Once Upon a Summertime

It was August in New Orleans.  By definition, that meant that not only was it hot and humid, but also altogether lacking in a breeze.

We’d been to Pres Hall the night before, and the huddled humanity inside that space practically fogged the windows with their water-logged breath.  I was, myself, reluctant to breathe and contribute to the problem, but did so anyway out of force of habit.

We’d spent much of that day sheltered in place in our hotel, sometimes in our room, sometimes down at the bar, and briefly down at the nearlybutnotquiteashotastheair swimming pool.

Dusk came slowly in from the east, and we were out in time for long shadows to slide past us.  We figured our best shot until the darkness was full would be the green space of Jackson Square, so we headed straight down Orleans from our hotel.  We’d enjoy the fresh air and a little time out of the cave, then maybe some time at Molly’s or Tujague’s.

We hit the flagstones in front of the Cabildo with still a fair amount of light.  The buskers were starting to pack up – time to move on to dinner or down the street, or maybe even a paying gig.

One man, though, lingered, and showed no signs of surrendering to the night.

His case said Blues by the Green or something like that, so I supposed he was a regular in front of Jackson Square.  He finished up St. James Infirmary on his trumpet, and the notes had come out like a smoky molasses, deep and rich, with their own weight of seasonings and seasons.  We got to rocking slowly in time.  By the time the song was done with him and his horn, a number of my stresses had been shaken down to my feet, just sitting there on the stones to be dropped entirely.

He hit the end and couldn’t seem to decide whether to pack his horn away or do one more.  He looked off to the west, down the street, where the sun was already hiding between Chartres and Royal.

He mopped his face and brought his horn back up to his lips.  One more song, at least, though the dark was filling in all the empty spaces in the square already.  

Summertime. I’d hear all the best arrangements and who knows how many covers. I expected we’d be bored and give a half-hearted round of applause and then to get on with our lives.  

It started slowly. I was starting to think he’d forgotten where his entrance was, then the trumpet came to life.  The mute came off the bell of the horn and he leaned back to let out all the notes and emotion he’d been saving up. He took us around one more time with the horn unleashed, then began to sing:

Summertime … and the livin' is easy …
Fish are jumpin' … and the cotton is high
Yo' daddy's rich … and yo' mama's good lookin' …
So hush little baby … don't you cry …

The words poured out slow and sweet, no hurries here, and anything that might have been in a hurry down inside of me, slowed.  That’s one of the perpetual charisms of New Orleans, slowing those things down inside that might be in too much of a hurry.

He made it into the next verse as a horse carriage pulled up right at the corner of the Cabildo.  

I suppose it was their routine – they probably did it every day rain or shine when they were both working – maybe they still do.  I’d never seen it before, though, and haven’t seen it since.

When the busker finished the second verse of the song, trailing “With yo mama and daddy standin' bye …” into the dusk, the carriage driver took up the refrain himself.

Summertime … and the livin' is easy …
Fish are jumpin' … and the cotton is high
Yo' daddy's rich … and yo' mama's good lookin' …
So hush little baby … don't you cry …

And then they just passed the song back and forth, their own call and response.  It felt like an hour – in the good way – but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

When they finished their last round of verse, with the words tapering into the night, the busker went back to his horn and the driver gave his reins a shake, and the carriage turned toward the departing sun.  By the time he was out of sight, the busker was packing his horn.  We barely had time to tip him – generously – before he vanished as well.

That was years ago, and even now, when I’m in need of quiet and calm, I go back to that moment. It was just like in the movies, but it was better because it was real.

As I recall, we went on to Molly’s, but the rest of the evening is a blur because we were already intoxicated by Summertime.




  

Slow Road to NOLA

I grew up in Pueblo, Colorado - a quietly hearty blue collar town just slightly removed from the slopes of the Rockies. At very least, I started to grow up there. When I was 14, we moved to Texarkana, Arkansas due to a change in my dad's job, then to Oklahoma City, then to Andrews, a small oil town out in West Texas.

I went to college in Denton, Texas, then moved to Fort Worth, where I've lived since.

I love Fort Worth.  The people are good and decent and friendly, if a bit straight-laced.  I feel at home here.  Mostly.

Years after moving to Fort Worth, I had to go to Colorado Springs for a conference.  I was looking forward to the return, and had planned an extra two days to drive the hour south and visit my hometown.  I was ready to do some reconnecting.  I hadn't been there in almost fifteen years.

What I wasn't ready for was something I experienced as the plane landed and we started taxi-ing to the gate.  The best way I can think of to describe it, is to say that something in me that I hadn't even realized was tense had just relaxed.  I was home, and at ease, in a way I hadn't imagined before.

