This afternoon I went with a friend to the swamp directly south of New Orleans, the Barataria Preserve, an arm of the “Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve.” The Barataria area is a nature park, but its place in the larger historical context is interesting and I’ll note it briefly: Jean Lafitte (he has a […]
Category Archives: Travels
Sold down the river.
24-Mar-09Sometimes things strike you suddenly, after long delay. I took a trip up the Mississippi, and saw a few plantations, among other things. And here is New Orleans, one of the two great slave marts of America (the other being Charleston), at the very bottom of the river. And I realized the origin of the […]
Disappearin’ Railroad Blues.
18-Mar-09This afternoon my mother left for Chicago via the City of New Orleans, the famous train running from New Orleans to Chicago. I sang the song all day afterwards. Riding on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central – Monday Morning Rail. Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail. […]
New Orleans in a nutshell.
06-Mar-09“Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States – the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians – regardless of […]
City of David.
02-Mar-09As I write this, it’s the last hour of March First, Saint David’s Day. The feast is named after a Welsh man, but the feast was appropriated by Saint David’s School (where I taught in years past) as the feast of King David. The Western Church typically does not call Old Testament figures “saints” nor […]
Mardi Gras Overall.
26-Feb-09As a general rule, I found the Mardi Gras events to be a continual crescendo of size and diminuendo of intensity. “Extension is the complement of soul,” I believe is the relevant apothegm (if you keep on saying it to yourself enough over a period of years you will feel how much truth is in […]
Mardi Gras Out of Context – 3.
26-Feb-09In the French Quarter, I saw a man standing at an intersection with a sign saying, GOD IS NOT FAIR. A man came up to him and asked him if he was with the Jesus people a few steps from him. And I thought to myself, “That is a great theological question. That is precisely […]
Fat Tuesday.
26-Feb-09On Tuesday I got up at six-thirty, hopped in the shower, and met my Corps engineer friend right outside my house. We rode our bikes downtown. Getting around was difficult. We attempted to take Claiborne Avenue, a major street running almost directly downtown from Carrollton, but its shoulder was filled with sand, gravel, and broken […]
Lundi Gras.
26-Feb-09After a weekend where everyone is off from work and partying, Lundi Gras is a lull. Most businesses are open, and there is opportunity to get practical things done. Johnny Angel and myself went to do laundry, and found the laundromat quite busy – the busiest I’ve ever seen the place, all the driers being […]
The Boyhood Home of James Earl Carter.
10-Mar-09“My life on the farm during the Great Depression more nearly resembled farm life fully two thousand years ago than farm life today.” – Jimmy Carter We know that social change occurs glacially, and that the victories discussed in textbooks represent rallying-points rather than real social conversions. American schools were “desegregated” in 1955, and yet […]