An empire of boulevards.

Now that's what I call a genuine New Orleans Southern Oak.

Somewhere on Esplanade Avenue.

Contrary to what many Bostonians may thing, Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans is pronounced "Esplan-Aid"  not "Esplan-ahd."  The city is full of unfamiliar pronunciations.  Dryades Street is just "Drieds," Clio Street is "Cl-eye-o."  Conti Street is "Cont-eye."  Burgundy is "Burr-GUN-dee."  Chartres is "Charters."  Who said French is alive and well in New Orleans?

I was on Grand Route St. John today.  How's that for a street name?  Nice street.  It intersects with Mystery Street parallel to Ponce de Leon Street.  One of the pleasures about tootling around New Orleans is not the streetscapes themselves, which are lush, but the names of the streets.  Whatever collective, subconscious genius named these roadways did a dandy of a job.

Humanity Street, Desire Street, Law Street, Magazine Street, Coliseum Street, Camp Street, Gen. Pershing Street, General De Gaulle Drive, Barracks Street, Rampart Street (North and South), Music Street, Jewel Street, Warbler Street, Elysian Fields Avenue...a body can get lost in the mind's associations.

Some streets are dull.  Most are interesting.  New Orleans is full of surprises around most corners.  The city is a work in progress, rebuilding itself from the sediment up.  Vast in area and dense in details, wandering New Orleans is an expedition that brings as many rewards as a Kenyan safari.  What should be familiar, disorients.  What seems repetitive is perfected in each, next incarnation.  

Every day a New Orleans Adventure

A New England Fisherman cuts the New Orleans fog.

Isn't every day an adventure in New Orleans?  Especially for those unfamiliar with the lay of the land and the ways of the city?  To most visitors, New Orleans must seem like a spermatozoa in profile: the blocks of the French Quarter and the long tail of the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line.  When I look at the map of the city that is hung on my wall, it is much bigger.  It resembles a pair of testicles, with Algiers and New Orleans East stretched out and cradling big, fertile balls.

It's not an accurate anatomical comparison.  Unless you live in Algiers or New Orleans East, those parts of the city are the furthest thing from your mind.  They are there nonetheless, part of the citizenry and fabric of this wonderful place.  They are, in fact, as mysterious and chemically influential as actual testes are to a male body.  New Orleans is not male, however.  It is the most seductive and sensuous of cities, a courtesan among the metropolises of the world akin to Venice in its charms and wiles.

If New Orleans can be compared to any part of the human anatomy before it is a zygote, it is more egg than sperm.  It is fertile, waiting to hatch.  New Orleans is a womb in which adults are born to their true natures, becoming more human in the process of self-discovery.  The humidity during a New Orleans summer is an amniotic bath.  You cannot know New Orleans by only knowing the French Quarter, the Vieux Carre, and the Garden District.  There are many, many more districts than those, each with its own flavor and patter and patois, each with its own creeds and conundrums and contradictions.

I watched a jazz funeral down North Broad Avenue today.  I thought it was a second line until I saw the pall bearers marching with their hands pressed to the side of a hearse, three to a side.  What's the difference?  I cannot tell you yet.  Both employ brass bands and colorful dress and a sense of celebration.  The funeral had an obvious purpose, to accompany the dead to his or her final resting place, while a second line parade is held for no other reason than being alive.  What is the difference?  I cannot tell you yet.  It is November and I have only lived here since June.  When I discover it, I suspect I won't have the words to express it.  You'll have to find out for yourself if you care.  You should.

This is New Orleans.  There is nowhere else like it that I've ever encountered.  I'm from New England.  Every town and city is pretty much the same except for the fact that they all hate each other and perceive differences in the layout of the town green, the civic administration, the number of Congregational churches vs. the number of Catholic churches vs. the Unitarians vs. the Baptists.  If you aren't from one New England town or city, you are from no where.  You may as well be from the moon or from Brazil or from Texas or from some other far flung place that has nothing to do with the square miles that make up this particular place.

