.png)
How could I ever explain to my one-year-old son that, less than a block from his daycare, I once watched a guy pour a can of gasoline onto a couch, calmly flick a lighter, and set it on fire?
Or that, in the very spot where we park for drop-off, I once relieved myself in a rented U-haul that rocked like a canoe?
Isn’t this the popular idea of Mardi Gras? Drunk college kids run amok?
Let's get one thing straight: Mardi Gras is notorious for its debauchery, but it's the first place I experienced everything I love about life.
I write this as we enter Carnival season in New Orleans, and as the city prepares to shut down for two weeks of revelry that most will have to repent for, come Ash Wednesday.
Since our son was born just days before Mardi Gras last year, we spent the parades hunkered down inside, the echoes of drums and subwoofers and viruses in the distance.
So, we're calling this year his first.
The season’s rhythms and traditions run so deep in my life that I begin to miss it even as it lies on the horizon.
Because Carnival is continuous. Like a strand of beads, or a roll of Tucks toilet paper, or the ancient wagon wheels that have conveyed floats since the 1890s. Each year, it rolls back around, carrying renewed zest and the hazy memories of Mardi Gras past.
As I bring a baby into the fray, I bring with me 33 years’ worth of memory—whose weight sits disproportionately toward childhood.
The parade route is a serious place to do some growing up.
I've watched cops race toward the sound of gunfire blocks from where I stood. Revelers have been run over by floats. Riders occasionally fall off, left dangling from their tethers. As a child, I remember peeking over the shoulders of the adults who had gathered around a man kicked by a horse. He was okay, they told us: “Now you know. Never walk in front of a car or behind a horse.”
Despite this undercurrent of danger and vice, this place helped raise me. Before I became that college kid, I spent 36 weeks of my life—more than half a year—on the parade route experiencing Carnival’s lessons through a child’s eyes.
My first taste of freedom came in the form of a Budweiser, discreetly passed by my brother. Him pleading with my mom to bring me down to Superior Grill, where the high school kids gathered, and showing me where you could pee without being caught by the cops.
My love of culture stems not just from the miles-long processions of floats and bands, but from the creative spirit it brings out in all of us. Like the lady I overheard in Michaels a week ago: "I'm not crafty, but it's for my Mardi Gras costume, so I gotta try."
My sense of community was solidified months after Katrina, when people who'd been flung around the country returned home for Carnival. I rode on our school's traditional Mardi Gras Day float in 2006. A thin line of spectators lined the route where deep crowds stood in years past—a reminder that the storm had stretched this community to its limit but had not yet broken it.
The revelry and the danger and the nostalgia and the heartbreak live together openly in New Orleans. And Carnival is the ultimate concentration of the city—two weeks where it all bursts out in the open, infecting even the most uptight with the will to live like no one cares what the hell we're doing.
Growing up in the thick of it, you see how community, culture and freedom make us human, and how putting all three together with tons of plastic beads and a decent beat makes us savage.
And I can only hope that when my son and his little pals embark on their school stroller parade next week, he takes a moment to notice the spot of earth where a sofa once smoldered. And I hope that a new group of college kids are blocking the corner where we park with a putrid U-haul.
I'll roll the stroller around and tell him: these are the things you learn to appreciate with a little experience.