There Will Always Be More Music

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I went back to New Orleans last month for a week to celebrate my 40th birthday with my best friend, my mom, and my aunt and uncle. I think I've traveled to NOLA about 11 times or so over the last 8 or 9 years, and each time, like each meeting with a soul mate, it gets better.

This time, we went to places that we'd never been before, and revisited old haunts. We drove to Chalmette, in St. Bernard's Parish, where my friend and I had volunteered for Habitat for Humanity a year or so after Katrina, and, miraculously, we even found one of the houses we had worked on. We drove through the famous Ninth Ward, a former urban residential center that now looks like the corn fields of Iowa, with grass up to my shoulders in some spots, covering all the foundations from bulldozed houses. There, Brad Pitt's Make it Right organization is building a series of funky,  modern houses for returning residents. We drove to Slidell and found a crazy good roadside restaurant that we would never have found if we hadn't taken a wrong turn. We took a swamp tour with a critter-phobic psychiatrist, and later hung out with four spanish psychiatrists(The American Psychiatric Association was in town for a conference) as they waited for it to be time to go to the airport - at 5 am. I saw the sun rise over the Mississippi. We wandered through Audubon Park and City Park. We had wonderful food, heard amazing music, walked for miles and miles, and laughed a lot.

In a recent workshop on finding safety within oneself, the attendees were asked to think of a situation or place where we felt totally in rapport with ourselves. Confident, strong, and centered. My first thought was of walking through New Orleans. When I walk the streets there, I feel comfortable in my body. I walk confidently and my strides are longer. I don't obsess as much about whether I look OK or not. I think it has to do with the warm weather, although I have been there in February and shivered as I strode the familiar streets, so that's not completely it. But the feel of the warm breeze on my skin, wearing flip flops and tank tops and skirts and never fearing the cold, there's heaven in that. There's something about the overarching shade trees, the lazy, dirty river, the slow awakening each morning after yet another music-saturated 3 am night, the boats moving past, and the ding-dong of the churchbells that makes me feel so at home. It's not the drinking, because after a few days of that, it gets old. It's something else about the place.

I was reflecting on my former letter about New Orleans, and the way I experienced the city this time. In my earlier letter, I was In Love. I wrote about arriving on the streets of the Quarter and feeling, literally, in love. My heart pounding, my feet not even touching the ground. This time it was different. We were old familiar friends, the city and I. I didn't feel those butterflies and that elation that you feel when you're in love. It felt just like the way you feel when, with a real human lover, the high of infatuation wears off, and you now get down to the business of really getting to know the person - the real person. Let's face it, New Orleans is a mixed bag. It's dirty, its claim to fame is rivers of booze and flashing co-ed breasts, and it has a sordid and cruel history. If it were a human being, our mothers would have warned us about