Do You Know What It Means, to Miss New Orleans?

Opening our bleeding heart, while trying to remember the day-trippin' good times (with apologies to Larry King):

Walking alone in the northeast corner of the French Quarter, near Rampart, at 6 o'clock on a clear, crisp fall morning ...

A big nasty fried oyster po-boy at Mother's on Poydras ... the red beans and rice at Buster Holmes', the original ... Ye Olde College Inn on Carrrollton ... Tujague's, the original, almost empty and quiet at mid-afertnoon ... waiting in line, Saturday mornings, Camellia Grill ... Commander's Palace ... Compagno's ... so much more, eaten, digested, forgotten ...

Riding the "Freret Jet" bus in the fall of 1972, watching a 7 or 8-year-old black kid on the back bench, alone, singing one line from Curtis Mayfield, over and over: "Fred is dead. Fred is dead. Fred is dead. Fred is ..."

Accompanying Edwin Edwards to a rally at Jefferson Downs, watching him drive his supporters into a howling frenzy, then being lifted off our feet by the hungry, grabbing, pressed-in crowd that followed him as he left the racetrack, 1983(?) ...

Sitting with my wife at Cafe Du Monde at 1 a.m. and watching the guy who played Cliff Barnes on Dallas emerge stumble-drunk from a limousine and throw his arms up in the air in a "C'est moi!" gesture. Then burst out laughing ...

Professor Longhair at Tipitina's ... Sidney's Newstand on Decatur ... Fooseball at Eddie Price's ... Springsteen on his first tour south, at the Lakeshore Auditorium, 1974 ... The Meters everywhere ... Jax in a can ... The Maple Street Bookstore ... James Booker on piano at the Maple Leaf---gay, crippled and a junkie to boot, with an eye patch ... Watching the Pope roll down Canal Street in the Popemobile, 1988 ... and attending an anti-Pope news conference staged by a renegade nun, then walking back with her to the French Quarter townhouse she'd been "loaned," being invited in for iced tea and stunned near-speechless by the beauty of the interior ...

Coming to at 7 a.m. in the Gateway Bar in the Quarter, with P--- McD-----'s hulking frame sprawled halfway across the counter ...

David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, The Warehouse, on Tchoupitoulas ...

Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors and the movie version with Paul Newman ...

Seeing, but just barely, Ali retake his crown from Leon Spinks, from a perch on the second row from the top of the Superdome, which we later read was like looking down at the street from nine floors up; then walking with our glassy-eyed friend through the Hyatt and seeing the sweaty, ass-whipped Spinks being carried off an elevator by his handlers ... 1978(?)

The old white guys' bar at the edge of the Irish Channel where we twice went with M--- C----- to eat soft-boiled eggs and shoot pool ...

Ex-governor Jimmie Davis singing You Are My Sunshine at the Jazz Fest, 1979(?)

Jazz Fest, 1987, with E---- R----- (1952-2004), "Authorized Distributor, Chaos and Confusion" ...

Riding the streetcar back from the Quarter late one night with a girl whose name we've long forgotten, in a fierce thunderstorm and driving rain that gave us the impression the car was slipping and sliding all the way up St. Charles Ave. ...

Taking our family to meet our parents for a weekend at the Monteleone, the crazy weekend of the 2000 "Bayou Classic," and trying to show our kids some of the sights, give them a taste of the city ... they say now they don't remember much of that weekend ...

"We've lost our city. I fear it's potentially like Pompeii."
---former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial