New Orleans dreams

New Orleans in a shot glass.

They say Hollywood is a dream factory.  I see why.  For different reasons, in very different ways, I think New Orleans, Louisiana is a dream factory.  Living here, day after delightful day, I feel untethered from the reality that rules every other place I've lived.

I spent some years in Naples, Italy, an outsider speaking only English, in a city with more than a million inhabitants, that has only one McDonald's and two Chinese restaurants (when I lived there, least).  Different rules applied to life in Naples.  Different rules apply in New Orleans.  It is a world like none other.  The rest of the world is out there, it just doesn't matter very much.  A living city is a microcosm.

When I hear a trumpet player keeping himself company along his, or her, long midnight walk home, I hear the heartbeat of a living city.  It sings.

I spent a few years in Boston.  That city calculates and studies.  I've lived in Queens, a part of a city that schemes to make a buck.  I've lived in Newport, Rhode Island, a place apart, that stuns with its beauty.  I've was nurtured and came of age in New London, Connecticut, a place where no one visits, unless they mean it.  I've lived in Chicago, and there was nothing wrong with that, except the weather.  I've lived in Houston, and I never want to go back.

I live in New Orleans, now.  I never want to live anywhere else again.

I live, alive, in New Orleans, without a care in the world.  New Orleans incubates dreams.  It fledges dreamers when they are ready to soar between Riverbend and Hollygrove, between Bayou Sauvage and the slippery shores of the mighty Mississippi River.  If an idea has legs, it will be able to swim.  New Orleans is a dream factory filled with small entrepreneurs looking to mint something more than coin.  It a city in which dreams come true.