Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

A Return to the City That Care Forgot

Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Association, 2011. Photo by the author.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

And miss it each night and day 

I know I'm not wrong this feeling's getting stronger 

The longer, I stay away 

Miss them moss covered vines, the tall sugar pines 

Where mocking birds used to sing 

And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi hurrying into spring 

The moonlight on the bayou, a creole tune that fills the air 

I dream about magnolias in bloom and I'm wishing I was there…

Smoldering between the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, New Orleans remains one of the very few American cities truly touched by magic. From the streets of the Garden District, where live oaks spread out above the streets and flowers burst forth creating what a friend of mine once termed a “perfumed alley,” to the Spanish colonial architecture of the French Quarter (best seen at dusk or nighttime during the week when the crowds have dissipated somewhat and you can still feel some of its mystery) to neighborhoods like Pigeon Town which produce the Pigeon Town Steppers second-line troupe, and across the river in what is locally known as the West Bank where you can find some of the best Vietnamese food in the United States, there is a reason that the Crescent City has attracted writers, artists, musicians, eccentrics, misfits, fugitives and other human fauna for more than 300 years and continues to do so.

Since I was a young boy living in Pennsylvania, the city has always fascinated and attracted me, too. I first visited when I was 17, and then did a long road trip from my college in the Hudson Valley in New York for a vacation with three friends two years later. From 2010 to 2012, I lived there, first in the Irish Channel and then a little further uptown, during a very tumultuous and impactful time in my life when a lot of things fundamentally changed. Early on, I fell in a kind of complicated love with the place, seduced by its pleasures but not blind to its flaws and its struggles, either. After a rough winter this year of chemotherapy and cold northeastern weather (broken only briefly by a writing trip to Jamaica and Haiti that also allowed some much-needed time for relaxation), followed up by the passing of my beloved dog, when my friend, the Irish photojournalist and filmmaker Andrew McConnell (who directed the excellent film Gaza, which you should all see) suggested I accompany him for his first-ever visit to the city, I gladly agreed.