Facebook says my hometown is Grand Forks, ND because I was born on the Air Force base there, but we lived in anonymously drab base housing, and went to base schools. I don't remember much of it besides having a blast in the snow and playing hockey on any scrap of ice we could find. Oh, and my older brother got his picture in the paper once for winning a speed skating competition.
My parents are both from the south, and we got a pretty thoroughly southern upbringing both before and after they split. We were probably the only family on base eating homemade boiled peanuts thanks to my dad's GA upbringing.
You could make the case that either Atlantic coastal Florida or Biloxi, MS could be my hometown because I split time between the two during my school years. I guess if you put a gun to my head I'd say I "grew up" in Florida, since I went to elementary and finished high school there.
There was my detour out to Los Angeles, which was a lot of fun, and a great experience, but is not home...no matter how much I want to hijack a plane and hit Hop Louie for Chinese or grab a Tommy's chiliburger from time to time.
And then there's New Orleans. I came over here to visit and party more times than I can count when I lived in Biloxi. I wasn't born here. I didn't go to school here. I don't have a yat accent, although I have since learned to speak it (dont pahk ya car up on the neutral ground dawlin, they writin tickets for dat this yeah!). I had to hammer the NOLA slang out of my vocabulary when I moved from LA to L.A. rather than keep explaining what I meant when I said I wanted my sandwich dressed or my coffee regular, but I make no claim to being a native. For the record, it took about six minutes for all that NOLA slang and then some to come back when I got back to the area. I will also confess that when I first moved to the gulf coast (in Biloxi) that I absolutely hated the Saints with a passion. It was the pre-internet/sunday ticket/sports bar/every game on TV days. I didn't hate them for being the Saints-I hated them because I was lucky to get two Dolphins games a season out of market back then. Eventually, around 1999 or 2000, thanks to Buddy D and a thoroughly likeable bunch of players, I finally admitted that I had become a Saints fan. They promptly went 3-13 and I got a small taste of the then-30 year heartbreak.
At this point, I have lived in New Orleans longer than any other place. This city makes me completely insane. Its dirty, crime-ridden, corrupt, the roads/schools/drainage are terrible, and full of some of the most ignorant bastards you could ever meet in your life. At the same time its welcoming, culturally relevant, vibrant, accepting, colorful, booming, and full of some of the most wonderfully awesome warm, loving people (including some of those same ignorant bastards) you could ever even begin to hope to meet. I've been around long enough to join in with Benny Grunch on some, though not that many, of the verses of "Ain't there no mo!" I was here for K&B and Schwegman's. I remember the Maison Blanche. I remember the wave of places that never came back from Katrina. I'll never be a native, but we've done some time, this city and I.
In the wake of That Bitch Katrina, I took a job in inland South Carolina, up by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Two weeks after I got there the trees turned for the fall and it was all sweeping vistas exploding with color. It was clean, quiet, people were super nice, the streets were smooth, you didn't get panhandled at every intersection by batshit crazy homeless people in tights and shrimp boots...and I was absolutely miserable. I was so homesick I would have happily accepted a short stint in prison for a hot sausage poboy and a pineapple Big Shot or to have someone ask me "Where y'at behb?" I don't know if it says more about me or New Orleans that when I was in a situation where I landed in a good job in a "normal" city that all I could think about was getting back down here.
In the end though, I think your hometown has a lot more to do with where you feel like you, rather than geographics or demographics. I love the time I get to spend with branches of my family in different places, but there's always something that clicks into place when I come back across the twin spans and I see the skyline off in the distance. THIS is home.
I liked it. My boy is a writer.
ReplyDelete