Fleeting images
Jan. 18th, 2011 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
necturusYesterday I rented a car and drove across a wide swath of the deep South, from New Orleans to Atlanta via Mobile and Montgomery. I stopped for lunch at a Hardee's in the middle of nowhere.
There were billboards all over Alabama promoting Richard Shelby for U.S. Senate (in an election that presumably took place almost three months ago). Feh.
I saw no lizards in New Orleans. New Orleans is not the same without lizards.
The levee along the Mississippi where I walked back in 1966 looking for snakes now has a honking huge industrial establishment on it, surrounded by chain link fences and razor wire. Feh.
We drove around uptown and the garden district looking at former homes of parents, grandparents, and cousins. I took pictures of some of them. One was the house where my grandmother was born in 1897.
We also visited my grandfather's old school, Metairie Park Country Day, and the nearby Metairie Cemetery where my grandparents are buried. The cemetery has an unusual plan because it used to be a racetrack. My grandparents are right near the Confederate monument in the middle. We were not able to find a cousin who is supposedly in the same cemetery.
After one of my aunts got divorced in the 1950's, she bought the house I remember as hers. She got her mortgage only because she was my grandfather's daughter; the bank president and he belonged to the same club. I walked past that club yesterday morning on my way to rent a car; it's said to be the last residential building on that part of Canal Street, having been built in the 1840's by some merchant prince who later sold it to the club.
The Canal Street streetcars sound wrong; instead of the soothing whir of the St. Charles cars I remember from my childhood (and which still sound that way today), the Canal Street cars emit a high-pitched whine like the Green Line cars in Boston. And they have *air conditioning*! Evil!
I ate too much, and in particular, too much meat. I have observed that southern cuisines in general seem to focus on meat, and even what passes for salad has meat in it.
Bacon! BaconbaconbaconbaconBACON!
Last night I had the strangest dream; I was being led by a group of colleagues through a maze of tunnels from which we emerged into a garden. Just before waking up I remember asking one of them how we got there, and he said: "Delilah's trap". And then I was awake, and on a train in Charlottesville, Virginia, wondering what time it was.
One of my cousins said my grandmother had told her she worried about my grandfather's gambling. I never knew him as a gambler, but apparently his club had been formed as a sort of gamblers' retreat. It is a mystery how he got invited to join, as he had started life as a poor Cajun kid in Ascension Parish.
According to the club's official history, written by my grandfather back in the thirties, the club was particularly proud of two alumni: General Richard Taylor, Zachary Taylor's son who commanded the Confederate military department of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and Judah P. Benjamin, who served as Confederate secretary of state and of war and ended up as a Queen's Counsel in London.
I looked up the card game after which the club is named; it is a variety of whist that seems to have originated in revolutionary France, where it was named for the American city whose defiance of British occupation most inspired the revolutionaries. The same game is mentioned in War and Peace, even if it is long forgotten today.
Taylor has a New Orleans street named after him, as does another general named Napoleon; this is probably the only street in America named after a European dictator.
We had lunch with a couple of old friends of my father's who live in the garden district; she is a botanist, while he is a retired doctor and a consummate birder. We walked along the lagoon in Audubon Park, where all sorts of birds hang out: whistling ducks, egrets, herons, anhingas... I had forgotten Audubon Park; it is as delightful as I remember, even with the occasional need to watch out for errant golf balls.
I believe my train is ready. I must sign off.
There were billboards all over Alabama promoting Richard Shelby for U.S. Senate (in an election that presumably took place almost three months ago). Feh.
I saw no lizards in New Orleans. New Orleans is not the same without lizards.
The levee along the Mississippi where I walked back in 1966 looking for snakes now has a honking huge industrial establishment on it, surrounded by chain link fences and razor wire. Feh.
We drove around uptown and the garden district looking at former homes of parents, grandparents, and cousins. I took pictures of some of them. One was the house where my grandmother was born in 1897.
We also visited my grandfather's old school, Metairie Park Country Day, and the nearby Metairie Cemetery where my grandparents are buried. The cemetery has an unusual plan because it used to be a racetrack. My grandparents are right near the Confederate monument in the middle. We were not able to find a cousin who is supposedly in the same cemetery.
After one of my aunts got divorced in the 1950's, she bought the house I remember as hers. She got her mortgage only because she was my grandfather's daughter; the bank president and he belonged to the same club. I walked past that club yesterday morning on my way to rent a car; it's said to be the last residential building on that part of Canal Street, having been built in the 1840's by some merchant prince who later sold it to the club.
The Canal Street streetcars sound wrong; instead of the soothing whir of the St. Charles cars I remember from my childhood (and which still sound that way today), the Canal Street cars emit a high-pitched whine like the Green Line cars in Boston. And they have *air conditioning*! Evil!
I ate too much, and in particular, too much meat. I have observed that southern cuisines in general seem to focus on meat, and even what passes for salad has meat in it.
Bacon! BaconbaconbaconbaconBACON!
Last night I had the strangest dream; I was being led by a group of colleagues through a maze of tunnels from which we emerged into a garden. Just before waking up I remember asking one of them how we got there, and he said: "Delilah's trap". And then I was awake, and on a train in Charlottesville, Virginia, wondering what time it was.
One of my cousins said my grandmother had told her she worried about my grandfather's gambling. I never knew him as a gambler, but apparently his club had been formed as a sort of gamblers' retreat. It is a mystery how he got invited to join, as he had started life as a poor Cajun kid in Ascension Parish.
According to the club's official history, written by my grandfather back in the thirties, the club was particularly proud of two alumni: General Richard Taylor, Zachary Taylor's son who commanded the Confederate military department of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and Judah P. Benjamin, who served as Confederate secretary of state and of war and ended up as a Queen's Counsel in London.
I looked up the card game after which the club is named; it is a variety of whist that seems to have originated in revolutionary France, where it was named for the American city whose defiance of British occupation most inspired the revolutionaries. The same game is mentioned in War and Peace, even if it is long forgotten today.
Taylor has a New Orleans street named after him, as does another general named Napoleon; this is probably the only street in America named after a European dictator.
We had lunch with a couple of old friends of my father's who live in the garden district; she is a botanist, while he is a retired doctor and a consummate birder. We walked along the lagoon in Audubon Park, where all sorts of birds hang out: whistling ducks, egrets, herons, anhingas... I had forgotten Audubon Park; it is as delightful as I remember, even with the occasional need to watch out for errant golf balls.
I believe my train is ready. I must sign off.
