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Our Atlantis

Doesn't everyone have a New Orleans story?

I went to New Orleans in March, 1986. It was my freshman year of college, the first time through, and my friends and I escaped cold, gray Washington, DC, for the glories of Louisiana. Sunny, balmy Louisiana where everything is blooming in March that doesn't bloom in Virginia till May, and everything blooms in Virginia in May.

We stayed across the lake in a condo we got through my parents' time share. Our first night there we got lost, caught in a speed trap, and discovered that you can buy bourbon at the grocery store. In that order.

Really.

We were there for a week and drove into the city to do tourist things on several days, but I don't remember how many. I remember seeing, from the highway, the gray cemeteries with all the graves built above ground. In the picture I have in my head, it's always cloudy over the cemeteries even though the sun shone all week long.

Being ignorant of the city, we mostly hung out in the French Quarter and in the daytime too. On Bourbon Street we saw a woman walking down the street in stiletto heels and a leopard print dress with shoulder pads up to her ears and whispered to each other, "You think she's a hooker?" We wandered around, just looking at things and listening to the live music that spills out of the bars, all day long.

The Catholic boys insisted on attending a mass at the cathedral on Jackson Square. A couple years ago I started quoting the sermon at one of them and he said, "You remember the sermon?" I said, "Of course, don't you? Ha! I only have to go to church once a decade or so because it sticks, but you have to go to church every week."

But what I was thinking about most today, when I heard a news anchor say how Canal Street was now an actual canal, was walking along the streetcar tracks down the median in the center of that same street. Or was it St. Charles Avenue? I remember flowers and talking with my friends, a thousand miles away from our imaginary troubles. I wore a purple flowered sundress and walked barefoot on the tracks, with my disintegrating slippers dangling from one hand. Our shoulders were dappled with sun and shade and the streetcars came up behind us so quietly that the drivers had to call out to us and warn us off the tracks.

422 words | August 30, 2005 08:41 PM | Real true story