Because I miss New Orleans. I was on the phone with a guy who lives there and hearing him say the name kicked me out of our conversation. My spirit ran away and left my body to handle the call, nodding and mumbling Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
I ghosted into known spots, places from my many visits to the quarter. Like I’m in a dream, I pop into Royal Street, drift down Decatur, and spend a minute at a table in Bayona’s on Dauphine. I float through the wine cellar at Antoine’s and stand in a spectral urgency in front of Turkey and Wolf. I drift through a used bookstore in the Faubourg Marigny, then hover next to the grill in front of the Maple Leaf.
Places matter to us. Places are part of who we are. Pat Conroy wrote, “My wound is Geography.” It’s true for everyone. You’re born into a place. It becomes you.
But you can lose that place.
You spend years away from where you were born until you can no longer find it within yourself. And then where are you? Loose. Adrift. Wandering. Looking for a home to lay your heart in. What can happen, what might happen to you, is that you leave chunks of your heart behind you like breadcrumbs. Like knots in a rope. Not so you can find your way home. You’re a nomadic soul, an army brat, a child of divorce; there is no home. You’re like me. I was born in Birmingham, but I moved to Florida, then back to Alabama, then California, then Florida again. Finally, I moved to Chicago to raise my kids. I’ve been here for 24 years, and I love it here, but I can’t claim it as the city of my heart.
Because I have more than one of those
My childhood town, Ocoee, FL, was so tiny you could fit it into the palm of your hand. It was a jewel, a teacup of a city. It has a piece of my heart. So do the neighborhoods around Lake Eola in Orlando and the high desert highways in the Mojave. My heart lives a little in Savannah. It lives in the Saint Miguel Food Hall in Madrid, right between the Cava bar and the oyster stand. It lives on a balcony overlooking Virginia Beach. It’s scattered into so many cities. But those are slivers. The big pieces, the bulk, the Corazon Majora; They live in Chicago, and they live in New Orleans, and I don’t know why.
New Orleans will take you.
Be careful when you go. It is a sprawling, vibrant, brilliant mess of a city. Even though it’s more than the quarter and Tulane and Frenchman street, much, much more than that. Even though it is cookie-cutter suburban shopping centers, rusted-out Shell Stations, and brightly lit fast-food joints. Even though it has all of that, all the faceless housing projects and store-front churches next to tire repair shops and check-cashing joints so common you might forget where you are, might mistake these outlying untouristed wards for the backside of Memphis or West Birmingham, or Pine Hills, Fl., even though it has all the non-descript architectural capitalistic cannibalism and debris that comes with being a busy city in America; even though . . . It is also the ancient, ornamented, eternal city we know from postcards. It is also the enchantment. And it will hold your heart in its lace-gloved hands and not give it back for a while. When you do get it back, a piece will remain.
That piece will jiggle and dance whenever you say its name
Whenever you say or hear the name New Orleans that empty place in your heart shaped like a beignet will shift and wiggle, and you will disappear into memory. For me, it’s sitting at the bar at Napoleon House around 2 in the afternoon drinking a Pimm’s cup and looking at nothing in particular. Or sliding into Mother’s at two in the morning for ham hocks and beans. Or opening the screen door at Ugliche’s. Or kicked back against the wall at the Spotted Cat sometime in the night when the clocks give up and all there is the divine fire of whiskey in a woman’s throat as she steps forward out of the howl of a four-piece jazz band, evoked from dim light into the spot, her face appearing out of thin air, her fingers curling around the microphone, her eyes shut, her voice weaving through the room, a threnody to days gone by, to all who came before her, to all the people whose hearts pave the streets of the quarter and whose voices rise up with her to capture your heart and chain it to this place.
The quote from Conroy is incomplete. There’s more, and it’s important. The full quote is: “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” You leave pieces of your heart anywhere you fall in love. They’re out there, beating in the landscape, street corners, and dark dive bars. When you hear their name, you return there, in spirit, where you live.
Which whiskey should you drink when you remember New Orleans?
I don’t know, Mon Frere. I don’t know. I’m working on a fist full of Four Roses and trying not to cry. You do you.
