My family went to Ye Olde College Inn for dinner Thursday night.
This local institution has a new look and a new menu since The Thing—heck, it’s even in a new building—but it still verily throbs with local charm.
You look around at the patrons at the bar and in the dining area, and whether you recognize them or not, they just exude that strange and familiar essence of this place. I don’t really know the proper words to describe it—the exact metaphor escapes me (in fact, it has escaped every writer who tried to find it)—but you know what I mean if you’ve ever walked in the door of College Inn or Uglesich’s or Domilise’s or Dunbar’s or any other of a million places where the talk is too loud and the calories too high and the energy is that just-right, impossible stew of languor, insouciance, comfort, and anticipation.
Ah, this place.
We were told it would be twenty minutes until we could get a table, and we understood in the New Orleans lexicon that meant it would be forty-five minutes until we could get a table so we decided to take a walk rather than try to rein in our kids amid the hungry and waiting masses.
They were drawn immediately to the scene down the street, a wasteland of rubble that covers an entire city block, that stretch of Carrollton between Claiborne and Earhart where those huge brick mansions all burned to the ground—or should I say to the waterline—back in September.
All that stands today are steps and chimneys, and otherwise it’s a blackened potpourri of ash and bricks, glass and appliances. You can make out the charred skeletons of bicycles and hot-water heaters and bedsprings and a few other things.
To you and me, this scene generally evokes horror and anger and sorrow, but then again we see it every day so it also strikes a chord of the familiar—as familiar as walking into your favorite old restaurant, I suppose.
It is part of our life. A New Orleans thing.
To the kids, it’s something completely different. “Where are the bathtubs?” my two oldest shouted from the sidewalk that borders this mess, and this was a strange question since my kids don’t spend much of their time or energy in their own home seeking out the tubs.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
But it’s what popped into their little minds and they actually wanted to go prospecting in the rubble for bathtubs but Big Daddy No Fun put the clamp down on that idea.
We did walk the perimeter of the block, hunting bathtubs, and even walked up a few front stoops to get an “aerial” view.
We found two tubs.
For my kids, this was a game and for me some sort of cautionary lesson/observation period: Let the kids absorb this. Let them keep absorbing this.
But then you think: This was someone’s house. Someone’s life. Someone’s stuff. Hopes, dreams, memories, and probably lots of not-so-pleasant things also, the grist of life, reality and struggle—even before it all burned down and washed away.
I guess I’ve kicked around so many busted houses that it’s easy to lose sight of that—lose the proper sense of respect and perspective. I hope I haven’t crossed the line, but if the reason you do this—to gawk at all the ruin around here—is to learn and to never forget, then is it okay?
Is it okay that my kids played here on the site of someone’s extreme loss? Even if the larger aim—in my mind—was a lofty ideal of understanding?
I don’t know the answer to that. I suppose whoever owns these properties can tell me some day.
Across the street, directly behind the restaurant, someone had obviously just gutted their house; that ubiquitous mountain of wasted domesticity was piled up six feet high on the curb.
Such a familiar sight. A New Orleans thing.
It’s amazing how free and unburdened little kids can be in this stark environment. There was a huge stuffed Snoopy in the maw in front of this house and my kids asked if they could keep it and I don’t have to tell you how Big Daddy No Fun responded.
My kids have seen the depths of the devastation here. One Sunday afternoon, we drove them down to the Lower 9th for reasons that elude me now other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.
They spoke very little and I didn’t even try to narrate our driving tour but let the landscape speak for itself, a vista unlike anything they’ve ever seen in movies or on TV.
My son Jack—four years old at the time—looked out his window and said, “Purple upside-down car.”
That’s all he said, and in those four words of simple declarative observation (there was indeed a purple upside-down car), I realized that maybe Jack will be the next writer in the family, for so perfectly did he capture the metaphor that has eluded me for all these months.
New Orleans is the Purple Upside-Down Car. A bright color with no sense of direction. A stalled engine. A thing of once-beauty waiting to be righted and repaired. Something piled up on the side of the road.
I am a father and my kids are riding shotgun in this purple upside-down car. We drive the streets of the familiar and the horrible. We use the seat belt. We live our life. We move on. We do the things that make us feel comfortable in these discomfiting times.
At the College Inn, I went with the foot-long fried oyster, melted Havarti, and bacon po-boy, drenched in mayo and Crystal Hot Sauce. A wondrous spectacle to behold. A truly ludicrous thing to eat.
Such a New Orleans thing.