I woke up this Wednesday morning prepared to write my blog piece about our trip to New Orleans, only to be confronted by the horrific news of the multiple deaths and injuries on Bourbon Street. By the time you read this, you’ll know a lot more than I do at this early point about the man who drove his truck, apparently intentionally, into the crowd of New Year’s Eve revelers shortly after 3AM. The news carries additional shock value for people like us who had just passed the street corner where it started a few days ago and where our daughter and son-in-law went in search of music one evening.
If you’ve been to New Orleans, you’re probably familiar with the scene they encountered, streets packed with, mostly, tourists, drinks in hand in a city that permits open carry, music of mixed quality emerging from the bars and clubs that line the street. Multiply the scale of the scene for New Year’s Eve plus the Notre Dame and Georgia football playoff fans and you can begin to grasp the horror perpetrated by a massive runaway truck slicing through territory where, not long ago, we had been standing.
Bourbon Street is not the kind of place we gravitate toward. In fact, we turn up our metaphoric noses at the people who think this is the essence of the NOLA experience, but after all they’re innocent folks looking for a break from their ordinary, often stressful lives, just as we did decades ago when we needed a reprieve from our stressful lives in Mississippi. The innocents who were mowed down by an SUV in the Christmas market in Germany just ten days ago were also undeserving victims of someone with a grievance. Their guard was down, but not as much as the Bourbon Street crowd, fueled by their open carry drinks, many poured into poor cousins to garish-colored abstract sculptures A true nightmare and some of our group could easily have been among the victims.
Now back to where I had originally intended to start. One of the reasons we were in New Orleans in the first place has to do with the fact that we are poor gift givers. We have difficulties matching gifts with potential recipients which I consider a failure of imagination, an inability to make the necessary connections. Rosellen and I agreed early in our marriage to relieve each other of the responsibility for marking birthdays and anniversaries with gift exchanges. When we come across something that we think would please our partner, we buy and present it, unattached to any occasion.
Our daughter Elana has the gift of gifting in spades. Since this trip coincided with the start of Chanukah, we watched her each night extract from her magic gift bag imaginative and appropriate items for the whole family. When we express our guilt about not being able to match her prowess, she reminds us that for her, the pleasure is in the giving. Maybe so, but she deserves better. In fact, the only gift that graced our suitcase was for Dalia, who produces a wish list around her birthday time, just the crutch we need to navigate around our obstacles, like the wedding registries which some feel robs the gift giving of authenticity, but which are a godsend for the gift-challenged like us.
In order to compensate for our handicap, we offer experiences rather than objects whenever possible. That’s what brought us to New Orleans, which serves as a combined Chanukah, birthday and anniversary gift for that part of our family. Ditto for past trips together to Berlin, London and Curacao. We’ve also offered dinner and theater gifts to Elana and Ben in place of the kind that comes gift-wrapped. Adina and Peter, our other daughter and son-in-law, whom we love not one whit less, are even more difficult to gift, but Adina turned the table on her mother last year by appearing in person for Rosellen’s 85th birthday and cooking a Michelin-level dinner for us, the ultimate experience gift.
There’s another reason for the “experience” gifts which has to do especially with Dalia. She came late in our lives, and we worried about how much of her life we would be around for. We’re lucky to still be hereat her 14th birthday, but we love the idea of building a memory bank of sorts that connects us through these shared experiences. One day on this trip we mentioned to her that we had trouble remembering a lot of details about our lives at her age. We wondered what she would remember about this New Orleans trip in twenty or thirty years. It’s likely to be random and unpredictable snatches, rather than a coherent narrative. But what we hope will remain when we’re no longer here is a general sense of warmth generated by the happy and unique experiences we shared.
As for the specifics of the New Orleans trip, we checked a lot of the predictable tourist stops – Mardi Gras World, the WWII Museum (this was our third time and we still haven’t seen it all), the Riverboat trip, the Café Du Monde, the French Quarter, the St. Charles Streetcar and the Sculpture Garden. This latter is less known than the others. It’s behind the NO Museum of Art and contains scores of works by famous sculptors, set in a most beautiful landscape. Don’t miss it.
We were also able to break out of the tourist bubble because of our personal connections to the city, especially my graduate school classmate, his wife and their daughter and her family who surrounded us with advice, good food and equally good conversation. We also visited former neighbors in Chicago who now live half the year – you can guess which half – in New Orleans, who made us feel that we were more than disembodied tourists.
All this now exists under the shadow of the tragedy that erupted just after we left, but the happy memories will withstand erasure. We hope there’s still time to add more items to Dalia’s memory bank.
