Steady in Its Rhythm

 Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, translated from the French, is the final day of feasting before Lent. Lent is a forty-day season in the Christian tradition devoted to prayer, fasting, and reflection in preparation for Easter.

The Mardi Gras tradition took shape in medieval Europe, with roots in Ancient Rome, and was brought to North America by French settlers in the 1700s. It eventually found its true home in New Orleans. The first organized parades began in the 1800s, and that is when Mardi Gras truly gained popularity. Private social clubs, known as krewes, formed to plan elaborate parades and elegant balls. Colors, costumes, and intricate floats became central to the celebration. Beads often featured symbols from ancient myths and classic literature, linking the celebration to timeless stories. King cakes, baked with small plastic babies, became a symbol of good luck.

Beyond the spectacle, Mardi Gras plays an important role in strengthening community bonds and supporting the local economy. After Hurricane Katrina, it became a beacon of hope during recovery, a symbol of resilience, rebirth, and unity. Mardi Gras remains beloved and enduring. Bad weather, hard times, even tragedy cannot stop it. It endures.

I took a stroll down by the river after breakfast and sat there for a while.

It is impossible to understand New Orleans without understanding the Mississippi River. The city does not just sit beside it. It exists because of it. The port, culture, trade, and daily rhythms have all been shaped by that constant presence beyond the French Quarter. For centuries, the river has dictated the pace and possibility of the city. Goods flowed through it. Music and culture traveled along it. Neighborhoods developed in response to it. It is not background scenery. It is history and identity all at once.

Unlike the sensory chaos of Mardi Gras, the Mississippi offers something very different: consistency. It moves whether you acknowledge it or not. It flows whether you are celebrating, recovering, or standing still. That consistency is especially noticeable the morning after Mardi Gras, when the noise fades, the city exhales, and the river continues exactly as it always has, strong, constant, and indifferent.

Standing by the river, thinking of the intensity of Mardi Gras, the contrast is clear. Mardi Gras teaches you to surrender to spontaneity and the river teaches you to yield to the flow of time. One overwhelms you with sensation; the other reminds you of continuity.

You cannot stop the current of the Mississippi. You can only decide how to stand beside it, watch it, and move with it. After the overstimulation of Mardi Gras, the river is quiet and still moving. The river carries on, steady in its rhythm, unbroken, and in our own way, we all must do the same.

Best beignets at Loretta's. Praline-filled on the left. Crab-filled on the right. Wow.

Moving with the Rhythm

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is chaos and magic coexisting in a way that should not work, but somehow does. The city itself becomes the experience. Parades roll, routes shift, crowds gather and thin in waves, and the atmosphere changes depending on where you are standing. On a map, everything looks logical. In practice, moving through the city during Mardi Gras feels anything but expected.

My instinct, as a teacher and lifelong planner, is to impose structure on an experience. I think in familiar terms: where am I going first, what is the route, what is the objective, what is the outcome. Before I realize it, I am mentally drafting a lesson plan for the day. Mardi Gras dispatches those notions instantly and laughs at your foolishness. The parades reroute you. The crowds redirect you. The volume of sound, color, and motion make planning feel useless.

You can leave with a general direction in mind, but the environment has its own vibration. A parade blocks the street you expected to walk down. A crowd thickens and your pace slows whether you intended it or no

 I drifted down to Canal Street and found myself in the middle of the Zulu parade. The bands echoing off the buildings and the sound reverberating down the palm-lined street in waves. The crowd wore layers of Mardi Gras color - purple, green, and gold beads over jackets and hoodies, sequined tops catching the sun, feathered accessories, face paint, and patterned shirts that looked festive but comfortably worn. Along the barricades, people leaned forward in anticipation, phones in one hand and the other already half-raised for throws. Riders and performers passed in elaborate costumes with tall feathered headdresses, bright fabrics, and painted faces, close enough to shake hands with the crowd. At one point, a throw hit me in the chest, but I was too busy fiddling with a photo to react. It dropped to the pavement, and within seconds someone beside me picked it up without hesitation. No frustration, no complaint,  just the understanding that if you hesitate, the moment moves on with the crowd.

The rhythm carries you into the French Quarter in the afternoon. You hear the band near Jackson Square, you dance, and then you join the second line without overthinking where you are supposed to go. Royal Street is packed. The crowd moves as one body, spilling into the street, especially outside Toulouse Theater where it feels less like foot traffic and more like a roaming costume ball. At Bourbon and Dauphine, a Lady Gaga dance party breaks out and strangers sing along and dance with you. You bump into a group of Golden Gals dressed as Hooters waitresses. A guy sees your Red Sox hat and shouts “Go Sox.” You give him a high five and tell him he looks like Gronk. He laughs and says it is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to him. You laugh too and wonder if it's true. Purple, green, and gold beads swing from necks and shoulders. Costumes pass. Music carries. Motion does not stop. None of it is scheduled. None of it is random. It simply is, and you are inside it.