New Orleanians don't hate anyone.  They welcome them, invite them for a drink, a meal, a dance, a good time.  Like an egg in a uterus, New Orleans' barrier is permeable.  I'm from New England and I find New Orleans like nothing I've ever encountered.  People from elsewhere in Louisiana say the same thing: "New Orleans may as well be its own country."  It is its own country, I think.  It is an Eden in its way where sin is conceived but carries no taint.  It seems impossible to do wrong in New Orleans.  Every avenue leads to adventure and discovery.

When I typed that last word my finger slipped and I wrote 'dixcovery.'  That's what New Orleans is, the land of Dixie, Dixieland, a country known to all with borders that can't be located on any map but the one a person carries in his or her soul.  

I am happy to live here and call it my home.  I cannot imagine ever being unhappy in New Orleans.  The good outweighs the bad in ways so that the bad doesn't seem all that bad at all.  It is.  Everything is.  Everything is good.  Everything is New Orleans: potholes, mold, moss, lichens, lizards, roaches, termites, aches and agues, stagnant water, midges, mosquitoes... Brilliance and transcendence all; motes, like us, in a gracious God's beaming eye.  If anything is corrupted, it is a parcel of the city's effervescent jigsaw, harlequin, unwritten yet implied, parti-colored constitution.

Stars shine over New Orleans and they are lucky stars.  They beam and smile bemused at the all the fertile activity they witness.  Heaven is not blind to human genius.

Great moments in New Orleans science

While the temperature has dropped in New Orleans recently enough for people to wear winter coats (high 50s before the sun comes up) that's not the kind of freeze I'm discussing today.  These images come from friezes on either side of the former front door at Tulane Medical School.

This neighborhood, the foot of Tulane Avenue at Elk Place and pretty much up past South Claiborne till I don't know how far out, is a desert of anything interesting.  The old medical school building, while no prize, does has some interesting architectural details.  It's the same way with the abandoned Charity Hospital next door.  A lot of art deco at ground level, an imposing silhouette for the skyline, but the neighborhood is pretty much dead and there is no life to speak of.  The 70s era bunker that is Tulane Hospital isn't a peach of an attraction, eyeglass museum or no.

Here's the other side of the old med school doorway:

Opposites attract

Daneel Playspot puts one in the mind for turtle soup.

A lovely couple and stylish couple who look half their age was dining at the Autumn Moon Chinese and Vietnamese Restaurant on Prytania Street across from Touro Infirmary (they have a website).  The meal was nothing exceptional but it was welcome.  It was nothing fancy and held no surprises, just wholesome nutrition simply prepared and presented.  Neither she nor he could ask for more.

At dinner's end the chipper waitress brought two fortune cookies along with the bill.  The lady diner opened hers and said, "Oh. I must have gotten yours."  Her companion cracked his cookie open and read the fortune.  "Maybe you're right," he said, "I seem to have gotten yours."  They exchanged slips of paper.

Both read aloud, "You have a magnetic personality."

They both had the same lucky numbers too:  3, 23, 34, 56, 76 19, and 88.

Blight in New Orleans

Somewhere in Central City, New Orleans, LA.

I won't say all the two story houses look like this, but some of them do.  An errant motorcyclist or bicyclist or simple pedestrian will encounter a fair share on a zigzagging path if he or she has his or her eyes open for such details.  We see the Leaning Tower of Central City today, not to be confused with Mid-City, New Orleans.

You come across the darnedest things in New Orleans and you never know if they are due to the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina or if they've been that way for decades.  I'm starting to just take things in stride.  It is what it is.  New Orleans is such a hodgepodge.  It was difficult enough to make sense of the place before the Army Corps of Engineers fell asleep at the switch for a decade or two before Katrina.  After the fact, it's a a slurry of mud and gumbo.

I'm not in a position to point my finger and assign blame.  My job is to enjoy what I've been given at this point in time.  Nice work if you can get it.  I see the decay, I witness the blight, I see the renaissance, the tradition and the vim of a city on the upswing.  I don't know what to make of it all.  I reserve my judgement.  There are wiser folk than I who have lived through a lot more, a lot worse, and a lot better.  For now, I make my patrols around the Crescent City, eyes open, ears cocked, and pen in hand.