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Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?
Way back before The Storm, I am walking the avenues of the French Quarter, sniffing around the edges of everything to see past the seductions being flaunted before me. Back in these days, New Orleans is the Big Difficult, a strange jambalaya of history, fiction, lies and legends. I am just another tourist peeking at the sideshow, but I am also the writer who wonders what is real and what is carnival.
The Quarter, as it turns out, is a series of glimpses.
I weave through the meandering crowd, glimpsing through an open door a waitress, nude save for the small dangling frontal pouch that holds order pad and tips and pencil. Does she imagine herself all dressed up for work?
Wonderful fragrances of spicy food being cooked and served mingle with faint urine smells from a narrow alley. There are still cobblestones about, causing an inebriant to sway even more as he walks by holding onto a wall.
The enormous old church oversees moneylenders and moneytakers who are quick to pose for pictures. Tiny overpriced windowless apartments are available everywhere, and no matter where I look, there are children tapdancing in their bottle-capped sneakers, hoping to magnetize a quarter of two from my pockets.
Dixieland music collides in midair with re-worked folktunes, and everything is played full volume as each venue vies for attention. Everybody smokes tobacco and other musty substances. The air is one hundred percent fume and flame and exhalation.
I learn to enjoy the Quarter by ignoring that which does not lend itself to change.
During the day, I visit brimming old bookshops, scan the wares of street vendors, eat the most delicious foodstuffs and frequently escape the drear humidity to bask beneath a hotel air-conditioner.
Of the non-visitors, most everyone has an attitude. Many are rude or abrupt. All wish for tips and gratuities and favors. But, strangely, this curious mixture of impoliteness and commerce helps make the Quarter authentic. I put up with behavior I would never tolerate back home.
The next-morning streets are bright and free of hustle. I wind up so absorbed in examining the shelves of an old bookstore that when I am ready to check out, I startle the owner. “Wow! We didn’t know anybody was here, so we locked up and went to lunch for an hour!”
I didn’t know I had been imprisoned. The perfect incarceration.
Back on the street, I amble along, watching people who watch people watching people. This is before the time when each person has a small device sutured to a palm. This is back when some of us actually gaze at one another and converse pleasantly.
It is a city filled with short-term emigrants from everywhere, and for these few hours we all get along with one another. Languages and slangs overlap. Even megaphoned preachers and zealots are tolerated here.
As I head toward the train station to return to Alabama, I wonder whether or when I will ever return to this potpourri, this overspiced porridge of a town.
Somewhere on the way out of Louisiana, just past flagrantly decaying cemeteries, the train comes to an unscheduled stop in the midst of nowhere. After a while, a porter walks through the cabin carrying a very large and quite dead turkey. “We ran over him on the tracks. We’ll cook him up for supper,” the porter grins.
So, even though I’m escaping the Big Difficult, a little bit of its traditions and primal rites return with me. Fresh turkey served on the tracks on the way to the shuffle of the big city of Sweet Birmingham
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.