Why is she so happy?
Last night, a friend ragged my joie de vivre saying she reads my blog but disagrees sometimes with my effusiveness about New Orleans. “It’s so great to live here!” she mocked, “is there any place better?” she rolled her eyes [well, no] – she harpooned me, “there are other places, this place isn’t always so great.” Oh, really now? Do tell?
Could I live in another city and raise Tin like I’m raising him? I asked her. Would we be going to hear music at the Fairgrounds, drumming circles in Fortier Park, going to a Toy Art Show, having musicians guide Tin’s musical career? Shall I go on?
Here in Rachel’s World, New Orleans’ Ground Zero, I feel nothing but blessed to be part of the airspace I breathe, the earth’s gravity fixes me here, I feel the pulse of the mightier than thou water that surrounds me, and I dream of no other home than right chere at the LaLa.
I told my friend to start her own blog, the one that says, “it ain’t so great here as Rachel tells you” but she was having none of it, preferring instead to critique my die hard glow.
I remember reading Herb Cain every day I lived in San Francisco – he made me love that city even more than the visual actualization of it – and I have written before about passing him on Columbus Avenue as I turned up Kearney and seeing the twinkle in his eyes and how it made me smile, then blush. I wrote in my journal that night about passing an older gentlemen whose eyes generated life itself. He wrote the next day in his column that a pretty girl smiled at him. And so he passed me the torch, I think. I came home to write about this city that haunted (haunts) me, and he forever lives in the hearts of all those who are haunted by San Francisco.
One of his famous quotes (with his iconic ellipsis included of course), is “One day if I do go to heaven… I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.'”
And I would substitute New Orleans in that sentence any day.