You stop trying to control every minute and start observing what is actually happening. You follow energy instead of directions. Your awareness instead of a schedule. The city stops feeling chaotic and easier to connect with when you observe instead of trying to manage every moment.

Mardi Gras does not operate on a syllabus. It operates on rhythm, spontaneity, and the collective energy of the crowd  and the more you surrender to that rhythm, the more you feel inside the moment.

Finding The Rhythm

Dispatches from the Crescent City: Finding The Rhythm 

You’ll be walking, getting your bearings after flying and suddenly landing in a place that feels totally different, especially when you’ve just left 35-degree winter in Boston and stepped into warm New Orleans air. Your body notices that shift immediately. The temperature, the humidity, the weight of the air, it all hits at once, and there is a brief stretch where your mind is trying to take in the surroundings while your body is still finding its natural rhythm again. Air travel shrinks distance, but it does not instantly reset how your body settles into a new environment.

So you move more focused than usual, paying attention to your balance, your footing, and the ground beneath you, which in New Orleans is not exactly forgiving. The sidewalks are uneven enough that you cannot just wander aimlessly while looking around. You are adapting to the city while also staying aware of each step, watching where you land your feet as you absorb the sounds, the buildings, and the energy around you.

And then, still adjusting to the rhythm of the city, you approach a club and casually wander in.

Before you’ve even seen the band, you hear them.

The trumpet hits first, sharp and immediate, cutting cleanly through the air. The piano is already there underneath it, steady and constant, not trying to stand out, just existing beneath the rest of the sound. Then the saxophone comes in with controlled blasts that feel close, filling the room in waves instead of drifting through it, while a clarinet weaves lightly through the air and a trombone expands the sound outward. The drums are subtler at first, but once you notice them, they stop sounding like a separate instrument and start feeling like the pulse of the room.

It sounds alive.

You start to notice how the sound fills the space and settles into the room, louder in some moments and softer in others, constantly shifting but never chaotic. Instead, it feels responsive, like the musicians are adjusting as much as they are playing.

The longer you stand there, the more it becomes clear that the band is not just performing at the same time.

They are reacting to one another.

One instrument steps forward. Another gives space. Something starts to build and then subtly shifts direction because someone heard something, felt something, and adjusted without a word.

Nothing feels scripted, yet nothing feels random.

There is patience in the rhythm and restraint in how each instrument steps forward. A note lingers slightly longer than expected, another instrument leans into it, and the trajectory changes just enough to be felt rather than seen.

You stop scanning the room.

You stop noticing everyone else around you.

You stop analyzing what you’re hearing.

And without really noticing when it happens, your attention shifts.

You stop thinking and just listen.

Crawfish étouffée

Lessons from the Dead

Dispatches from the Crescent City: Lessons from the Dead

I woke up January 1 in New Orleans and I wasn’t even hungover! I took a cold shower, which is something I never do. There was no hot water, but I  wanted to get wet. Maybe to wash 2025 off. I could only tolerate it for a minute or two. Then I got dressed and started walking towards the French Market. 

The sun was shining and 2026 felt like a blessing. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I just wandered around. I walked through Jackson Square and saw massive lines at Cafe du Monde, so I definitely wasn’t getting beignets. I walked through the whole French Market. Most food places were still closed. The market was opening slowly this morning it seemed. 

The French Market has always opened this way. Not ceremonially. Not all at once. It exists because someone decided it should. In 1784, under Spanish rule, the city formally designated this stretch by the river as the place where trade would happen. People were already buying and selling here. The decision did not create commerce. It just made it official.  

Over the years the buildings of the market were destroyed, rebuilt, and shifted around. None of that mattered much. The point was never the structure. The point was the trade. The exchange.

Markets survive because they are honest about what’s exchanged. You know why you are there. You know what you are giving. You know what you are getting. Relationships fail for the opposite reason. We act as if they exist outside of terms. We assume understanding instead of checking it. Time, attention, trust, and effort are always being exchanged, but we rarely say it out loud. When those terms change, as they always do, we hope things will somehow hold without being renegotiated. Markets do not do that. They adjust openly. They last because the terms are clear and the exchange is honest.

I walked back down Decatur Street. The line for chicory coffee and beignets was even longer. There was literally not a single person at the Market Cafe, which is thirty seconds away from Cafe du Monde. A guy working there hollered. “Want breakfast?” That was exactly what I wanted, so I sat outside by the railing in the closest seat to the golden Joan of Arc statue. 

