New Orleans, counting down

I’ve been back in New Orleans for just over a week; this time next week I’ll be in Auckland again. Only a month left on my residency: I’ll miss it terribly. Especially as the Auckland City Council has acted, finally, and is promising to lock Bowen Lane at night.

It’s decidedly autumnal in NOLA, though no doubt it’s still much warmer than in other parts of the country. (In Iowa City, this was the week the Farmers’ Market closed until April.) Here it’s mild and sunny, almost chilly in the shade and at nights – not exactly mists and mellow fruitfulness, but better than wet-hot, as it’s been for months. Some of the big houses on State and St. Charles have insanely elaborate Halloween decorations: I’ll try and take some photos tomorrow, though many of them are lit to look their sinister best at night.

Halloween is a big deal here, and tends to go on all weekend. We have two party invitations for Friday night. As usual, we’ve left costume decisions until the last minute. One year in Iowa we dressed as Dead Currencies and Dead Languages; our second year there we decided to be less conceptual, and T. Middy went out dressed as Harry Potter, complete with lightning scar and messed-up glasses. At the Eastside Hy-Vee supermarket, where we were purchasing our usual vats of Yellow Tail, he was accosted by some drunk students: “Harry Potter, all right!” I was an Iowa cheerleader that night. I still have the little skirt, with IOWA in yellow letters across the back, but I think the pom-poms drowned in the flood.

This year I’m opting for semi-conceptual, and dressing as the Spectre of Marxism. Apparently, during my absence from the US, it has been revealed that Obama is not only a Muslim and an Arab who was really born in Kenya, not Hawaii; he’s also planning to impose collective ownership and other evil Marxist ways on us. (Oh, and he’s also the Anti-Christ.)

TM is digging out his dreadlocks wig and some selections from his vast wardrobe of All Blacks gear, and going as Tama Umaga, the AB’s former captain. That way, he says, his costume can be literal AND figurative. Because, according to one of our neighbors, who stopped by when Tom was attaching an Obama/Biden sticker to our car, if That One is elected, it will be a scary time. Not because Obama is black, he explained, but because he, the neighbor, is white. I can’t remember his logic exactly, maybe because he didn’t have any, but basically he thinks that when black people are in charge, item one on the list is taking revenge big-time on white people. Presumably by imposing Marxism, Islam, Tyler Perry movies, etc.

This neighbor is young, by the way, but not a Tulane student.

I’ve been swallowed up in too much Tulane business while I’ve been back, and I’m looking forward to getting back to my own work in Auckland. But first there’s the African Writers’ Symposium on Saturday, and the Sarah Lockwood/Billy Mohl wedding extravaganza, and the election. Early voting closed last night in Louisiana, and Sarah spent hours yesterday waiting in line to vote. Thousands of people here have already cast their votes. Louisiana is likely to stay Republican – because McCain is perceived as more sympathetic to squirrel hunters or the overweight or something – but there are other things at stake this election, i.e. the Senate and the House of Representatives. And, you know, the future of the world, but we’re driving ourselves crazy enough with anxiety as it is.