The New Orleans Jazz Vipers play at the Spotted Cat, a nightclub on Frenchmen Street. The stricken city's legendary night life is far from silenced, and restaurants and bars stay open into the early hours of the morning. Lori Waselchuck for The New York Times
For various and somewhat obvious reasons, this is shaping up to be one of my bluestholiday seasons in years. While China is my home now and will be for the foreseeable future, this holiday season I am particularly stateside and homeward drawn in spirit, heart, mind, and soul. Nowhere do those parts of me reside more resonantly than New Orleans. It is where I lived for almost 25 years; it is where my son and daughter-in-law (and my grandchild-to-be) live now; it is where my childhood sweetheart and former wife of 31 years lives still; it is where my dreams came true and I wrote my first five books--even my O. J. Simpson book was mostly written there instead of Los Angeles where I was primarily living at the time. It is where my dreams that are not nightmares take me when I am lucky and do not weep and curse in my sleep.
It is New Orleans, America's "Eternal City," and it will recover and be there for me when I truly do go home again someday. Why I and so many others feel that way is nicely captured in the article excerpted and linked to below, from The New York Times:
Back to New Orleans, Gently
By MATT GROSS Published: November 26, 2006
IT was a Friday afternoon in late October, and the narrow lanes of the French Quarter were quiet. Fresh paint -- pale green, robin's egg blue, canary yellow -- adorned the low, tidy Creole cottages, and the wrought-iron railings of town-house balconies shone blackly in the sunlight. The streets were free of litter, the air unpolluted by the musky odor of all-night parties. But as I wandered the beautiful Quarter, one question stuck in my mind: Where was everybody?