Of course, at the end of the conference, I went back to my new home.  I was home there, yes, but in a different way.

About fifteen years ago, I had to go to New Orleans on business.  I'd never been before.  I knew the history of the city, and respected its culture and music, but I was never particularly taken with the idea of a visit.  The popular caricature of Bourbon Street, which admittedly, isn't always far off from the reality of Bourbon Street, stood astride the whole city for me like a colossus.  It was all just drinking and flashing boobs - not that I'm intrinsically opposed to either, but if it's all I can imagine, then ... eh.

I landed and drove to my hotel close to the airport.  The first thing I really remember about the trip was that, it was so humid that by the time I got to my hotel, just a couple of miles from the airport, I had condensation running down both the inside and the outside of my car windows. Heat, cold, defrost, wiping ... nothing availed me.  I ended up having to drive with windows down to see where I was going.  Born in the midwest, humidity and I don't get along.  I hated the humidity of Texarkana and hated every trip I'd taken to Houston - which was many - because of the humidity. Things were starting with a deficit.

The next day, though, I finished with my business by lunch time and had the rest of the day until I caught my late afternoon flight out.  My rule in an new city is to avoid the monuments and see the city from the streets, so that's what I did.  I was prepared for a crassly commercialized street whose corporate sponsors were Bud and Miller Lite.  I was ready for the human statue, for the "I can tell you where you got your shoes" guys, as well as the "Here's your free hat ... now about that donation ..." folks.  

What I wasn't ready for was the feeling I had as I entered the bubble of the French Quarter.  I parked in a lot on Rampart and went around the corner.  By the time I got as far as Burgundy, I once again felt something in me relax - something I hadn't even realized was tense. 

By the time I hit Bourbon, I was ready to overlook its shortcomings like one overlooks the shortcomings of friends (who, of course, return the favor).  I wandered aimlessly, up and down streets, experiencing everything and nothing in particular.  I was starving, so I had a burger at Yo Mama's, which has become a must-visit on every subsequent trip.  I wandered Royal.  I stopped at a handful of places, including Molly's at the Market, and the now-shuttered Flanagan's Pub.  It was all spontaneous and all good.

By the time I walked out of the quarter four hours later, I'd taken in food and drink and art and curios and t-shirts and books and antiques and a thousand other things. I had breathed in centuries of history, of humanity and debauchery.  From drunks to poets (not always separate things), the Quarter and the city had absorbed their essences for ages, slowly releasing them into the air like the mist over a lake on a cold morning.

I was converted.  More than that, I was in love.  I also felt at home.  I say that a little more tentatively than the others because there's a very tangible difference between feeling at home and being at home.  Having the feeling doesn't imply any investiture. Being the feeling involves rootedness and commitment.  While I can see us possibly becoming residents at some point, any being at home would come after that.  Until then, I'll remain a most-graciously, and often most-audaciously, welcomed guest, and for that I thank the New Orleanians.

I've since visited the city a dozen times, spending anywhere from three days to ten. I've expanded beyond the quarter, into Uptown, Back-a-town, Marigny, out Magazine, etc.  My wife might not love the city quite as much as me, but she loves that I love it, and each time we visit, we find new, special places for food, drink, art, books, history ............. 

King of Royal and Toulouse

Guitar riffs bounce down the sidewalk
Bluesman in the street
his folding chair’s the main stage
Tip bucket at his feet

Singin' the stories
walkin' by
When you sings yours,
can you meet his eye?

Sings you
Sings me
sings 'bout the troubles
that don't let a man be.

Sings what ain't there
or what don't stay
What comes in the night
or your quiet day.

Sings from your bottle
or your tired shoes.
Sings 'bout your heart
and how you paid your dues.

Con man can tell ya
where ya got your shoes
Only bluesman knows
where you found your blues.

Procedural Noise: Cop shows and Deniable Plausibility

I was watching an episode of NCIS: New Orleans last night.  I know, I knowwwwwww ... but we had it recorded and it was right in front of me and ... other excuses, yadda-yadda.

Anyway, in this episode, their computer expert, Special Agent Patton Plame, played by Daryl Mitchell, was called upon to perform some forensics work on a laptop that had been wiped by the Office of Naval Research following the murder of its owner, a naval Commander.

Before I start my whining, I want to say it's great to see Daryl Mitchell on TV. He's a really good actor and it's refreshing to see that people aren't making his wheelchair a stumbling block in getting good roles.

So here's my problem, as Special Agent Patton Plame would say (and actually did say):

PLAME:

Here's my problem.

It's hard to investigate what's not there anymore.

