During our singular night of sleep in the Crescent City, I drifted off, imagining the sun searing the day, warmth steaming the night, jazz spilling from horns, and people still milling around the nighttime art bazaar on Frenchmen Street.
After breakfast on Saturday morning, we hopped the streetcar in front of the hotel and plugged our fare into the machine. A woman behind us waved a twenty-dollar bill at the driver who warned her she wouldn’t get her change back. She said she was French and couldn’t speak English. I didn’t have exact coins for her, but I did have some dusty français to protect her from overpaying by $18.75.
“Il n’y a pas de change ici,” I said to the woman.
Her face brightened, and she asked me something else.
“Tell her she can wait until later to pay,” the driver said to me.
“Vous pouvez payer plus tard,” I said to the woman. “Gardez votre argent.”
She thanked me and tucked the bill back into her bag.
“Wow, Mom,” Dicka said to my French 101 sentences. “That was awesome.”
As the streetcar clattered down Canal Street, I thought of how I had used change as a noun with the lady instead of the correct word monnaie, but she understood me anyway. And I was still mentally conjugating French verbs when we got off our ride at the Mississippi River and spied an alligator in the water near a riverboat.
We noshed on our second round of beignets in two days—this time at Café Beignet—and the family pronounced the donuts superior to the previous day’s sampling, except for Flicka who preferred Café du Monde’s denser dough.
We ambled along Jackson Square, admiring its artists’ paintings, and a pang of yearning for youth and Paris shot through my core. Artisans sat on folding chairs under the shade of umbrellas on Chartres; painted canvases hung from wrought-iron fences or rested against their stone bases.
At The Gazebo, we ordered one alligator sausage to-go from Kevin who said, “Try it plain first. Then dip the next bite in remoulade and see what you think. It really brings out the flavor.”
The day we saw the alligator, we ate the alligator, I thought as we sliced up the grilled reptile with a plastic fork and knife and tasted it together.
We strode on toward the French Market—our last stop of all. The humidity sat at one notch before rain, the atmosphere as saturated as Husband’s T-shirt. Marketgoers poked through jewelry, candles, alligator heads, and nativity scenes. Ricka purchased a sundress, and I bought amber oil from Senegal.
Around 2:00 p.m., our twenty-four hours in NOLA were spent, and we had miles to go before we could sleep (in the car again.) And so, we drove.
We arrived in Memphis around 9:00 p.m., eager for a walk down Beale Street where Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, and other blues and jazz legends had played. We parked near the intersection of B.B. King Boulevard and Beale and headed for the blues establishments. Beale was blocked off, though, and metal detectors marked the entrance. Security guards checked IDs. Here we go again.
Despite Dicka's twenty years, the guards said they would allow her onto Beale Street with the family. Husband who was carrying, however, asked a nearby police officer about his entry, showing the man his badge. As law enforcement too, could he go in?
“No way,” the officer said.
And just like that, our hopes of Beale Street ended—and the Marc Cohn song dropped in again:
Then I’m walking in Memphis
Was walking with my feet, ten feet off of Beale
Walking in Memphis
But do I really feel the way I feel
We conquered the final swath of road in a forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead fashion. Except we didn’t forget.
“Let’s drive down to New Orleans, get beignets and coffee, and drive home,” Dicka said one day in early summer.
And so, we did.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.