(You won't be surprised to find that I was reading Catcher in the Rye about the time this was written.  Holden's whine is tough to shake.)

☂

I suppose you’ll want to know about New Orleans.

The thing of it is, New Orleans isn’t much more than a few rooms to me just yet. Most of the time I’m either sitting in here or hunched over the kitchen counter or down at The High Volt Cafe getting $4 cups of cold brew from Elise or Ian or Tyler or Ben, all of whom suffer my especially anxious brand of  a.m. chit-chat like absolute pros.

The chit-chat needs practice. You spend this much time away from new people and the brain can gum up a little in public. Even a solid start in safe territory - the weather, say - erodes pretty quickly in to nervous calculations about how long it’s been since they’ve even seen weather (as in how much sunlight gets in to the kitchen and at what time of day), which soon becomes a silent, back-of-the-mind meta-panic about whether you saw a kitchen window coming in, whether asking that - about the kitchen window and all - would be taken as rude, etc and all this while trying to read into their inevitable grimace as you keep yammering on without actually getting around paying.

This is the downside of working from home.

A taxi hit a biker down near Mojo a few days ago - I guess that counts as local news. Or maybe it’s just a tidy way to include our amazement that no one wears helmets down here. It was quite the spectacle–stopped traffic for a solid hour. I was just heading over for the afternoon double shot when Walter's wife Rose (Walter is the handyman) warns me that something bad has gone down under the next stoplight. I squint and in the distance can see a bright shape, sharp against the dark pavement.

Out in the open, blood is so much thicker than you think it would be, though I expect that has more to do with sand and pavement than the blood itself. Ketchup. By the time I got there the biker had been bundled up and two guys were hoisting him in to an ambulance. A little group had circled around the smear, everyone just holding their iced lattes and staring quietly. At some point an EMT knelt down with a handful of paper towels and mopped up as much as he could.

I’m usually indoors.

The old wooden crate that held all my books during the drive down has been pulled back in to service as a side table. It’s here now, standing at attention next to the comfier of the yellow chairs that we got for $25 from a hotel liquidator. As of about two weeks ago there’s a lamp beside the crate, which means I can read after the sun goes down without squinting or turning on the horrible dim thing that doubles as a ceiling fan. (When switched on, the dim thing covers the whole room with this pale, sickly light that brings to mind basements and cataracts.)

The lamp’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to read by and the crate is in excellent condition, considering it’s gotta be twice my age. It has what I guess you’d call character, if crates are allowed that sort of thing. The nails are all rusted and burned looking and even the neck of that one with its head twisted sideways is almost black. An apple crate, I guess you’d call it, though I don’t think it was ever pressed in to service during the Sawyer Hill cider days.

Now that we’re dredging for material, I guess the mysterious saxophone guy could be filed under Genuine New Orleans Experience. We still don't know for sure what he looks like, but long, lonesome riffs can often be heard along our street, roundabout 3 or 4 in the morning. I doubt you'd get that sort of thing elsewhere. He just hangs out on the corner of Magazine & Richardson, right near the bus stop. The whole night seems to sort of tighten around the sound, and sometimes I’ll just stay up listening. Not that I’m a saxophone buff, but he’s good, or seems to be. On our way down to the post office a few weeks ago we saw an older guy in a yellowing tank top with scars on his face, leaning against the outside of a bar; a saxophone was propped up on the wall next to him. Not that proximity is incontrovertible or anything, but it was nice to fit a face to the music.

Y’know, the more I think about it, it’s very possible that this is the crate's first time out of New England, though I suppose part of its mystique is that I don’t know that for a fact. Furniture biographies are tough, and fruit crates are hardly unique to the Northeast. This one could have started life somewhere tropical and traveled north atop a stack of siblings. For some reason it strikes me as having been assembled sometime in the thirties, though I couldn’t tell you why. I tend to envision a stalwart looking guy in faded overalls nailing these things together, one by one in bright sunshine. Sometimes the scene is a shipyard, with wheeling gulls and foghorns in the distance, other times it’s a sawmill in northern Vermont, and there’s a stack of these slats leaning up against some freshly cut lumber.

Could have come from here, for all I know.