Growing up in New Orleans years ago, so much was predictable, reliable, and sensible. Mondays meant red beans and rice for lunch at school and red beans and rice for supper. Fridays promised seafood. Families shared conversation, however calm or chaotic, during mealtimes. One of us hand-washed the dishes while another dried them. Did we have more time then, without houses full of “time-saving” devices? On hot summer evenings, neighbors sat on their front porches or stoops and

When New Orleans natives leave home, people say, sooner or later, like homing pigeons, they find their way back. For me it was both sooner and later. My “sooner” was after a 5 ½ year odyssey through 32 countries which drastically changed my view of the world and of myself. For my homecoming in 1973 the physical landscape of the city hadn’t changed so much. I did see it with different eyes though, briefly, before moving to California, back to New Orleans for two years, then to

New Orleanians almost don’t know what it is to go to a parade of any kind, in any season, without expecting there to be “throws”. We just can’t imagine, it seems, to only stand and watch the beauty or pageantry. Parades are interactive events in which we feel deprived if we don’t go home with some booty. Take the St. Patrick’s Day parade, for example. Their float riders throw bushels of fresh vegetables, and parade-goers have to constantly be alert lest they get blindsided by

Like flotsam and jetsam we landed in shelters and on doorsteps in places that other people called home – flopping on couches or floors and gratefully accepting the kindness of both strangers and distant friends. Many of us who were St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans area Katrina refugees, had evacuated from homes which were turned into mucky rubble. When we could return home after more than a month, we found that swampy waters had marinated the contents of our homes, wood flo

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” There’s hardly any disputing this old maxim, and we should consider that the stomach is also an important route for connecting cultures. When I was more or less a citizen of the world for five and a half years, I always made it a point to eat the same food the locals ate – with only a few exceptions. I had learned quickly that to refuse to eat what was offered at my host’s table was to offend him or her, because what we eat i