NOLA, an acronym. New Orleans, Louisiana. Okay good. Why doesn’t Memphis have one, an acronym? As my grand baby Amelia says, “I want one.” But how do you get one, an acronym? Can I just make one up? MOM, Memphis on the Mississippi. DM, Delta Memphis. MHE, Memphis home of Elvis. MB, Memphis Blues. MS, Memphis soul. MM, Memphis music. MG, Memphis Grizzlies. MM, Memphis Motown. This is really fun. I have never sat down and tried to come up with an acronym for Memphis. We need one.
I am in New Orléans, NOLA, staying at 5525 Laurel St in the Garden District at the home of Chuck and Susan Schadt. My friend, Kathy Fish and I bid on this weekend get-away at a Blues Street Caravan Fund Raiser. We won. Jimmy and I are here tonight alone. Kathy and Kelly arrive tomorrow. We will be together two nights. We leave on Sunday morning. I want to be back for the Super Bowl and home to keep Amelia on Monday. The Fishes will stay Sunday night.
The drive. I taught two private lessons this morning. Jimmy talked to Comcast for an hour and a half while packing the car and doing his real estate work. We ate lunch and set out on our adventure around noon. Great tunes. Our friend, Greg Leonard, who lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and works for Tree of Life makes cds. Not just random cds, but works of art. Today we listened to You Missed My Heart, a compilation of Karla Bonhoff, Mark Kozelak, and others, and Songbird, another compilation of Fleetwood Mac demos. Stunning. Out of sight. Spine tingling. Goose bump creating.
Great road trip until we hit NOLA. Traffic. Mama, the traffic. And Siri, did she lead us astray or what? Jimmy had printed out google map directions which were pretty straight forward, but Siri, as she so often does, had other plans for us. We followed her through twists and turns, over congested expressways, through crowded, overlapping intersections, down one-way streets, around road blocks until we finally arrived at our destination.
The house lights, inside and out, are on. The stairs to the house were now on the left. Wooden, planted in a sea of sand. Yellow tape ropes off the new brick stairs that march up pristinely up to the front door. Blocking the door is a vintage TV set adjacent to a plastic grocery bag. Odd. Right in front of the door? A cleaning woman peers at me through the glass. I knock. She opens the door. “We are staying here tonight.” I tell her.
“Oh,” she says with a mop in her hand. “You stay tonight?”
“Yes,” I reply. She lets me in.
I walk to the back where I remember there is a bedroom. Pictures sit on the floor, a rolled up is pushed against the wall, and tall shudders, wrapped in foam and plastic lean against a window seat. Not quite the way I remember it. I walk into a second bedroom. Well appointed. I like the feel of it. Oops. I open the door to the bathroom. Paint. I smell enamel paint. Oh, look, the cabinet doors are on the floor. Well this bathroom is not in use. I ask the cleaning lady, “Is there another bathroom?”
‘Oh yes.” she leads me down the hall to a sweet little toilet with a nice tub/shower. What you might call a wash closet. Yes, I think. We will take this one. Here we are in the second bedroom without the shudders and the paintings on the floor. We do have to walk down the hall to the bathroom. Oh well. LIfe is a series of concessions, trade offs, and disappointments. Still not to shabby.
Next, Atchafalaya Restaurant on Louisiana Street. Had one of the best meals of my life. Mussels in a tomato, white wine broth I could have bathed in, a curried cream of something soup with jalepenos and cilantro, swordfish with turnips and greens cooked to perfection, and the finale, a pear tart with ice cream and a caramel sauce…to die for. WOW! If you come to New Orleans you must eat at Atchfalaya. Stunning.
Now we are settled into our NOLA home for the weekend. We are in the bed. Jimmy sleeping and I finishing yet another post. As always, I love it is rewarding to reflect on another day gone by.
I to bed. What a remarkable thing it is to live….the texture of a bed spread. The pixels in the photo. The colors and lack of that surround me here. My hair, eyes, fingers, toes. A body. A life. A day in the life of one human. Where were you today? What did you see? Who did you meet? What did you do? Worth remembering? Yes, I believe it is worth every minute.
Writing into the Light 