Darby's entire system was wiped remotely three hours after his death.

BRODY:

So all gone? 

PLAME:

Gone, but not really gone.

See, gone is never totally gone.

I use some complier code, maybe a packet sniffer.

If I'm lucky, I'll find a zero day exploit.

BRODY:

And here's where I pretend like I know what that means.

PLAME:

Oh, it means, I'm gonna be on it, like a woman on a bicycle, with somewhere to go.

BRODY:

Analogies are not your strong suit.

First off, if the DoD wiped Wilson's laptop, they'd have wiped it to DoD standards, which means you have to get more than a brilliant special agent to recover any suggestion of data, and it would take weeks, not an hour, and you would never get a 100% restore.  And don't get me started on how, once he's recovered all the data, he's magically figured out how to break at least 3 encryption standards. In minutes.

Second off, there's no way in hell you're going to use compiler code to un-wipe a hard drive and sure as hell no way you're going to use a packet sniffer.  A packet sniffer captures data packets as they're passing from Device A to Device B across a computer network. That would be like sniffing the air to detect traces of odor that a broken fan isn't pushing anywhere. That leaves us with him looking for a zero day exploit ... whatever the hell he thinks he's going to do with that, I don't know and he doesn't either.

Then Brody, no slouch, says her bit about pretending like she knows what all that means, which I guess is the writer's lazy way of saying "Uhhh, yeah, we didn't really have time to focus on this part because of ... stuff, so we just threw in some words we pulled off random Google searches. Sorry, Brody, you got stuck playing the writers' stooge.

So, yes, while analogies are definitely not Plame's strong suit, he's equally weak when it comes to forensic data recovery. 

* * * * * 

So, what, right?  It's five seconds of one episode of a series.  It's here and it's gone, and only tight-ass OCD types fixate on such things.

Yes and no.  I will stipulate to the (at least occasionally) tight-ass, OCD categorization.  Let the defense enter it into the record without objection.

My problem isn't this gnat, but the cloud of gnats that increasingly surround procedural shows on TV.

Pick one - NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS (original), Criminal Minds, Bones, etc., etc., etc. - they all fudge extravagantly and unceasingly.

It's not just technical computer details where you say "Yeah, it doesn't work like that."

It's procedural issues where you say, "Yeah, they would never get a judge to do that."

It's legal issues where you say, "Holy fuck - does nobody give a damn about the Constitution?"

It's forensic analysis that yields a complete physical profile from a cheekbone.

It's behavioral analysis that gives a full portrait of an "unsub" based on how he lays his fork on his dinner plate.

It's painting a plot with thin (sometimes gold-leaf thin) layers of bullshit that defy logic and reality just for the sake of getting a shiny, albeit half-baked story out of the kiln in 43 minutes of script time (after commercials are taken out, that is). 

[Aside:  Kathy Reich, whose books I enjoy, says she stays attached to the Bones TV series to "make sure they keep the science right." I'll insert a derisive snort here, and leave it at that.]

Sure, it's fair that, in general, everything is secondary to the story line.  I get that.  But let's not make every single piece of back story and backstop trivial.

It's all fairy land science and technology AND legal systems that let them tell a story that is mostly unencumbered by reality.  So, they get to do some soap opera kind of story and make it look cool and high-techy or (cough-cough) relevant to today's headlines, but without an anchor of veracity.  Why don't they just set these shows on an old west asteroid where monkeys and sharks are the chief protagonists?  They could introduce lots of additional dramatic tension using cases and story lines that sometimes demand opposable thumbs to solve, and other times demand razor sharp teeth to solve.

Now tell me that wouldn't be cool!

I know my wife would enjoy it a lot more if I wasn't almost continually saying "Yeah, but that wouldn't ..." Actually, she does it, too, just not as much as me.  Plus, I'm training myself to hold it in.  She knows what's happening when I twitch, but don't say anything, or when I open my mouth, freeze, and close it again.

Anyway - how about them sharks and monkeys - think they can solve this week's case with the sky-diving cellist encased in jello by a crime syndicate eager to keep her out of a dance competition and track down her inside connection to a tactical nuclear weapons expert?  Is it going to be a thumbs or teeth denouement??  Stay tuned for an all new episode!

One last thing - Original NCIS?  Sure, they cheat now and then, but it's my perception that they do it much less than the others.

One more last thing - NCIS: New Orleans? Try not to be trying so hard. I know your heart's in the right place, but you're too desperate to blend in, to sound like you're from the city. Folks may never love you like they love HBO's "Treme" but they can love you like a cousin, if you just relax.

