Along the same line as my last post from Californnia, I had a great conversation with Chef Donald Mutin from Morton's Steakhouse last night. Our conversation played out some of the things we had talked about a couple of weeks earlier when I interviewed Donald for the FoodFetish podcast.
Donald's house in Lakeview was completely destroyed when the flood wall right behind his house broke and the storm waters washed it away. After that he wound up working in Burbank for a while before moving with his family to Houston. Now he commutes between NOLA and Houston every week or two in order to be with his wife and kids. What he most wants is to get everything back up and running (something that won't be happening for some time) so his family can all be together again in New Orleans.
For Donald, as well as pretty much everyone else at the party, the Crescent City is the only place to be, and everyone has a story about friends, family and helpful strangers who can't imagine why they would want to come back. Tonight I'll be at my friend Tom Morgan's house where a whole group from Krewe du Vieux will be there celebrating their own sense of home sweet home.
That's the pull of this place. It gets in your blood just like the humidity gets into your bones. Once your connected, it's almost impossible to disconnect. After a number of conversations about this emotional phenomenon, I've been trying to figure out where it comes from for me and what it ultimately means, but I'm still not sure. Armistead Maupin describes this feeling in the first novel of his Tales of the City series. In that book he describes the feeling of San Francisco reaching out to welcome you home as you fly into SFO. It is a feeling I recognized the first time I read the ilne over 25 years ago and it is a feeling I have never felt for any place other than San Francisco; not until about two years ago flying into New Orleans. The moment I felt that feeling, as the plane cruised low over the river, I knew that I would have to move here in order to explore that feeling, and what it meant for me, in more depth.
Last night, as Donald and I talked, we discussed how deeply people feel about this city and how it's really something you either get or you don't.
Right now I think it's important for anyone and everyone who loves this place to work to communicate "what it means to miss New Orleans" to as many people as possible, because OTHER people getting it is vital to the survival of this precious jewel of American cities.
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