Things that crack me up... or is this a fear-induced hysteria??

I was commenting on a student's short response paper and trying to connect with him by using a specific example to make my point. Knowing he's kind of an edgy music student who works at our local independent theater, I used the band Jane's Addiction in my example. So after he read my commentary, he approached me after class and asked if I liked the band. I of course responded in the affirmative, having been quite a Jane's Addiction fan in my day, and he asked if I had seen Perry Farrell when he came to NOLA a few months back. "No," I said, "But I did see him with Porno for Pyros awhile back. Let's see... I think that was 1996. So yeah, I saw him, but 12 years ago." I don't think my student even paused at this remark, but sheesh, he must have been... what, 6 years old at the time? He did proceed to tell me that his first concert was an Aerosmith concert when he was 4, but I just found myself derailed by the notion that I was going to concerts while these guys were in Little League. Ah, the gulf widens between us every year.

I wanted to pull a quote from my friend Wendy's blog. She's quoting Loren Eiseley here:
"In some of us a child--lost, strayed off the beaten path--goes wandering to the end of time while we, in another garb, grow up, marry or seduce, have children, hold jobs, or sit in movies, and refuse to answer our mail. Or, by contrast, we haunt our mailboxes, impelled by some strange anticipation of a message that will never come. 'A man,' Thoreau has commented, 'needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.'

"...We cling to a time and a place because without them man is lost...it brings stray cats running over endless miles, and birds homing from the ends of the earth...I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field..."

Ah, I thought these were beautiful, found myself taken with the sweetness of these lines, the very truth of them. Why do I haunt my mailbox -- why have I always haunted my mailbox? In search of an answer to a question I haven't yet asked? In search of a message that recognizes and summons my own uniqueness and directs the course of my life? That haunt is such a familiar routine that email has only worsened. I've found peace in the days when for some reason or other I've been forced to limit my endless checking. And even though there's no great cosmic game involved, I must feel on some level as though there is, or else I wouldn't keep returning so often with hopeful anticipation. Like I'm looking for a compass from the divine.

Then the clinging to a time and place -- also a familiar idea, but in a hazier way. My problem with NOLA perhaps arises from an opposite perspective. I can recall another city that I knew before this one, but the architecture is of a theatrical sort that I won't restore. I'll explain: I used to ride down Magazine Street on the back of my then-boyfriend's bike on afternoons, holding up a broomstick like it was a lance, and we would sing together one of those militaristic ditties that ends in "Charge!" Or I recall being with the same boyfriend on a crowded streetcar once, when he stood up and gave the oxygen-mask soliloquy that stewardesses give before take-off. Most folks just rolled their eyes or looked out the window, waiting for their stop, but I was folded over laughing. I also remember interviewing a local voodoo priestess and her husband for a school essay and going back to visit just for the sake of pleasantries. The priestess made me pancakes one Sunday morning, and her husband told me stories about his own initiation into voodoo in the Caribbean as a young man. A local priest made him a drink once that turned him invisible, or so he said. These were the days when I would meet the same boyfriend in a bar on Bourbon Street each night when he got off work. One night, I was stopped by the bouncer of a strip club who asked if I wanted a job. I considered the offer seriously but eventually turned it down. That's a New Orleans I recall, but it's worlds away from here, from me. The New Orleans I live in now is a heavier place, still humming with the percussion of insect wings and steaming up with heat just like it always did. I can see the remembered city shifting about in this New Orleans where I now live, but it's a city I won't revisit. It's not a pre-K city or a post-K city. It's a much more personal landscape than that, and it's a dream that NOLA can still facilitate, but it would be the work of other bohemian visionaries to create.

Maybe that's the problem. My NOLA today is still so saturated with the vivid dream of the old that any new life pales in comparison. How can a neighborhood association meeting dare to compete with climbing high into Louisiana live oaks by moonlight? And the new life, the pale life, isn't well facilitated by New Orleans today. This city facilitates well the other, dreamier, riskier adventure, but it isn't like Austin, say. There aren't public pools or other civic recreation opportunities. No good public schools, no midwife on every corner. No bike lanes, no vegetarian restaurants. No food co-ops, no recycling. It's not a city so much for progressive-minded adults. It may have been a fantastic jungle playground for my younger self, but it no longer nurtures the person I want to become.

I have no qualms with my old self or the city I once lived in. I like to flip through the mental photographs of it and remember the lightheartedness, the adventures, and the stranger, darker nooks of the city I sometimes occupied. But as for what to build now, goodness. Let's say I were a bird. I might feel that there weren't enough sticks for me to gather to build a sound nest. My nest would be floppy, risky and unstable, held together by lesser materials. I live a pressboard life, and I'd like to gain more solid footing!

Well, perhaps I'll work through it. But I wonder, is it possible to carve out an adult life in the city of one's youth? A fulfilling life, especially if your city is New Orleans? I feel enough nostalgia for the place, certainly, but that's not enough! What's enough is solid footing. Can I gain that here?

Comments

[Ellie]

I can't go back to Seattle anymore for similar reasons-- I see myself at various stages doing various things, but unlike your memories, it's horrible. I like Austin for who I am now and I don't think I would dare to try to go back and construct an adult life for myself in Seattle.

[Chris]

Jeez. So, I'm moving away for the third time, and its killing me b/c I feel like I'm not missing, or, rather, anticipating missing, the city as much as maybe I should. I've been wrestling with why for months. Your posts about nola are universal, Doc. Its not really so wrong to want recycling bins or smooth streets or freakin' traffic lights that work.
Thanks for this.
cv