A New Orleans Testimony

There has been some loose talk that WK is in ill spirits, that he cannot write in his old style, that he cannot capture the spirit of a place, that he is suffering from separation anxiety, so far removed from the granite that underlies New England.  Your humble narrator may be a stranger in a strange land, but he is fitting in rather well.  Every day is a delightful day.  Assumptions of declining mental health are not only exaggerated, they are downright wrong.  To whit:


Life is not disposable in New Orleans.  It is vibrant.  It is robust.  It is as curlicued as a beaded string tossed in the air, it as ardent as the hands that reach to catch that string and place it around the lucky recipient’s neck.  There is pride in place.  There is pluck and gumption, and the stern stuff that makes waking up worth doing every day in every way.  Dreamers slumber in New Orleans.  They do not dream on the same scale as the sleep-deprived who hunker through the witching hours, the blue hours, the jazz hours, the riotous times, the hurly-burly, the hurdey-gurdey, the shimmy, the chamois, the velvet glove and the velvet fog, that fill the interstices between every one of New Orleans’ seconds, step by step, inch by inch, without flinching.  If you dream in New Orleans, you live.  If you sleep in New Orleans, you rest.  If you live in New Orleans, your skin tingles, your nose stings, your taste buds are afire, your ears prick, and your eyes are wide open to all the colors of the rainbow. 

There are plenty of projects in the pipeline.   

With a handshake,

WK