Can't do a thing to stop me....

I was on my way to baby shower in West Monroe Saturday, listening to one of the new "mixtape" CDs I recently burned and enjoying the rainy-ness of the day...when I was struck by that longing, that familiar burning for the Holy City. So many of my memories of New Orleans are tempered with rain; rain has never dampened my desire to wander when I'm there.

But it wasn't so much the City Proper (i.e., the Quarter) that I was reminded of while I was driving to the baby shower. I was reminded of the River Road - the old road that runs along the levees all the way into New Orleans, sort of parallel to Airline. The little shotgun houses, the tiny wooden houses, even the little modern brick ones that have cropped up - they look like they belong in the midst of rural Mississippi or Louisiana, not there on the cusp of Metairie and New Orleans, between suburban sprawl and the swamp....to be honest, I would live happily in one of those little houses, for all my love for New Orleans proper.

...nostalgia burns in the hearts of the strongest...

I'm not a particularly sentimental soul - I have my weaknesses, yes, and I am a packrat, much like my mother. I'm somewhere between my mother, who keeps EVERYTHING, and my aunt, who keeps NOTHING. My aunt says that she keeps nothing because her memories are more important to her than the material things. Which I understand - but the material things allow us to have a more vivid experience of the memory - it provides a sensual object on which to fix the experience, something for this age of reason...

*sigh* Anyway - so I was pretty melancholy by the time I got the party, and was perhaps quieter than my friend, for whose daughter the shower was given, had ever seen me, as well as several other co-workers who attended. Driving home again, I was accompanied by that same sense of mood, hungry and lonely for the City. Later that day, as the Captain and I watched TV, some commercial about New Orleans came on, and it went straight to my heart, crystal arrow. The Captain reminded me that we would be visiting the Holy City in September...but that does nothing to assuage the burning that winds through me now.

But with the patience that has served me for years, and the constant knowledge that something always takes me there with a regularity that keeps me sane, I will make it to September, and I will not give in to the restlessness that plagues my steps. I am not one of those souls that requires instant gratification - I delight in the delay of satisfaction, and always remember the sweetness of hunger finally answered in the right moment.

So I will nurse this longing with all the right songs, and all the right memories, and I will bide my time. I will be good, I will be right, and I will be rewarded.