself.
“New Orleans—it’s a cliché, I guess, but it’s a gumbo. The beauty and the seedy, blacks and whites, history and new. It’s the most European city in the United States, I think. I couldn’t go one block without running into somebody I knew: a patient, a friend, somebody who knows my brothers or sister…”
Some of his family has moved back. He says he will not. “I would not be able to face the upcoming hurricane season,” he says. Amazingly, this past February, a freak tornado, the first to hit New Orleans in 26 years, hit what was left of the Lavie home at 2 a.m. and ripped off the back bedroom that would have been occupied by his daughter Juliet. It almost made Katrina seem a blessing, if that’s what it took to get them out of the house ahead of that destruction.
“I definitely have had fragile moments,” he says. “You get a different perspective on life. I will never be in any way materialistic. I really wasn’t that much, but I guess I was about books and records. But what I believe is that you have to turn the tables on adversity. My children are stronger, my marriage is stronger, our family is stronger.”