“Lent & All That Jazz”

“Being sure of yourself when you’re wrong is no great blessing!” – overheard at Liuzza’s by the track

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Carnival’s colorful mantle lifted, leaving Lent’s ashen smudge in its place. Lent is the most joyless holiday in the entire liturgical calendar. Curiously it is, also, Christendom’s longest. Mardi Gras is its vaccination, a Bacchanalia before the gray sickness strikes.

This year’s Carnival passed without an official garbage count. Le Mayor said garbage was the wrong scale on which to weigh our Big Swamp City. I don’t know about that, folks. Credit card slinging tourists come to roll in our historic gutters as much as study them, and it seems the size of their sloppy footprint would interest us all.

“You could even see pavement through the crowds,” L. A. Norma said.

Weighed or not, Carnival 2003 was Baghdad news for the once mighty airline industry. There were smaller crowds, lower hotel occupancy, fewer restaurant tops, and less taxes collected – as well as less garbage. But whose counting?

Now, war and warm weather stalk us. Sunny skies hang protectively overhead, while sainted parades and beloved festivals defy Lent, and the only terrorism we’ve experienced is self-inflicted Post Medicinal Red Syndrome.

The River runs remarkably high this Spring, and ships sail overhead as we walk towards the levee – talk about shock and awe. One afternoon, college boys from Kentucky ate boiled crayfish, and a lone man from Canada asked if we lived in New Orleans all the time. He thought it odd that any one would. An empty ship and a full one passed. I said the one was going to offload oil at Baton Rouge, the other to gorge on American grain to feed our many enemies. L. A. Norma said, “If we didn’t trade with our enemies we wouldn’t have any trade.” We all laughed.

In my salad days I went to Sea, shipping from the port of New Orleans, then the nation's busiest. We'd cast off from uptown wharves, or West Bank granaries, or Baton Rouge oil terminals, and slowly slip down the muddy River past the now closed Mariner's Hospital, the downtown Moonwalk, and neighborly Faubourg Marigny. Today give yourself a treat, take a walk towards The River and look up at the ships riding high on its floodwaters, and know there are sailors aboard looking back at you, longing for home.

Going down to the Sea on the Mississippi River is an American epic. One of life's rare experiences, full of metaphor, and not to be missed. It is eight hours from New Orleans to The River’s mouth, a thrilling eight hours of growing anticipation, of City fading, of land dwindling.

After passing The City you first spot the Gulf of Mexico across two strips of River bank. You also see cows grazing along those slim banks. Dusky brown cows, about the color of River water, walking slowly, swishing their tails, chewing sea grasses, and headed down to that final rickrack at Louisiana's very end. I wonder who herds them, and if they are keen eyed about hurricanes and war.

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I told a joke I heard in 1979, aboard a grain ship, in Odessa, in the old U. S. S. R. The joke went like this: An American and a Russian negotiator are arguing over an ancient Arabian border. The U. S. negotiator throws up his hands and says, “We have been at this for years and still there is no peace!”

“Yes,” says the Russian, “but for years we have had no war, either.” That’s it. Russian jokes are politically pointed and not very funny.

Incidentally, 1979’s war-of-note was the U. S. S. R.’s in Afghanistan. For it we armed and trained some of the people we now fight. That’s what the ladies of Odessa’s nights told us, as they smoked Afghani hashish and sneered at our newly announced neutron bomb, “A capitalist’s weapon designed to kill everybody without hurting the real-estate.”

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Near its mouth The River becomes a true delta fanning numerous passageways out to Sea, and false passages into marshes and bayous. It must have driven the brothers Iberville and Bienville, "Mad as Frenchmen," in 1699, as they searched dead end bayous and horseshoe loops for The Great River inland, to the mythical Northwest Passage.

That passage was never found, but Mardi Gras Bayou was (one of those blind leads) and New Orleans. Not The City - not yet - but the native’s landing near today's Moonwalk, where it would one day be.

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We lifted our glass recently at a Faubourg Marigny wedding party. It was a garden affair filled with white roses and a blue pool – it looked like a David Hockney painting. The great Rachael VanVoorhees played her harp, and the grooms wore morning coats. Yes, grooms! We are more sophisticated in Faubourg Marigny than some settlements upriver might think. Congratulations to Larry Wayne Anderson and Michael Bernard Boulas. Their “celebration of commitment” was at The Country Club on Louisa Street.

“You do not have a credible story about veto, if you do not have a credible story about passage,” Norma said to two straight couples at our table. From Chicago and Long Island, they had asked about the Tricolor I wore in my lapel.

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Yes, le crowds were lean for Mardi Gras by New Orleans measure, but they would have boggled the civic minds in San Antonio or Las Vegas.

For your prurient Carnival interest click this flash photo Don’t show it to Mr. Aschroft, please. Happy Spring!