For me, December can’t happen without my hearing certain music. One such piece is Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
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As a child, I dreamed an entire commercial, or as it probably should be termed, a full-music-video PSA. I decided after all these years to write about it.
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Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
Seeing Ellen DeGeneres in the car with Jerry Seinfeld reminded me of when I gave her a ride in the mid-1980s, early in her career.
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We said goodbye to Mom on July 3, 2006, in a hospital room in Houston. She was the subject of one of my first posts on this site, and of the only obituary I’ve ever written.
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It was a long time ago. I was 19, and M was 25. We worked together and played music together. At my dad’s funeral, I played guitar, and she sang.
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Published February 12, 2018
Earlier this month, I reconnected with a good friend from college. Conversation soon turned to movies, and she recommended “Housekeeping” (1987). Directed by Bill Forsyth, it is based on Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 novel. If you watch it in a mood similar to mine when I saw it a couple of weeks ago, you might be taken aback by the use of the word “comedy” in the opening of Vincent Canby’s November 1987 review for The New York Times. Taken in full, the description “haunting comedy” feels closer to the mark.
The intersection of St. Peter and Bourbon streets was a blur in a different way on the night of Feb. 7, 2010, and into the early-morning hours of Feb. 8 as the French Quarter filled up within minutes of the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl. (Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock, Inc.)
Postcard from the French Quarter:
(With my heart going out to those affected by tornado damage Tuesday in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, here’s a look back at one of the best night’s in the Crescent City’s history. Originally posted at 3:21 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2010, on a blog long since shuttered.)
NEW ORLEANS — Super Bowl Sunday has become early Monday morning, almost imperceptibly, and this afterglow of the Super Bowl victory by the New Orleans Saints still feels like something that might forever be called Lombardi Gras.
The fusion of the NFL’s championship trophy with the Carnival atmosphere in the Big Easy in February 2010 seems inspired now, almost fated, as I sit and rest tired feet while younger, more energetic revelers continue to party in the French Quarter. Now we know why the Big Game had to creep from January into February over the years.
Some of the passersby look at me as I type notes on my BlackBerry, and based on their comments, they think I’m texting someone. In a way, I suppose I am. I’m texting you.
In no particular order, except the free-flow way I typed them, here are notes of the sights, sounds and smells of my walk from near the Convention Center down to Jackson Square and deep into the Quarter:
Minutes after the game, euphoria.
There’s never been a feeling like it.
New Orleans empties onto its streets.
Car horns blare.
Strangers high-five strangers.
“Who Dat!”
Tonight, no one is a stranger.
We’re all trying to wrap our minds around it.
“The Saints, NFL champions!”
The streets fill with cheers, and thanks to go-cups, “cheers!”
There are no words, really, but we’re all trying.
“Boom, chaka laka laka! Boom, chaka laka laka!”
More high fives, swarming like flies.
“Big guy, Who Dat!”
We pass Harrah’s, where a crowd has gathered.
“Who Dat!”
The flow on Poydras seems headed toward the Superdome.
Let’s veer off into the Quarter.
You can see more of the street surface than usual.
That won’t last.
Got time for a celebratory Lucky Dog, Ignatius?
Someone’s walking under huge black-and-gold balloons.
Music is blaring from car stereos.
Car horns are approximating Mardi Gras songs.
Black-and-gold-umbrella dances.
More high fives.
Right there, smiling children who can’t possibly grasp the moment like their parents can.
Big-drink-in-hand high fives.
Cell-phone-hand high fives.
A single boot on the ground across from Café du Monde.
Let’s play kick the boot!
A solitary woman snaps a photo of St. Louis Cathedral.
Your blogger sits and types his notes.
“Who Dat sitting on the phone, texting!” a girl yells.
“He Dat!” her boyfriend chants.
Me Dat, your blogger thinks.
Drew Brees jerseys everywhere.
Reggie Bush jerseys almost everywhere.
A Deuce McAllister jersey catches the eye.
Café au lait, then another, at Café du Monde.
Powdered sugar and jubilation floating in the air.
Around Jackson Square, tarot card readings.
Candles burn, lighting a dark corner.
Nothing beats the smiles of a young stoner couple.
Beads, beads, beads.
A Jeremy Shockey jersey, filled out like I’d never seen, stumbles over to Who Dat and high-five me.
“Halftime (Stand Up & Get Crunk)” fills the cold air.
Improvised percussion. A small parade starts.
Ghetto booties follow.
There are few, if any, street performers out here.
And yet, everyone out here qualifies, in a sense.
Cars roll by as people stand through the sunroofs.
Moonroofs?
What came first, those or Texas Stadium?
Glassy eyes.
Trucks roll by as people stand in the flatbeds.
A jazz band parades past us.
Broken glass.
Handheld cams.
Spills.
Yep, this is what the Quarter smells like.
