NOLA

I love cities that are of themselves: they have accepted who they are, they embrace themselves, and they make no apologies.

Enter New Orleans.

Our hotel was in the Warehouse District. Walk out the front door of the Hilton Garden Inn, and to your right is an interstate flyover. And some warehouses. To your left is a dive bar, with yummy po-boys and beans and rice, where you will share a lunch table with strangers.

Walk towards the river and you’ll find the convention center and the elongated but air-conditioned Riverwalk Mall. Walk away from the river and you’ll find buildings that, according to the flaking advertisements painted on their great masonry walls, housed durable goods in a past life. The behemoths have recently been resurrected and divided into homes for hipsters. Continue walking and you can look through the windows of art studios and galleries, and the posh World War II museum.

Walk from the hotel to the French Quarter. You’ll smile at your reflection in the glass storefronts of banks, offices, and restaurants that are only open for lunch Monday through Friday as you pass through the Central Business District. Museums, Harrah’s Casino, and signs pointing to the Aquarium greet you on Canal Street as you navigate the streetcar tracks. Fortune-tellers, street artists, musicians, and performers fill the streets around Jackson Square. Boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops fill the first story windows of the streets of the French Quarter. Shuttered windows behind porches full of greenery mark the second-story residences. You will pass churches and a convent. The doors and windows of Bourbon Street open up at night, illuminated by the neon signs and the promise of entertainment. Later, music will spill out, either from karaoke or a cover band. (They say to go to Frenchmen Street for jazz.) Grocery stores sell food for the residents, and the permanent half of the French Market displays local produce and food stalls. Local “arts and crafts” fill the tables of the flea market in the back half.

You won’t really remember the smell of the city, because your nose goes a little numb. Fish, piss, river, beignets and coffee all schmooze together with the humidity.

Hop the Canal Street streetcar line. Ride it out of the city center, towards the SuperDome. Remember Hurricane Katrina, and realize that until now there has been no other reminder of her…

Note that only tourists use the public transportation. Also note that the timetables are whimsical suggestions, assuming that you can actually locate one. Tourists mustn’t have deadlines or people to meet. Those tourists must have somewhere else to be.

Continue to City Park. En route, see the boarded up storefronts, the well-maintained employment office, and the faces staring up at the tourists riding the streetcar. You may witness some New Orleans natives actually enter the car and sit near you, distant from the French Quarter. If you’re lucky, someone might hand you a poem to read while you pass the time screeching along the track. Once you reach the end of the line and enter the park, appreciate the groomed botanic gardens, the resident rooster, the misplaced Japanese Garden (at least the weather is authentic), and the soggy cacti. Enjoy the sculpture garden, and consider visiting the art museum.

Ride another streetcar down Saint Charles Street. The trees and cast iron balconies are draped in strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads. Tangles of them. Webs of them.

The Garden District does actually have a coffee shop and a restaurant. You can walk past both of them if you like, so that you can stop and stare at historic homes. Huge houses with iron lace curtains adorning the porches and doorways, with great cast iron fences, with stained glass windows, with gilt details, with mature trees and flowering bushes, with letter boxes and lion’s head door knockers. The corresponding grocery stores and luncheries are on Magazine Street. If you head that direction, you will pass through the neighboring neighborhoods, where people drive Fords and keep Mother Mary statues in their front yards. The houses are no less colorful and much less shuttered. You might be lucky enough to say hello to a man as he “walks” his half-paralyzed dog, or an elderly woman as she carefully tends her front gate. You may see a Victorian home peeled back as it ages, displaying the layers of roofing and siding and broken windows that frame the heavy old door. As you pass a decrepit old masonry building with fascinating detailing, you will realize that it is not abandoned when you turn the corner and spot the new Free School sign behind a freshly painted fence.

Cemetery walls enclose forgotten tombs where a pile of bricks that was once a wall and marker hugs the exposed steel vault, a mere foot away from an immaculate granite mausoleum fronted by a weeping angel that evokes a requiem and breaks your heart. Stillborn children and toddlers share gravesites with their great-great grandparents. The magnolia trees shade a piece of broken wall, where the mason’s initials have been exposed in the formerly hidden mortar.

New Orleans wears its dichotomies on its sleeve: the rich and poor living and socializing just a hair’s breadth apart, the clean and the dirty separated by a street corner, the tourist brushing the shoulder of a local, the impermanence and perseverance. Sailors, traders, soldiers, clergy, criminals. The spirits are still there to see and to hear. You can almost perceive the ghosts, as you tread the same paths and feel the same desires. Work hard, play hard, witness and partake in the spectacle. Live.

And then place your luggage in the back of a cab. The cabbie will check his log, and ask you to guess how long he has been waiting at the cab stand in front of the hotel…almost three hours. He is quite happy to take you to the airport, where you can enjoy a warm beer and wait for United to take you home.

The year in review

2009 was an excellent year for us, filled with grand journeys, great love and copious amounts of meat (for San). It marked the first entire year we spent together!

We traveled across the sea to glorious Ireland, where San’s BFF Holly had spent the previous three months. Holly hosted them with gusto, enchanting San with the Guinness Brewery tour where we all learned how to pour a perfect pint. San also drank several perfect pints…enthusiastically. Next came our first rugby game in the hotel pub, in which Ireland breathtakingly defeated Wales in the waning seconds of the match. After the first night of revelry, which included finding the Dubliner version of Captain America, Holly lured us into a train using wine and cheese, and stole us across the country to her abode in Galway. One day was devoted to visiting the majestic Cliffs of Mohr, underground caverns where bears once dwelled, and exploring graveyards and castle ruins. We even met her Irish Boyfriend, who introduced us to a village where where old (and not-so-old) Irishmen start drinking at the local historic pub at approximately 7:06 a.m. (The Irish Boyfriend eventually made two trips to Chi-town later in the year to see his beloved Holly.)

