NEW ORLEANS — The sparrows here are insistent, expectant. Before I can get the laptop out of its case, two of them are at my feet looking up. The birds are my only company at this early hour on this nondescript corner at Magazine and Erato.
You have to love the street names in New Orleans, exotic and story-laden: Esplanade, Felicity, Gayoso, Melpomene, Tchoupitoulas, Ursulines.
A raving man, who looks like he may have slept the night under a bridge, approaches. The sparrows scatter. The man is yelling at an unseen demon and appears to notice neither me nor the birds. He stops at the corner, then crosses Magazine.
As if on cue, a gray-haired man wearing a bright red shirt and a white cowboy hat shoots by on a motorized bicycle. You wonder if David Lynch is hiding in the oleander.
It was a mistake to feed the birds crumbs from the bag of granola. After eating their fill, they disappear, leaving me alone. I’m perched in front of a small bright yellow building with blue trim, French Truck Coffee. It is the only splash of color on this otherwise drab corner with a view of the I-10 overpass and a handful of tall buildings beyond.
The first dog of the day appears, an English Cream Golden Retriever leading an older, energetic senior wearing a navy T-shirt advertising Canada. “They’re from Scotland,” the man says about his white-haired companion.
At 7 the coffee house opens. When I return with coffee to my sidewalk perch, the birds await. A man in dusty brown dungarees and a tan T-shirt rounds the corner of Erato pushing a bicycle loaded with shiny silver conduit.
We’re about four blocks from the World War II museum and not much farther from the recently denuded Lee Circle.
On Wednesday, we visited the WWII museum. What a powerful experience that is. I found myself choked with emotion most of the time we were there. Will we ever again be united as a nation as we were then?
Later, in the gift shop of another nearby museum, I said something about our too short time at the WWII museum.
“It takes seven hours to go through it,” said a man standing nearby. “I’m a docent there,” he said.
The man with the retriever returns. “What’s his name?” I ask. “Kipling,” he says, pausing to let it sink in, “like the writer.”
A young fellow wearing white wingtips, seersucker pants, a white shirt and an untied bow tie strides around the corner. A lawyer specializing in personal injury cases (the subject of every other billboard in New Orleans) headed to work or a Garden-District decadent on his way home?
A bearded man in shorts, flop hat and a red T-shirt with “Alabama, Top of the Food Chain,” buckles his coffee into the basket on his bike. “That shirt can get you in trouble down here,” I said. “No, I have lots of friends here,” he says. Been a Tide fan all his life, he says. “I was 17 when Bear Bryant came to Alabama to coach.”
A woman walks by with a gray pit bull on a leash. While the dog licks my leg, Beth, who has arrived, asks about her other dog she had with her the day before that is dying of cancer. “He’s at the vet,” she said.
A tall, fashion-model-thin African-American woman in exercise togs strides by. She grins at Beth. “Oh, you’re here again,” she says.
A week here and you would be on a first name basis with the neighborhood.
A man driving an almost new-Triumph motorcycle pulls up and parks. He’s wearing black jeans, boots and a blue Brooks Brothers button-down with his initials monogrammed on the pocket. “These aren’t anything like the old Triumphs,” he says. The old Triumphs, like the cars of the same make, were notoriously troublesome.
Beth says something about crazy drivers. “I’ve been driving bikes for 40 years and I’m super-defensive,” the biker says. “Never had anything happen yet,” he said, looking for wood to knock.
The man exchanges his helmet for a small black fedora and a backpack stored in his leather saddlebag. He puts the helmet on the handlebar and sets out up the street toward a row of metal buildings. Getting some work done on my bus, he says.
By 8 there is a steady flow of regulars in and out of the French Truck: a T-shirted father and his daughter, three men in tight black suits looking like hit men in a large, black SUV, dog walkers of every stripe, joggers.
So begins another day in the Big Easy.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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