Yankee sensibility shifting

They say you are finally adept at learning a foreign language when you have a dream in the new one.  I haven't had a dream in New Orleanian patois because though there are some people I find hard to understand, like any thriving city, this is a place that attracts newcomers.  I have encountered all sorts of accents and few of them are unintelligible.

That's not true of the fisherman I passed alongside Bayou St. John.  I still don't know what kind of fish he caught.  It was black with blue speckles, a rectangular fish with a tiny, protruding mouth.  I have no idea what he called it though I've mulled it over a few days, but he told me they used to be more common in the past than they are now.  Maybe it was a bream.

I have internalized one local colloquialism without realizing it.  After reading the word so many times, I now think the word "crawfish."  Where I come from, they are called "crayfish" and I hadn't made that verbal shift from ay to aw until the past day or so.  No one eats or sells crayfish where I come from.  They are occasional things you find in backwoods streams if you're inclined to go there.  I saw one once when I was a kid.  I've seen plenty of crawfish and I've eaten a few since I've been in New Orleans.  I call them what they are and it doesn't stick in my craw.

Baby Love

I've never had to keep track of when the last was that a stranger called me "Baby" or "Babe" or "Love."  In  New England, this just doesn't happen.  Here in New Orleans, it happens two or three times a day during common exchanges.

I had lunch at Ted's Frostop on South Claiborne today.

Regular readers will know that I don't eat a lot of hamburgers, though I started enjoying them weekly at the Banshee before I left Boston.  I was a little hesitant to order a hamburger at Frotstop but the menu came to my rescue.  My lunch was red beans and rice for $2.99 and a large root beer.  The beans came with some kind of patty on top.  It wasn't meat but, rather, some kind of dark, spicy pancake.  Whatever it was, it was delicious.  I was there a little before noon so it wasn't crowded: me, a pair of cops, a couple of construction workers, and two chaps who looked like stock brokers. No women except behind the counter.  One of them called out to me, "Number Zero Six.  Here's your beans, Babe."

I looked at apartments today.  I asked the realtor after the second one if it was a typical apartment.  "There's no such thing as typical in New Orleans," she replied.  I chuckled and had to agree. 

For the same price that I'm paying in Dorchester, I'll be getting about a third more space.  The lady of the house and I were concerned that we have too many things.  We don't have a lot of furniture, but we've filled up the floor space of our Dot three-decker and neither of us can abstract how much a square foot contains without seeing it.  No worries ahead.

I've seen four different dwellings.  The first was a kind of little, stand-alone house in the back yard of a bigger building.  Nix to that one. The owner of the front house wanted all the yard to herself and was building a hot tub outside the renter's bedroom window.  The second was two stories at the front of the house with access to a long porch in back running along the former slaves' quarters and serving as a fire escape.  Thumbs up for the front porches on both floors.  That was on Terpsichore Street, named after the muse of dance.  

The third was in the rear "slaves' quarters."  It was a nice, if cramped seeming, space but  the porch (it was on the second story) felt very soft under it's peeling paint.  Not interested.  The fourth was half of a "double," that is half of a doublewide shotgun shack up in Riverbend.  That was really nice and I was torn because I like the Riverbend neighborhood and I liked the apartment, which has a skylit loft in the back room, but I would love to have an address on Terpsichore Street.  That, and the park in Coliseum Square is lovely.

We are going to look at some more on Thursday.  I followed the realtor between locations and she took me down a part of Prytania Street I hadn't been on before.  I now know where the Prytania Theater is.  My leader apologized after we arrived at the final destination.  She said, "I've never been on a motorcycle and I realize I just led you down some very bumpy roads."  I said it was no problem.  She saw me jostling around in her rear view mirror.  Maybe she heard me exclaim, "Jeez Louise!" over a particuarly bone-rattling stretch.

I went to library today to read the Yellow Pages.  Employment agencies don't do a lot of outdoor advertising in New Orleans so I wanted to see who could help me find a job.  If anyone needs a medical coder or biller or office manager, let me know.   I'll be available on June 11.

What's in a name?

I ran into an old acquaintance the other day. She was married when I first met her and her name hasn't changed so I assumed she was still bound by the ties of matrimony. She set me straight in short order.

"You're last name is King, you'll never see any need to change it,"she said. I admitted the idea has never entered my mind. She continued, "Imagine going through the first half of your life as Jennifer Tukus? When I got married I clung to my new last name like a life raft. The best thing my ex-husband gave me, the only good thing he ever gave me aside from our daughter, is my new name. Until something better comes along, I'm going to keep calling myself Jennifer Winner." She had a winning point.

Why is Dorchester called Dorchester, besides the usual accidents of history? What does Dorchester, Mass., a part of Boston, have to do with Dorchester, England? Very little if anything at all anymore. Savin Hill, Neponset, Lower Mills, Codman Square...all these neighborhoods have an organic reason for their designations, but Dorchester? Why? Because Englishmen from British Dorchester settled here four centuries ago? I can walk down every street in the Dot swinging a broom and I won't hit one limey.