A lot of black and gold.
A little purple and gold.
Pretty girls.
(Many of them female)
A Saints Tailgating Crew mini-bus.
Cops on horseback.
Shirtless guys standing on the roof of a moving Suburban.
Does everyone out here have style and rhythm? Sure seems that way.
“Let’s repeat!” he says, and then he high-fives your blogger.
A man and his son ride their bikes through the craziness.
A blue hula hoop gets a workout around more black and gold.
A “When the Saints” parade breaks out, punctuated by Who Dats.
Group photos. Say “Brees.”
Group photos that from a distance, in the dark, resemble team photos.
A young woman announces she must soon relieve herself.
A split-second later, she Who Dats me, then high-fives me.
Her boyfriend slaps my hand, but it doesn’t feel like a high five.
Cat in the Hat hats in Mardi Gras colors near Pat O’s.
A single glove on the ground at the entrance.
The streets have fewer people on them than you’d think.
Five are making the noise of 10.
Ah, and then I turn onto Bourbon.
Five hundred make the noise of 1,000.
Garbage is fast piling up against the curbs.
Balcony parties.
Lip lock.
A Manning jersey — Saints, No. 8.
No sign of the Manning jersey — Colts, No. 18 — from this afternoon.
“Livin’ on a Prayer” sung twice in two blocks.
Bourbon is crowded.
And then some.
The girl pushing against me wants me to back up.
I can’t.
“Get the heck off me,” she says.
Except she doesn’t say “heck.”
She can’t grasp the force pushing me into her.
Or the force pushing her into me.
The Bourbon Street crowd is a little more surly.
This has crowd surge written all over it.
It’s probably a good time to duck in for beignets and elbow room.
Everyone seems to want to high-five the guy by himself.
There’s joy, disbelief and catharsis everywhere.
And no riots, fires or looting, at least not where I can see.
I’m cold, and it’s a long, long walk to where I left my car.
I hope it’s still there.
I’m glad I came. This was the place to be when the Saints won the Super Bowl.
The Saints won the Super Bowl. Mardi Gras may never end.
Lombardi Gras has a pretty respectable momentum itself.
Time to give the thumbs a rest.
I might need them to hitch a ride if I can’t find my car.
⚜
Seven years later, I’m struck by how many references there are in this play-by-play account of French Quarter revelry that a person would struggle to understand without having some familiarity with: a) New Orleans culture; b) the Saints’ many losing seasons; c) Super Bowl history; d) Mardi Gras; and e) the allowance of open containers of alcoholic beverages on the streets of New Orleans.
The sense of connection, in scope and in fervor, was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. All of us were part of a community, even if you didn’t know anybody else on the streets that night. We were all friends. We all knew what that championship, something many thought we’d never live to see, meant to post-Katrina New Orleans and to people who remember what the city was like before Aug. 29, 2005, the day the hurricane came ashore.
Seven years after that Lombardi Gras night, instead of being able to enjoy the anniversary, New Orleans was busy picking up the pieces from another destructive strike from nature. That nearly convinced me not to repost this old blog piece. But, at a time when it’s almost impossible to imagine the kind of togetherness I felt on the streets with thousands of strangers, I’ve been revisiting good days in America, good memories. This qualifies.
Published February 8, 2017
Lucky Dog photo by Lori Monahan Borden via Shutterstock.
St. Louis Cathedral photo by Natalia Bratslavsky via Shutterstock.
Café du Monde photo by Andriy Blokhin via Shutterstock.
Drew Brees photo by Action Sports Photography via Shutterstock.
Note: Yep, no camera that night. Just the BlackBerry. So even though these photos are from different days in New Orleans history, they help, I hope, paint a more colorful picture than just the many words I pieced together with my thumbs on that wild night seven years ago.
Published December 28, 2016
Gary Laney died without warning Friday, two days before Christmas. He was 47. The news was crushing. The shock hasn’t worn off, and I am flailing about in search of words.
His funeral is happening now in Baton Rouge. I wish he were here to talk about it with me. Gary’s presence here two years ago, the day before the funeral of our first editor in the daily newspaper business, was a gift to me from the cosmos. Now, he’s gone, and we are not having lunch together, not having beers, not telling Lake Charles stories, laughing and crying.
In a year of so much loss, Gary’s death is one of the hardest losses to bear.
We first met in the mid-1980s, when my journalism career was just getting started and he was a high school student with an interest in sports writing and newspaper work. He came up one day to the makeshift press box at Legion Field in Lake Charles where I was covering American Legion games, and on some level, he never left. Gary was like a friendly puppy, tagging along as I did my job. He was likable, smart, curious, full of questions, and eager to discuss sports, music, writing and many other subjects.