Shrimp and grits

Joan of Arc was a peasant teenager from Domrémy who appeared in French history at a moment of collapse. In the early fifteenth century, France was losing the Hundred Years’ War. The British controlled large portions of the country. The French crown was weak and divided. In 1429, Joan claimed she was instructed by divine voices to support Charles VII and drive the British from France. 

For a brief moment, Joan was protected because what she did was working. In 1429, she convinced French commanders to let her accompany the army during the siege of Orléans, where she urged an aggressive assault rather than continued delay. The siege was lifted. Over the following weeks, French forces won a series of battles along the Loire River, reopening territory that had been lost to the British. Joan then insisted that Charles VII travel to Reims, deep in contested land, where he was crowned king. She did not command armies, but she gave direction, confidence, and urgency at a moment when all three were missing. As long as her presence coincided with progress and legitimacy for the crown, she was protected.

That protection did not last. In 1430, Joan was captured by Burgundian forces, a rival French faction that had allied itself with the British during the Hundred Years’ War. They handed her over to British authorities, who put her on trial in a church court. The trial was not really about religion. It was about discrediting Joan and weakening the French king she had helped put on the throne. Over months of interrogation, she was pressured to deny the voices she said guided her and to abandon the men’s clothing she wore, which church officials treated as disobedience and used against her. She understood the stakes clearly. If she recanted, she would live. If she stood by what she believed was true, she would die. Joan briefly signed a confession to save herself, then withdrew it, refusing to live a lie. In 1431, at the age of nineteen, she was executed by being burned at the stake in the city of Rouen.

What I admire about Joan is not her faith, but her clarity. She refused to live a life she knew was false. Sitting looking at Joan’s statue and only steps away from the French Market, the contrast is hard to ignore. The market survives because it is honest. When the terms no longer work, they are adjusted openly. Joan lived that same honesty as a person. She told the truth and would not bend it to survive. The market endures because it faces the truth. Joan was executed because living honestly left her standing alone in the fire.

After breakfast, I walked back to the hotel, but stopped in at Erin Rose for frozen Irish coffee. I stayed for two because that place vibes in the late morning.

I made a brief visit to my hotel before going to St. Louis Cemetery no. 1. You have to enter the adjacent building to get the tickets. Inside there was a really interesting map. It showed in red the areas of New Orleans that had at least 12 inches of water after Hurricane Katrina.   

The tour guide was very energetic and entertaining, and used the cemetery itself to explain how New Orleans has always had to negotiate with water, death, and history at the same time. Because of the high water table and frequent flooding, the dead are buried above ground in tombs and wall vaults, otherwise coffins would eventually float back to the surface.  

Bodies are sealed inside the tombs until they naturally decompose. After a year and a day, the tomb is reopened, the remaining dust swept into the corner, and space is made for the next family member. As we walked, we passed the pyramid shaped tomb purchased by Nicolas Cage and nearby memorials honoring soldiers who manned the cannons during the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson, reminders of how the city folds national myth-making directly into its burial grounds.

We stopped at the tomb of Homer Plessy, the man whose arrest for sitting in a whites-only railroad car led to Plessy v. Ferguson and the Supreme Court’s disastrous endorsement of “separate but equal.” That ruling legalized racial segregation for more than half a century, shaping everyday life in the United States until it was finally overturned in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Standing there made it clear this wasn’t abstract legal history,  it was a real person, buried here, whose quiet act of resistance helped define an entire era of American injustice.

The most intriguing story belonged to Marie Laveau. The tour guide showed us a fake tomb and a real tomb, explaining that the famous site most visitors see is a decoy, and that someone once broke into the cemetery, climbed the walls at night, and spray painted the real tomb pink. 

Her legacy has been reduced to superstition, but she was deeply involved in herbal and holistic medicine among people excluded from the medical establishment, and the effort to shut her down reflected a broader power grab by medical and social elites. Even the often mocked voodoo dolls began as practical health charts. I in an oral healing tradition, figures marked with pins to show where a patient had been treated, allowing practitioners to remember who had been treated for what and where in a system that relied on memory rather than written records. Her story makes clear that what gets labeled superstition is often just knowledge practiced outside the approval of those in charge.

Standing in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, surrounded by tombs, crypts, sand  the quiet certainty of endings, it became clear that understanding death sharpens the urgency of living. Accepting that nothing lasts is not morbid here, it is clarifying, a reminder to live with intention, curiosity, and purpose while we still can.

Tomb of the soldiers who fired cannons with Andrew Jackson, and the Battle of New Orleans

Nicolas Cage's tomb

Homer Plessy

Marie Laveau's tomb