Imaginary Vacation

It is the third week of January and a time I like to jokingly refer to as the thermal solstice. At least statistically this tends to be coldest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere -and it's also is seen as the most depressing. You have that big letdown after Christmas, the bills from the holidays are coming in and spring looks like it's years away. A few of my friends would say if it wasn't the Super Bowl they would have nothing to live for.

Because of family and work it's impossible to get away to some place warm and sunny. So if the body can't go at least the imagination can wander. I've been Florida enough to know what's there but I certainly would not turn a chance to spend a week in South Beach, Gainesville or Cedar Keys.  I have never been to Louisiana. My wife and I have been saving up for a trip to New Orleans. Our two sons are ready to leave home and be adults on their own, so we no longer have any reason to have another sedate family vacation.

New Orleans is were the Old South and the Caribbean cross paths. I know I have a million images of southern Louisiana and they are probably all wrong. That's okay with me, I don't mind having the chance to trade in my ignorance for firsthand knowledge. But just look at the source materials that are available to me up here in Pensylvania, like the TV shows Treme and True Blood -and  books by James Lee Burke and Ann Rice.  Based on that alone you would think the whole area is filled with jazz musicians, murderers and vampires.

My first interest in New Orleans started with grade school American history. The abbreviated version taught in the classroom seemed suspiciously skimpy  and soon I was reading on my own about the Crescent City.  How the whole mid-west needed to ship everything though New Orleans if they wanted export to the rest of the world. The irony that the Battle of New Orleans was fought three weeks after the peace treaty was signed. The slave trade, voodoo, Dreamland and the jazz age, how General Benjamin Butler got the nick name "spoons" or the trek of the Arcadian French relocating from Canada to what was still French territory. All of that history is fascinating.

The next thing that drew my interest to southern Louisiana was the music of Credence Clearwater Revival. Cut me a break here, I was a kid back then, I had no idea the band was from Encino California and they were inspired by the same marginally true and overly romantic images that everyone else was feed. You add in the movies Easy Rider and Hard Times and I was hooked on the myth.

Any myth is just a cardboard cutout of the truth. The truth has depth and is always more complex then the story that gets sold to the tourists and outsiders. Slowly I started to pick up little bits and pieces of the real music traditions of the region. The Jazz, R&B and Rock and Roll were pretty easy to keep separate though you hear were each genre borrowed something from the other.  For an untrained ear the differences between Creole, Cajun and Zydeco were a bit more subtle.

I've come to appreciate sad plaintive ballads in a language I do I speak. And I always perk up to a dance beat played on the accordion. I don't know enough about the music to  have long and detailed playlists of favorites -nor could I compare and contrast one performer with another. But I know what I like and I'm open to hear whatever else is out there.

All of this and more is the Louisiana of my dreams.

 

So next year in New Orleans and maybe Layette too. This weekend I'll probably borrow last season of True Blood on DVD and watch them all in a marathon while trying to make beignets and Cajun coffee. True Blood is mindless pop corn entertainment but it so wonderful to see a place where all year round you don't have to wear much more than a tee shirt and shorts. The vampires and the soap opera story are just an extra attraction.