Familiar Reality

FAMILIAR REALITY

Wait until midnight. Saint John’s Eve. Light some candles. A pinch of incense. Put Gris-Gris on the stereo. Listen to the Night Tripper. His gravelly voice, slow and swampy. 

Moonglow over the Vieux Carré. Wherever you are, the doctor is in. .

My interest in New Orleans dates back to the 1984 World’s Fair. It was a time of  “changes” – as the Doctor would say. And remedies. But I remember a little. Croissants and café au lait on the patio of a Vieux Carré hotel. The quaint architecture of the Creole townhouses with their cast-iron balconies. Balconies which came in handy when it rained.

Bourbon Street of course. Dixieland and daiquiris at the Maison Bourbon. You could keep the glass if you could drink the whole thing. You could keep the glass even if you couldn’t drink the whole thing, but it was fun to try. Crazy Shirley’s. Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo. The waterfront. Moran’s Riverside Restaurant. So good I swiped the ashtray. Gumbo. Jambalaya. A steamboat cruise on the Mississippi River. But most of all, just roaming around the French Quarter seeing everything there was to see. 

It was nearly twenty years later when I thought about New Orleans again. I discovered Lafcadio Hearn. I was enchanted by Fantastics and Other Fancies and sought out his other writings on New Orleans. I longed to revisit the City that Care Forgot. But for one reason or another, that was not to be.