Polaroid Paragraphs #2 - "The Great Pretender"

On the bus heading for the store, Henry would imagine he was riding the street car, usually the Saint Charles line, on the way to the French Market, maybe.  He’d talk his every move through in his head like he was telling a story, but then he always narrated his activities, even if he wasn’t projecting them onto New Orleans. When he was just out of school, he randomly decided to take a Rosetta Stone course in Conversational Greek.  That’s what this was like – learning to sound like a native in conversation.

“Hey, where y’at, Sammy?”

“Awrite, friend, awrite.  Just on my way – gotta make groceries ‘fore the family shows up tomorrow, y’know.  How you been?”

“Awrite, too. Jest so tired.  Runnin’ home to make some dodo ‘fore tonight. Me and Liz are goin' by Tipitina's.  I could shore do with a huck-a-buck right now, it’s so hot!”

"I hear ya, man."

He’d have little chats like that inside his head all the time, honing his vocabulary, cadence and most especially pronunciation, for when he met someone who might seem charmed by knowing someone from N’Orlins.  Well, someone who seemed, anyway.

It was the instant key to acceptance, sounding like you were a son of the Crescent City, and most anybody would start up a conversation with you based on that.  You had to be real good to fool natives, though.  You had to talk “Yat” and not just Southern or Cajun or Creole.  You had to know the difference between uptown, downtown and backatown.  You had to know that Esplanade was pronounced Ess-pluh-NADE, not Ess-plah-NOD or that Burgundy was pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, not the first.  It was Bur-GUN-dee Street, not BUR-gun-dee.  That word was hard for him. He always messed it up.  Always-always-always-always!

You had to mention the flyin’ horses at the fairgrounds, Spanish Fort, Hubig’s pies, and the former glory of Uglesich’s – but not too often.  Too often and you were immediately suspect again.  There were thousands of things to mention like they were an old favorite of yours, or that your grandmere had told you about, but not so often those remembrances dominated the conversation.  

There was a girl at his supermarket, maybe five years younger than him, but really cute, and he wished he had the nerve to ask her out, but she wasn’t ready yet.  He would always maneuver to go through her line when she was at a register, or need help finding something when she was out on the floor.  She was from Minneapolis, which you’d think would be as far from New Orleans as a person could get, culturally, but there was all kinds of music floating up and down the river, cross-pollinating things between the cities and at all points in between.  He’d been in Minneapolis years back for a family wedding.  He and his cousins went downtown expecting to see ice cream parlors and churches, and came back drunk as skunks and sporting new tattoos.  If only she’d been from Alaska or some such place.  But still, she was starting to warm to him.  A few more “chere’s” and “darlin’s” and he was pretty sure she’d go out with him.

Even people from home could be cagy at times.  There was a strong connection between Fort Worth and New Orleans it seemed, and a whole quiet mass of people who spent lots of time passing back and forth.  They could spot you a mile off if you were a fake.

He struck up a little conversation with his seat mate on the bus about how they thought the Saints would be doing this year, or the “Aints” as some old, fatigued, fans called them.  It was getting pretty lively.  The man knew nothing about New Orleans, but was a big football fan, so he talked a lot about that and Henry got to talk a lot about football fever in the city.  Two conversations in one, but talking at each other and neither listening.

The bus made a stop and an old black man probably in his eighties got on the bus.  Henry eyed him cautiously and clammed up while the man next to him kept yapping about rankings and trade options, and was even slip-streaming in and out of his fantasy football league picks.  There was nothing ominous about the man who just got on, or his blackness, but Henry knew him, and he knew Henry too well, and that was the scary part.

He was from New Orleans, born and raised, and had only left because Katrina had come, and in his absence, taken his Marigny home away.  He knew the old man would bust him wide open and call him out for being a pretender.  He’d been very rude the first time he’d caught Henry in a lie, and Henry still stung from the rebuke.  Something about getting your own damn life and stop playing games with other people’s story.  No, not something like – almost exactly like.  He’d looked Henry right in the eyes and said, “Man, you are so full of shit.  I don’t know what you’re playing at, but you need to get your own damn life, and stop spouting stories you’ve made up or heard from other people. Ain’t no damn game!”

Coming down the bus aisle, the man briefly eyeballed Henry, who avoided looking directly back and hit the bus stop cord. Thirty seconds later, he was on the sidewalk, or banquette, as they used to call sidewalks in New Orleans.  He’d walk a little ways and catch the next bus at the stop coming up.  Maybe he’d walk down the median in the grass and trees for a ways.  Wait, not median. Neutral ground. He kept forgetting. It’s median here, yes, but it's neutral ground, not median, in New Orleans.

One of these days, he’d have it all down perfectly, and everyone would welcome him.