There’s nothing like listening to “September Fifteenth” and remembering being on the road to becoming me — in the driver’s seat, not a passenger.
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For me, December can’t happen without my hearing certain music. One such piece is Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
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As a child, I dreamed an entire commercial, or as it probably should be termed, a full-music-video PSA. I decided after all these years to write about it.
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Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
Published February 12, 2018
Earlier this month, I reconnected with a good friend from college. Conversation soon turned to movies, and she recommended “Housekeeping” (1987). Directed by Bill Forsyth, it is based on Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 novel. If you watch it in a mood similar to mine when I saw it a couple of weeks ago, you might be taken aback by the use of the word “comedy” in the opening of Vincent Canby’s November 1987 review for The New York Times. Taken in full, the description “haunting comedy” feels closer to the mark.
The intersection of St. Peter and Bourbon streets was a blur in a different way on the night of Feb. 7, 2010, and into the early-morning hours of Feb. 8 as the French Quarter filled up within minutes of the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl. (Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock, Inc.)
Postcard from the French Quarter:
(With my heart going out to those affected by tornado damage Tuesday in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, here’s a look back at one of the best night’s in the Crescent City’s history. Originally posted at 3:21 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2010, on a blog long since shuttered.)
NEW ORLEANS — Super Bowl Sunday has become early Monday morning, almost imperceptibly, and this afterglow of the Super Bowl victory by the New Orleans Saints still feels like something that might forever be called Lombardi Gras.
The fusion of the NFL’s championship trophy with the Carnival atmosphere in the Big Easy in February 2010 seems inspired now, almost fated, as I sit and rest tired feet while younger, more energetic revelers continue to party in the French Quarter. Now we know why the Big Game had to creep from January into February over the years.
Some of the passersby look at me as I type notes on my BlackBerry, and based on their comments, they think I’m texting someone. In a way, I suppose I am. I’m texting you.
In no particular order, except the free-flow way I typed them, here are notes of the sights, sounds and smells of my walk from near the Convention Center down to Jackson Square and deep into the Quarter:
Minutes after the game, euphoria.
There’s never been a feeling like it.
New Orleans empties onto its streets.
Car horns blare.
Strangers high-five strangers.
“Who Dat!”
Tonight, no one is a stranger.
We’re all trying to wrap our minds around it.
“The Saints, NFL champions!”
The streets fill with cheers, and thanks to go-cups, “cheers!”
There are no words, really, but we’re all trying.
“Boom, chaka laka laka! Boom, chaka laka laka!”
More high fives, swarming like flies.
“Big guy, Who Dat!”
We pass Harrah’s, where a crowd has gathered.
“Who Dat!”
The flow on Poydras seems headed toward the Superdome.
Let’s veer off into the Quarter.
You can see more of the street surface than usual.
That won’t last.
Got time for a celebratory Lucky Dog, Ignatius?
Someone’s walking under huge black-and-gold balloons.
Music is blaring from car stereos.
Car horns are approximating Mardi Gras songs.
Black-and-gold-umbrella dances.
More high fives.
Right there, smiling children who can’t possibly grasp the moment like their parents can.
Big-drink-in-hand high fives.
Cell-phone-hand high fives.
A single boot on the ground across from Café du Monde.
Let’s play kick the boot!
A solitary woman snaps a photo of St. Louis Cathedral.
Your blogger sits and types his notes.
“Who Dat sitting on the phone, texting!” a girl yells.
“He Dat!” her boyfriend chants.
Me Dat, your blogger thinks.
Drew Brees jerseys everywhere.
Reggie Bush jerseys almost everywhere.
A Deuce McAllister jersey catches the eye.
Café au lait, then another, at Café du Monde.
Powdered sugar and jubilation floating in the air.
Around Jackson Square, tarot card readings.
Candles burn, lighting a dark corner.
Nothing beats the smiles of a young stoner couple.
Beads, beads, beads.
A Jeremy Shockey jersey, filled out like I’d never seen, stumbles over to Who Dat and high-five me.
“Halftime (Stand Up & Get Crunk)” fills the cold air.
Improvised percussion. A small parade starts.
Ghetto booties follow.
There are few, if any, street performers out here.
And yet, everyone out here qualifies, in a sense.
Cars roll by as people stand through the sunroofs.
Moonroofs?
What came first, those or Texas Stadium?
Glassy eyes.
Trucks roll by as people stand in the flatbeds.
A jazz band parades past us.