Shortly after returning from overseas, Tracy hunkered down to study for her professional engineering licensing exams (yes, plural, as in two). Hours, hours, and more hours at the end of March and most of April disappeared in such quiet places as coffee shops, libraries and the dining room table on Saturday and Sunday mornings. She rejoiced in July upon finding out that she passed. She can now legally oversee and sign off on dangerous projects that could very well kill you.

We met our respective families for the first time this year, traveling first to Tracy’s hometown in Kentucky. On Day One, during mid-drink at the local baked goods establishment, Tracy’s Aunt Sheila unexpectedly gave San a southern seal of approval. San also experienced a Kentucky tradition of biscuits and sausage gravy, made from scratch by Tracy’s Pop. (It was later explained that such a feast was only prepared for those her father liked.) In the fall, Tracy met San’s extended family in New York. His parents, aunts and uncles took a vote, and decided she could stay.

In June, San fulfilled his 10-year dream to attend the Annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois. The geekfest featured the world’s largest Superman statue, a Superman Museum, appearances by Superman writers and actors, locals dressed in a variety of superhero costumes, and a nefarious gaggle of Mole Men - all eagerly enjoyed by a wide-eyed San, who gleefully purchased collectibles and photographed as many Supergirls as he could.

This year was also filled with obligatory wedding trips. We attended our first Jewish wedding in Cincinnati, complete with a “little hat” for San and kosher delicacies. Tracy was a beautiful (and unfortunately pink) bridesmaid for her brother’s ceremony in Kentucky, where she managed to be unnaturally perky for several hours. San was the best man at his childhood chum’s wedding deep in the Adirondack Mountains. He got to ride in the back of a 1940s fire truck, was appropriately introduced at the reception to the Pulp Fiction theme song and, of course, gave a riveting best man speech about the groom’s love for dragons, which had been sweetly supplanted (or at least augmented) by his love for his new bride.

Halloween was celebrated with eerie finesse, complete with costumes, cobwebs, corpse-faced fiends, chili and spider-legged cheeseballs. We hosted our friends in our first and final bash at the old apartment, filling it with opposing sounds of creepy sounds and death metal, and baking decorate-your-own cookies. The party was certified a success when the marathon partiers began battling board-game zombie legions, while Tracy mysteriously disappeared around 1 a.m. San later found her on the bed, where she mumbled, “Someone must protect the coats!”

In November, Tracy closed on her first home. During this exciting time, San reached his major personal accomplishment (along with his trustworthy chum, the Captain) for 2009: he finally defeated every single burger on the menu of his favorite restaurant, Kuma’s Corner. While San and Cap packed their bellies, Tracy spent the day packing boxes. (San made penance by spending 14 hours packing the following Saturday.) We finally moved ourselves and the two grumpy old cats in December, shortly before Christmas.

Christmas was spent with Tracy’s family, where San woke every morning to the savory smell of pork sausage in her Pop’s man-kitchen. A painful amount of food was eaten, many presents were opened (to the three kitties’ glee), and much snow and rain was driven through to get to and from the festivities. San even learned not to snuggle with the calico cat, who first played shy then tried to eat his ear.

We hope this year has been as kind to all of our friends as it has to us. Happy holidays, and may 2010 rock your arm sockets out!

San & Tracy

Airport stories

Things I've seen this week while travelling through various airports:

• Mr. Popped Collar. He got off a plane in St. Louis, channeling some Ryan Seacrest-esque spiky bleach blond hair, wearing oversized aviator glasses (did I miss when these came into fashion?), and a short-sleeved brown polo with the collar popped.


• The Turquoise Family. A mother, father, and seven children, aged approximately 15 down to 6. Five boys and two girls. The father and several of the kids had a cool European accent. They were headed to Spain, which one of the middle boys quipped was famous for their chocolate. The men in the family were all clad in turquoise polo shirts, and the women sported turquoise t-shirts. I guess color-coding your kids would make them easier to pick out of a crowd.
  
• Musak. The music choice in Wichita baffles me. I heard an instrumental elevator rendition of Smash Mouth's Walking on the Sun. Never in a million years could I have predicted that this particular song would be immortalized as musak.


• Sunglass Challenged. A commonality among annoying men who think too much of themselves: they wear their wrap-around sporty sunglasses backwards or tucked into the back of their collar.


• Loud Talker. Sitting behind me at O'Hare, an aging baby-boomer heading out on vacation was discussing the status of his buddy drinking, getting sloshed, getting slammed, being inebriated, getting hammered, and various other frat-boy euphemism for being totally drunk to his other buddy via cell phone. Maybe he was wearing his sporty sunglasses on the back of his shirt...but I didn't want to turn around and look.


• Preppy Boy. Lincoln Parker wearing a white polo, white shorts, white no-show socks, and white tennis shoes sat near me, eating a powerbar and a banana. Thankfully he didn't talk.


• Tattooed Woman. I tried hard not to stare, but a woman across from me had full tattooed sleeves on her arms, and was wearing an ill-fitting sleeveless top that clung to her in a very unflattering manner.