Fortuna, a blind goddess, has spun her wheel of fortune again and our luck was apparently on a “downward cycle.” In other words, “the gods of chaos, lunacy and bad taste gained ascendency.”
I’ve just returned from a service trip to New Orleans. We spent five days in the city working our way between service, seeing sites and exploring the cultural varieties of a city replete with antiquity, debauchery, and the smells of misfortune and insanity. I spent my time protecting my students from the occasional con, drunks, and city folk lost in the opium fugue of a city that delights the senses at every turn. The city is called the “Big Easy” but after this trip to me it is the “Big Difficulty.”
It started when I met a Buddhist monk on Jackson Square dressed in an orange monk robe. His shaved head was sweating as the humidity hung on him like a cloak and he had a tarnished aura, but his getup made him look sincere. He moved in a pious and mindful manner as he took two bracelets, one colored black and red and the other with multiple earth tones, and placed them on the wrists of my students and asked for a “peace offering” of $20. My social justice sensibilities kicked in, and I thought about making a kind gesture to our Buddhist friends, so I haggled, gave him $10 and was done with it.
Later I saw him a little tipsy and smoking a cigarette on a bench beneath Michaela Almonester’s famous “Pontalba Buildings” outside the gates of Jackson Square. I couldn’t help myself. “I thought Buddhists are careful about putting intoxicants into their bodies.” He waved me off, as if to say, he walked away from that Eightfold Path years ago. I should’ve known from that point on I “wasn’t in Kansas anymore.”
Street signs hanging from posts are few and far between. The city takes a more artful way of letting travelers know where they are by inlaying them in mosaic tiles on street corners. I think it’s the first time I’ve praised technology for directing me where I needed to go. If only the two- way streets didn’t suddenly become one-way streets on Magazine, it may have been a perfect ride. Instead, a quick turn from oncoming traffic did the trick and a few choice “Cajun/French” words salvaged our dignity as we sighed relief for the preciousness of life.
Walking down Bourbon Street, we peaked in Maison Bourbon and watched a classic Dixieland band play some standards. It’s hard not to wax poetic when you’re standing in the Quarter, drinking in the sights and sounds of the place where jazz originated. It’s like an ongoing Koranic prayer that never ceases.
I watched my students backs as they watched a street performer juggle. I looked around thinking, “Which one’s the pickpocket? That nice old lady who looks like a tourist? The man with the beads wearing the “Saints” shirt holding up his pants and looking like a sad basset hound lost without a home? Maybe it’s the woman playing the tourist with the frizzy hair and pink lipstick, holding a cup, swaying in the dizzy air; the one with the stifled senses playing half amused and half confused. I couldn’t enjoy the show, as the street performer juggled knives and joked about the “last volunteer who walked away without a care in the world — or an arm.”
There were tastes of romantic qualities in NOLA, too. I watched the beads of water pour off the red paddles of the great Natchez steamboat and churn the muddy Mississippi with pieces of black driftwood and water moccasins floating in the water as the great horn blew, startled passengers and echoed in the Quarter. How many souls traveled this gateway to prosperity in this ancient American port city? The rain pummeled the river and looked like a piranha frenzy bubbling on the surface. How enchanting to see the banks of old Algiers Point after a rain, watch the sunset and view the city from the rails of a boat I last rode as a child in ‘75.
New Orleans is one of my favorite cities in the country. There’s no place like it. The French/Spanish architecture’s dynamic and mirrors European roots. The seafood is second to none. Although the work was hard at times, the heat got to us and tensions rose in our group, but there’s always refuge in St. Louis Cathedral. Gregorian Chant was playing on loop, as we sat and took in the peace and the gold leaf altar and classic coronation mural. Where else can you experience a voodoo shop less than 50 yards away from one of the oldest Catholic cathedrals in the country?
There is a generosity of spirit in this city. Working at places like Hotel Hope and Culture Aid of NOLA, you see how great the need is and those willing to meet it at every cost and through every sinew of virtue in their spiritual muscles. Sr. Julie, PBVM, Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, told me how the sisters saw a need and battled FEMA for the right to convert their convent into a home for single mothers. Although they won the lawsuit and the right to convert the convent, they saw that the need was greater than they originally thought. They converted the old Crescent Palms Motel on MLK, Jr. Blvd into another shelter. We helped put some rooms together. That day a mother gave her one year old child a home.
Culture Aid of Nola was formed during the pandemic and has continued to this day. We served over 1200 families that Wednesday evening, bagging produce, meats and dry goods for families in need in the parking lot of “Our Lady of the Sea” Catholic Church. Cars drove up and we filled their trunks for not only themselves but for their friends. We also managed to bring lunches to those living in tent cities under the St. Charles bridges.
John Kennedy Toole, author of “Confederacy of Dunces,” who wrote about New Orleans like no other, writes about the quirky characters of Louisiana and their idiosyncratic natures. As I re-read his masterwork, I am amused by the foibles of Ignatius Riley. I have to laugh, and think I saw a few of those characters roaming those streets. I had my beignets and coffee at Café duMond, ate my Lucky Dog, relished the sweet candied pralines of Aunt Sally in the French Market and watched the parade of locals and tourists make their way through the Quarter and thought to myself, “for every no good grifter, lech and fat cat trying to beat the system, there’s a charitable heart willing to set straight the “theology and geometry” of the world.”
spirit beat 