Broken glass.
Handheld cams.
Spills.
Yep, this is what the Quarter smells like.
A lot of black and gold.
A little purple and gold.
Pretty girls.
(Many of them female)
A Saints Tailgating Crew mini-bus.
Cops on horseback.
Shirtless guys standing on the roof of a moving Suburban.
Does everyone out here have style and rhythm? Sure seems that way.
“Let’s repeat!” he says, and then he high-fives your blogger.
A man and his son ride their bikes through the craziness.
A blue hula hoop gets a workout around more black and gold.
A “When the Saints” parade breaks out, punctuated by Who Dats.
Group photos. Say “Brees.”
Group photos that from a distance, in the dark, resemble team photos.
A young woman announces she must soon relieve herself.
A split-second later, she Who Dats me, then high-fives me.
Her boyfriend slaps my hand, but it doesn’t feel like a high five.
Cat in the Hat hats in Mardi Gras colors near Pat O’s.
A single glove on the ground at the entrance.
The streets have fewer people on them than you’d think.
Five are making the noise of 10.
Ah, and then I turn onto Bourbon.
Five hundred make the noise of 1,000.
Garbage is fast piling up against the curbs.
Balcony parties.
Lip lock.
A Manning jersey — Saints, No. 8.
No sign of the Manning jersey — Colts, No. 18 — from this afternoon.
“Livin’ on a Prayer” sung twice in two blocks.
Bourbon is crowded.
And then some.
The girl pushing against me wants me to back up.
I can’t.
“Get the heck off me,” she says.
Except she doesn’t say “heck.”
She can’t grasp the force pushing me into her.
Or the force pushing her into me.
The Bourbon Street crowd is a little more surly.
This has crowd surge written all over it.
It’s probably a good time to duck in for beignets and elbow room.
Everyone seems to want to high-five the guy by himself.
There’s joy, disbelief and catharsis everywhere.
And no riots, fires or looting, at least not where I can see.
I’m cold, and it’s a long, long walk to where I left my car.
I hope it’s still there.
I’m glad I came. This was the place to be when the Saints won the Super Bowl.
The Saints won the Super Bowl. Mardi Gras may never end.
Lombardi Gras has a pretty respectable momentum itself.
Time to give the thumbs a rest.
I might need them to hitch a ride if I can’t find my car.
⚜
Seven years later, I’m struck by how many references there are in this play-by-play account of French Quarter revelry that a person would struggle to understand without having some familiarity with: a) New Orleans culture; b) the Saints’ many losing seasons; c) Super Bowl history; d) Mardi Gras; and e) the allowance of open containers of alcoholic beverages on the streets of New Orleans.
The sense of connection, in scope and in fervor, was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. All of us were part of a community, even if you didn’t know anybody else on the streets that night. We were all friends. We all knew what that championship, something many thought we’d never live to see, meant to post-Katrina New Orleans and to people who remember what the city was like before Aug. 29, 2005, the day the hurricane came ashore.
Seven years after that Lombardi Gras night, instead of being able to enjoy the anniversary, New Orleans was busy picking up the pieces from another destructive strike from nature. That nearly convinced me not to repost this old blog piece. But, at a time when it’s almost impossible to imagine the kind of togetherness I felt on the streets with thousands of strangers, I’ve been revisiting good days in America, good memories. This qualifies.
Published February 8, 2017
Lucky Dog photo by Lori Monahan Borden via Shutterstock.
St. Louis Cathedral photo by Natalia Bratslavsky via Shutterstock.
Café du Monde photo by Andriy Blokhin via Shutterstock.
Drew Brees photo by Action Sports Photography via Shutterstock.
Note: Yep, no camera that night. Just the BlackBerry. So even though these photos are from different days in New Orleans history, they help, I hope, paint a more colorful picture than just the many words I pieced together with my thumbs on that wild night seven years ago.
Published December 28, 2016
Gary Laney died without warning Friday, two days before Christmas. He was 47. The news was crushing. The shock hasn’t worn off, and I am flailing about in search of words.
His funeral is happening now in Baton Rouge. I wish he were here to talk about it with me. Gary’s presence here two years ago, the day before the funeral of our first editor in the daily newspaper business, was a gift to me from the cosmos. Now, he’s gone, and we are not having lunch together, not having beers, not telling Lake Charles stories, laughing and crying.
In a year of so much loss, Gary’s death is one of the hardest losses to bear.
