My mother grew up in an orphanage, and my father grew up in the bayous of Louisiana. Both their childhoods spanned the Great Depression. That harshness of that experience did not fade as they slowly clawed their way into a materially sufficient lower middle class. Not wanting their children to go without the way they’d […]

    Probably sixty years after I first read it, I can still recite the opening line to Babe Ruth’s autobiography: “I was a bad kid; I say that without pride…”    Growing up in the 1950s, baseball was THE professional sport, even in a non-professional sports region like New Orleans. (The New Orleans Pelicans were a AA […]

   I was 16 when Hurricane Betsy hung a U-ee in the Atlantic, wrapped itself around Florida and made a beeline for the Louisiana coast. It was September of 1965, and New Orleans was the bullseye of the storm.    The night of the storm, my father made me a highball to “calm my nerves.” My nerves […]

   Carol came into the living room smiling. “I just won $10 tickets to Hamilton for next Thursday.” You might think that direct quote should have been punctuated with an exclamation point. I mean it’s Hamilton, not Guys and Dolls, The Fantastics or Cats. I’ve seen it twice on stage myself and still can’t get enough. […]

  The Sunday Morning show on CBS ended with images of Britain’s New Forest, historically the first Royal Hunting Ground founded in 1079. What wasn’t  stated was that designating a Royal hunting ground meant that land was now off limits to commoners who had previously used the forest as a source of fuel for heat and […]

   I was determined to hold my tongue this time around. I decided that exercising my pet peeve, where people stand and block your view of the stage during a concert, was ineffective. More people were turning around to look for the wingnut exhorting the crowd to “sit down!” than were people who actually sat. I […]

   Last week I mailed my old passport back as part of my renewal application. For the next two or three months I can’t leave the country if I wanted to. This is different from Covid. Then, travel wasn’t available; now it is but I can’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter that we hadn’t planned any […]

“Airplane mode”    The disadvantage of booking an airport hotel room the night before your flight home is that being way out from the city, your café and wine shop options will be slim, if they exist at all. I’d taken care of the wine shop issue by packing a leftover bottle of room wine from […]

“Last Tango in Orléans”    At first I thought Carol believed she’d turned a corner with me and sightseeing based on yesterday’s achievements that included a cathedral, an Old Town walk, a fresh food market, a tram ride and a midnight light show. (Whew. Just writing it down sounds like a full week, rather than one […]

Tourist Time    Orléans sports a cathedral, an Old Town, a riverside and a recreation of the house where Joan d’Arc resided during her successful defeat of the English during the Hundred Years War. In other words, strap on the Skechers Relaxed Fits, black socks, cargo shorts, faded XXL T-shirts with “Branson Missouri” emblazoned across the […]