Do you know?

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

My friend of friends Hal sent that classic question out to the mojo wire, and I have to wonder about that myself -- I know he knows, and I know he knows that I know, but I wonder how many others know, really know. New Orleans is (guess I have to start using the past-tense now), was a place like no other in this country, a little slice of Catholic Europe, a cultural island in a tepid WASP sea. It’s a place many feel affection for, but how many will truly miss it -- and I’m not talking about missing your house with all the stuff in it or missing your favorite college bar on Maple Street -- I’m talking about missing the vibe of the city, that unique energy at the heart of what used to be New Orleans.

(Watching the news as I type this up and a flash of a McDonald’s from the air, that prototypical American institution, ripped to shreds -- symbolism there.)

Do you know what it means? People get married in Las Vegas, they leave their heart in San Francisco, they wear a big heart on their chest for New York -- they may think they wear their heart on their sleeve for the Big Easy (a term that no one in the city had ever heard of before the movie of the same name used it), but in all likelihood it was just a stain left over from one too many Pat O’Brien’s Hurricanes. I wonder.

I was born at Baptist Hospital on Napoleon Avenue, only a few wet blocks from the apartment that I so recently called home on St. Charles Avenue. My dad worked for K & B Drugs, one of the most beloved companies in the history of the city, the model for all multipurpose drug stores we see today (taken over and destroyed by Rite Aid like some ravaging corporate virus, by the way). We moved out when I was five (1970) because of the deteriorating conditions of the city, or maybe my dad just saw the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond elsewhere -- either way, I spent the next thirty years here in Lafayette, two and a half hours away in Cajun Country.

Even after twenty years of growing up here, I could never say I was from Lafayette -- I never sounded like a Cajun and I always felt that New Orleans was my real home. We still had plenty of family there and went back for most holidays, including Mardi Gras, of course, and that connection was never broken within me. It might have just been a case of romancing my origins, but when I finally made it back (for good, I thought), it was like I’d never left and nothing has happened since to change that love I have for the city of my birth.

After moving back, however, it didn’t take me long to notice that most people who are born and grow up there don’t really love New Orleans all that much -- they love Metairie and Kenner, Chalmette and Gretna, the suburbs where they live and go to school, but New Orleans itself is a dark and scary place, a dangerous den of thieves where tourists go to live on the edge for a while like thrill-seeking spelunkers. I’ve lost count of how many times people of all ages shook their heads in amazement and confusion when I said how much I loved the French Quarter and Magazine Street, like I was trying to impart to them the cuteness and lovability of a tarantula.

Of course, now we can all watch the news and see exactly what those dumbfounded suburbanites were afraid of as the lawless ferocity that always lay just below the surface of the inner city breaks into the light of day like a dying submarine that blows all ballast and shoots to the sky -- it’s an ugly thing, but it shouldn’t be seen as the heart of my city --

For me, the purple, green and gold of Mardi Gras are the true colors of the city, the event that shows what New Orleans is truly made of -- that amazing balance it maintains between the land and the sea (there I go needing the past-tense again), good and bad, day and night -- family at parades and lechery on Bourbon, the mob of people in the streets that would cause panic and the issuance of riot gear anywhere else, but here they stand side by side (people, not riot police), white and black, young and old, jumping for beads and diving for doubloons, handing catches over to kids or grannies who wouldn’t catch anything otherwise -- though I’ve grown to enjoy Jazz Fest more, Gras is where the flower of the city blooms for all to see.

Now my thoughts keep going back to a moment in the week before Katrina struck. I was walking down Bourbon Street around three-thirty in the afternoon, off work and heading for the trolley stop at Canal Street, talking to my brother Steve on the cell over the din of bands and stereos in the bars and T-shirt shops lining the street, catching up with him and laughing about life -- here I was coming from my job on Royal Street, strolling through the Quarter on my way home, which meant a streetcar ride down St. Charles Avenue and I said to him, you know, you can’t get much more New Orleans than this . . .

Do you know?