The Train to New Orleans / June 2016
LEJ's Louisiana
Yours Truly in a Swamp
Yours Truly in a Swamp
Monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.org
on paper at
~ Les Amis de Marigny ~
publication of New Orleans
by
Leonard Earl Johnson,
of Lafayette and New Orleans
June 2016
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The Train to New Orleans
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© 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
New Orleans is a town with trains, ships, music, food, even a style of literature named after it. If ever you must be awake and weary at daybreak there is no dreamier place to suffer it.
The Sunset Limited bound from Los Angeles to New Orleans, was listed to stop at 5:12pm, Friday, but did not pass through Lafayette -- 140 miles out from Big Swamp City -- until 1:30 Saturday morning.
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| Sunset Limited / courtesy Amtrak |
It was well into the next day when it finally reached the City of Dreamy Dreams, Big Swamp City, New Orleans.
The passengers were grumpy. The exhausted crew grumbled they were expected to sweep out the train and be up for a turnaround scheduled for 9a.m.
(actually left five hours late).
The sun was rising when we stepped out of Union Passenger Terminal on Loyola Avenue, next to the Superdome, and climbed in a United Cab headed for a French colonial breakfast of beignets and coffee at Café du Monde, across from Jackson Square, next to the Riverfront flood wall.
L. A. Norma closed the cab door and said, "They
should've re-named her the 'Sun-rise Un-limited.' "
Our cab driver nodded but said nothing. We had seen him before. And he had seen us.
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| click image for information / Parish Ink |
He was wearing his T-shirt that read: "My Parents Went to New Orleans and All I Got Is This Lousy I.Q."
There had been a derailment two days before, way out West. For the next two days Amtrak could not tell us anything. Except that the "Incident" was not an "Amtrak Incident."
We did not know what that meant, because the only part of the "what-ever incident" that concerned us was clearly Amtrak's part ~ the delay.
"If that isn't an Amtrak-incident," Norma bellowed, "Ray Nagin is an honest man." The cabbie pulled up to the curb and turned around and stared at her.
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Furtherless the daily, The Times-Picayune, venerated grey old lady of New Orleans letters has lifted her skirts and shown us she has only enough petticoats left for three days a week. The Times-Picayune has not exactly folded, but she ain't goin' dancing any more.
Since Katrina, The T-P has been pushing her faithful scribes out the door. Now, she is pushing them out windows, too, and breaking our hearts all over again with news of more lashes from the Demon Change.
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| New Orleans Item, circa 1900, precursor to The Times~Picayune / Wikipedia |
On the decadently optimistic side, however, she has given us yet another forget-me-not theme for fundraiser dinners, parties and coffee shop chatter for years, nay, centuries to come.
"That will fill our T-P-less days," Norma said, standing beside the cab lighting a cigarette. She blew smoke in the cabbie's face and handed him a large bill, "Keep the change."
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We awaited an early strong storm from the Gulf of Mexico.
"Debby's the name, flooding's the game," Norma said through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "She's headed for Florida."
We prayed for Florida, but worried the storm might slip past the point of our prayers and come here.
"Thank Gott, we have a flood wall sturdy as the one that failed last time," L. A. Norma told the checkout clerk at Rouses on Baronne Street.
On our way back to Faubourg Marigny we reminisced over storm preparations of long, long ago. When the effort was no more than stocking up on Camel Cigarettes (for Norma), Chocolate Ice Cream (for me), and batteries for a little transistor radio that had traceable DNA directly back to the 1950s.
Norma called Amtrak and found out the normally morning train West would not be leaving until the afternoon. She booked two sleepers to Lafayette.
We phoned for our cabby and told him during the ride to the station that Italy was playing in the European Cup. The game would be on TV, "In forty-feet-up, twenty-miles-in Lafayette," L. A. Norma said.
He said, "But is it worth it?" We shrugged.
"We will be back in a couple weeks for
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| Somewhere in Louisiana / courtesy Amtrak |
Hemingway's Pamplona-NOLa running-of-the-bulls party," Norma said to the ticket-taker at the Sunset Limited's platform gate. The ticket-taker closed her eyes and handed us back our ticket stubs. We closed the curtains and dozed off as the train slipped out past the Arena and the Superdome.
"The big one looks like the box the little one came in," Norma said, before snoring.
Superdome and Arena / courtesy New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau
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Copyright, 2016,
Leonard Earl Johnson
All Rights Reserved
Leonard Earl Johnson
All Rights Reserved
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Hope you do, I love talking with you,
Leonard Earl Johnson,
Columnist to the elderly and early weary.
Lagniappe du Jour:
Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution,
which was inspired by the American Revolution,
which was financed by the French
and opposed (in three wars if you count the American Civil War) by the English. 
LEJ at Henry Boudreaux and Sonya Lecompte party, Laughingyette / Conni Castille
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| Cabildo, awaiting the trowel / Mark Tullos |
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posted by LEJ's Louisiana | 5:57 AM
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