We first met in the mid-1980s, when my journalism career was just getting started and he was a high school student with an interest in sports writing and newspaper work. He came up one day to the makeshift press box at Legion Field in Lake Charles where I was covering American Legion games, and on some level, he never left. Gary was like a friendly puppy, tagging along as I did my job. He was likable, smart, curious, full of questions, and eager to discuss sports, music, writing and many other subjects.
Published September 24, 2015
Ten years ago today, Hurricane Rita made landfall along the Louisiana-Texas border. Coming less than a month after Katrina’s surge across the Louisiana-Mississippi border, Rita scared millions across the Gulf Coast as it developed into the fourth-most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Lessons learned from Katrina prompted mass evacuation of Houston and other cities as Rita approached, saving lives. Katrina’s official death toll is just short of 2,000 people; Rita’s is slightly more than 100. In the collective memory of America and the rest of the world, Rita is the forgotten hurricane of 2005.
Not so in my family. Like many others in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, we lost someone whose terminal illness in the months after the storms was part of the unofficial death toll from the deadly hurricane season of 2005.
My oldest sister and her family live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 30 miles north of the Gulf, 35 miles east of the Texas state line. They live directly behind the house that was my mother’s home during the summer of 2005. I was living in Baton Rouge, about two hours’ drive east of Lake Charles, where I was born and raised. Affected by Katrina mostly in terms measured in lost power and lost sleep, I had settled into what was the new normal in Baton Rouge: taking alternate routes on surface streets every day because of the crush of people who relocated to Louisiana’s capital from the New Orleans area after post-Katrina flooding.
When it was obvious that Rita, a Category 5 hurricane at its most powerful, was not expected to hit Baton Rouge, we decided that my family’s best evacuation option was to head my way. For two weeks, my two-bedroom apartment was home to me, my mother, my sister, her husband, their two children (a daughter and a son), a dog and a hermit crab (my nephew’s). Tight quarters, for sure, but nothing like the many situations after Katrina in which 20 or more people crowded into a home or an apartment.
Published August 29, 2015
How strange to wake up to this sound just outside my window on Aug. 29, 2015. Ten years ago, I woke from a restless sleep before dawn as the outer bands of Hurricane Katrina reached my apartment, about an hour’s drive from downtown New Orleans.
The electricity went out, and it would stay off beyond the next few sleepless days and nights. As the wind rushed through the trees that were as close to my bedroom window as these are to my sliding-glass patio door today, it was accompanied by rain. Not so right now. Here in the Pacific Northwest, amid a relentless drought, our forecast called for rain today and next week, but as I look outside, I see thirsty leaves holding on to their branches and their green as they await what the gray sky seems to promise. It is not the verdant green of trees nourished by south Louisiana rains, or challenged by a major hurricane, and I swear I can hear the difference as the wind cuts through the brittle branches.
(Updating to add that I’ve discovered we had a thunderstorm hours before I awoke. It dumped more rain than we’d had since early June, but the ground and trees soaked it up so quickly, they still seemed drought-stricken by the time I opened the curtains.)
As the largest wildfire in Washington state history rages a few hours away from me, and much of the West Coast deals with problems associated with ongoing severe drought, there is other news of nature’s power. I’m reading reports of trees falling and injuring people this morning during a triathlon at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Runners in Hood to Coast arrived in Seaside amid sideways rain and wind so powerful, organizers scrapped the usual tent city for safety reasons. There are reports of residents without electricity in Oregon. I don’t know if I want to know what else could be happening in the region.
(Another update: Reports of high wind gusts followed: 85 mph on the southern coast of Washington state, 90 mph in Oceanside, Ore., and 43 mph at Portland International Airport, eclipsing the record August wind gust of 39 mph set in 1953. Our 37 mph high wind gust probably occurred around the time I stumbled out of bed to find out what was going on outside. They tell me this was a once-in-30-years storm, a freak occurrence for August, or even if it had been September.)
I wasn’t going to write anything on this anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My plan was to spend as much time as possible in quiet reflection about the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, and the hours, days, weeks, months and years that followed in Louisiana. That’s still the plan, although my quiet time comes with a soundtrack, an eerie reminder of that Monday morning 10 years ago today.
This is the sound of wind.
Published June 11, 2015
“The Judge,” the 2014 film starring Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. as a father and son, judge and lawyer, left a lot of good lines in my head, but the quote stuck in there right now wasn’t spoken by either of those Roberts.