I'm not in favor of changing Dorchester's nom-de-guerre for marketing reasons. I'm not in favor of Shadyvale or Pleasantville. Quite the contrary. If Dorchester elects a new name, I think it should reflect the facts on the ground. Palookaville springs to mind. So does Affordabletown, Work Acres, Hope Flats, or Meltingpot. If we want to keep the ties to history, just Dot works fine.

As we have pointed out again and again, Dot is not an disparaging name and the label puts a pointillist focus on a self-contained orb that spins according to rules of its own making. Dorchester is a bull's eye to be aimed at. On Boston's canvas, it is like a spatter of paint that didn't get laid on a Jackson Pollack canvas, one that held all the creator's intended meaning but will never be seen because it's on a potato barn floor somewhere out of sight. It is on the edge of the main show, forgotten and neglected. Only the artist saw its worth but once the paint had dried it was too late to change the picture. The final picture sold for a trillion bucks at auction decades after completion. Dorchester is a work in progress.

I guess it doesn't matter what you call yourself. Dorchester is Dorchester when the day is done. It is full of palookas and hope and affordable rents and the hurly-burly, hurdy-gurdy, sing-song grunt and weft and sweat and chance and happenstance that close company breeds. Dorchester is a Dot, but a name means little on the streets. What is the moon except the thing you see in the sky? Is there a man there looking down? Wave hello. That is the Dorchester way.

An American werewolf in Dorchester

Tonight's happy hour led me to the Dot Tavern where I was sitting next to a bearded chap with a Southie accent. We didn't talk at first which suited me fine. I was finishing up the horse racing news in the Herald and preferred not to be interrupted from my studies. After I put my paper down, the 'gentleman' gradually engaged me in conversation.

He saw what I had been studying in the newspaper so the talk started with palaver about the ponies. While he regaled me with tales of his well chosen trifectas I noticed that his eyes always wandered when a lady walked past. The woman in question could be young or old, attractive or not, blond, brunette, redhead, bluehair, cross-eyed, snaggle-toothed or super-model. If they belonged to the fairer sex, which naturally they did, his eyes would follow them from behind my left shoulder to the hairy edge of his left ear.

"I've been drinking beer all day. I could use me a nice goose right about now," he told me. I suggested he visit Gene and Paul's Meats just down the road. This grocery has the freshest meats of all varieties from any flesh-bearing, land bound animal one might wish to consume.

He said, "Naw, I don't cook. I just want me a little tickle." Then he pointed with a crooked finger at a spiky-haired, crew cut brunette lass sitting in a booth. "That's the goose I want to pluck," he said, extending his finger out then pulling it back a few times. I excused myself.

I introduced myself to the ladies in the booth. It was all, "Hello, I'm Whalehead King...it's a nice night compared to yesterday...what do you do for a living?... uh huh, uh huh...do you live close by?...do you know that the creep who keeps looking over his shoulder at us and licking his lips isn't watching me but you?"

It turned out to be last call for the ladies though the evening was still early, hours before cutoff time. I offered to escort them home but they refused. I said I was leaving anyway, and we left together, parting company at Columbia Road. The goose hunter didn't follow, which is just as well.

Better Than Good

When something is better than good, it deserves a different word. Some people say "fantastic," and that may work if you come from Fanchester. Where I live though, if something is better than good, we call it dottastic. We usually append two exclamation points for emphasis like so: Dottastic!!

The word is a fad that is catching on with all the youngsters around Dorchester. I wouldn't say the word has reached the critical mass to be all the rage, but it's making its rounds and gathering force. I was in the McDonald's at Codman Square where a young couple were enjoying a late lunch. The boy said, "My sister took me to Eggleston Square yesterday and that Filet o' Fish was good, but this one is dottastic!!" His date took a bite of hers and flashed an enthusiatic thumbs-up in agreement while still chewing.

At the Tedeschi Market on Neponset Avenue the other morning, I was picking up a Dorchester Reporter and the Herald. The cashier was all of seventeen. After I had given her my $1.25, she gave me a winning smile. "Thank you, sir. You have yourself a dottastic day!!" I assured her I would.

While waiting on the inbound platform at Shawmut Station, I watched a gaggle of pre-teen girls squeal with delight at one of their member's shoes. "Those are so dottastic!!" They kept saying it over and over. The shoes' owner was very pleased by the attention and compliments. She said she had gotten the shoes at AJ Wright.

Proof that the word is entering the mainstream, at least in this part of Boston: There is a handwritten sandwichboard on the sidewalk outside Peabody Tire. It says: "We have the BEST Tires at the Most Dottastic Prices!!"

Will the word catch on outside Boston's biggest neighborhood? It may be a tough sell. Roxtastic sounds pretty nice, too.