Published March 24, 2016
The photo I took of the church at St. Joseph Abbey and Seminary College in August 2010 speaks to me of more than one time of transition in my life. I pulled it from the archives this month upon learning of the death of longtime Louisiana sportswriter Marty Mulé.
Six summers ago, I accepted a job in Oregon and left Louisiana, which had been my home state since birth. On Aug. 9, 2010, I loaded my car with essentials and set off on a weeklong drive to the West Coast to visit family in California, taking a right turn before reaching the Pacific Ocean and headline up the coastline to my new home. On Aug. 7, I spent some quiet time at St. Joseph — or, as current and former students call it, St. Ben’s. This was a multipurpose visit: fresh air, reflections (the visual and the introspective kind), a reconnecting with a place that had a profound impact on me long ago, and other reasons too complex to revisit here. It was my good fortune that I could end the day having dinner with Marty.
He’d heard I was moving, and he’d wondered if we could get together before I left the state. He reached out to me less than a week before my scheduled departure. No, he wouldn’t be in Baton Rouge before I left, which presented a logistical problem. When I realized he lived close to St. Ben’s, we finalized our plans. I’d spend some time on the grounds at St. Joseph, and we’d meet for dinner at Acme Oyster House on the Northshore. My last Cajun seafood meal would be with Marty.
It was an unexpected last Louisiana supper. Marty and I weren’t especially close. We never worked for the same newspaper, although he wrote columns for Tiger Rag, where I was working when I accepted the job in Oregon. He was not a mentor in the formal sense, but for whatever reason he took an interest in me and in my writing, and we became friendly. He had a way of making people with far less experience than he — and far less talent — feel special.
“I know this is a big deal if Carl Dubois is here,” he’d say if we bumped into each other at an event. It was one of those things you could pretty much count on Marty saying, and it would make you smile and put you at ease every time. You were always glad to see Marty.
Marty had made it onto my radar long before he knew anything about me. At my first job, in Lake Charles, I heard about feature stories he’d written that had impressed my boss and co-workers. His was a name I quickly grew to respect before I’d ever put a face to the name. To me, he was a big-time sportswriter, but upon meeting him, I could not imagine him ever trying to big-time anyone. He was a common man with uncommon storytelling ability, someone who could make magic out of plain language and the facts. He was a genuine guy, good company no matter the place, a man with a passion for reporting and writing.
One day at work, I heard about a story he’d written that referenced the 1958 national championship team at LSU, with a specific mention of the squad known as the “Chinese Bandits.” The nickname came from a comic strip called Terry and the Pirates, which later became a television adventure series. There’s virtually no chance a team would adopt a nickname like that today. Even in the 1980s, when the story came up, there was an uncomfortable edge because of the nickname. Indeed, I listen as my boss and co-workers said the term had been stricken from Marty’s story because it was politically incorrect. That news brought a different kind of discomfort, but it wouldn’t be the last time I’d hear a story like it. Since then, I’ve seen plenty of writers and publications struggle with reporting the details about a point in history and, rather than acknowledge the language of that particular time, completely scrub it, as if it never existed. In the case of Marty’s story, I remember thinking that omitting that piece of history would rob the story of one of its essential pieces, and thus, the richness of full reporting. The discussion in the office made an impression on me, and it resonated as I got to know Marty. The more familiar I became with his work and work ethic, the stronger my realization of his commitment to historical accuracy — the good, the bad, and the ugly. I never asked Marty about it. Now, I wish I had. I’m sure his response would have been more thoughtful and layered than my perspective.
At dinner that August night in 2010, we shared stories from our past, and we shared some laughs. Marty paid for dinner, and he gave me a copy of one of his books. It accompanied me on my drive to Oregon the following week.
When I heard about his death on March 12, I remembered that day of walking around on the grounds at St. Joseph. I recalled the peaceful feeling and the calm place it put me in for my meal with Marty. It sent me to the Internet to look up details, and I discovered that the day before he died, flooding hit the grounds at St. Joseph hard. Looking at its website, I saw that familiar, postcard-like view of the abbey church, the one everyone captures with their camera or phone when they are there. The view I wanted to take with me on that August day.
I dug into my archives and found the photo I took. It took me back to that afternoon, and to the feeling I had retracing long-ago steps on the grounds there. It took me back to the warm feeling I had before having dinner with Marty, and after. I pulled out Marty’s book. I opened it and found the inscription he penned for me before handing the book to me as we parted ways: To Carl, some memories of your roots!
— Marty
I found our last email exchanges, and our references to my “last supper” in Louisiana. In his email, Marty’s words were in Marty’s voice: “Listen,” he began as he wrote about the meal, starting a sentence in an email the way he often did in speech. I could hear him, and it made me wish I could listen to him again.
Thanks, Marty. For the meal, for the friendship, for everything.
Listen, rest in peace, my friend. If I should bump into you again, I’ll know it’s a big deal, because you will be there.