Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans

New Orleans in early summer, with the sun shining through the balconies of the French Quarter, creating blocks of swirling Arabic letters on the brick and stucco walls behind them, mixing chirping Patois and languid Gulla with the broad flat vowels of Texarkana, confounding the eye and ear at every corner -- New Orleans in June is a sweet chunk of marzipan one could chew all one's days. In late summer, that same sweetness will cloy, and produce what are known locally as the vapors, the aversion to all things warm and honeyed. Women will put a dash of vinegar in their soups and bathwater; men will sprinkle cucumber and lemon into their handkerchieves, and decorously mop their brows. But that is later. June is a dream, crisp and clear and golden.

On Borchardt Street ... the trees on either side branched up and met in a thicket of green and scarlet, and the light that came in through to the street and sidewalk below was dappled -- at midday it was like walking through confetti. The flowering bushes that spread out along the fences and sent purple and yellow vines up along the clapboard walls contributed all the more to the festive effect. Small birds darted in and out among the blossoms and white butterflies hovered over the small vegetable patches that crept around from side gardens, thrust themselves up next to the gate.

(from Life Drawing by Michael Grumley)



"Grumley died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind this wistful, if not thoroughly conceived coming-of- age novel. The story, which follows a wide-eyed young man named Mickey as he grows up in and leaves Lillienthal, Iowa, has the sepia-toned cast of a memoir. There's an old-fashioned grace to Grumley's prose even when he's describing something as ordinary as Mickey's days as a golf caddy: ''The summer of West Side Story we sang 'Tonight' and 'Maria' at the top of our lungs along the club's fairways at dusk, startling the groundskeepers and the starlings.'' During high school, Mickey rides down the Mississippi on a barge and falls for a black card shark named James. It's not the most original plot in the world, but Grumley's description of their subsequent life in New Orleans is funny, evocative, and romantic ..."

-Jeff Giles
(Posted:10/11/91 -- Entertainment Weekly)

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