After the tornado

Notes from a trip away and awry

<Deep sigh…>

I’m back.

My short trip to New Orleans with my son came and went and along with it went my intention of posting updates from the road.

Things go awry. That’s just how life works. What you picture in your mind just doesn’t come to be. Something comes up or breaks down or goes off track. All of those colorful imaginings just… derail. Imagining how things will go is like seeing life as a set of train tracks: two neat iron rails proceeding straight from where you board to where you expect to arrive.

Life, however, is not a train ride. It is an Uber to the airport in a clown car operated by a drunken clown. You may or may not arrive where you expected but it will be a damn ride to remember; and you’ll probably miss your flight.

When my son and I travel together, we are nearly immune to derailment. It’s not that things go the way we imagined. It’s that we don’t actually imagine how they’ll go at all. We just set off and make it up as we go and roll on through whatever comes.

This time around, I suppose I had more of a mental picture than before our other trips because I have so much history with New Orleans. I didn’t need to imagine what the place might be like; I knew. I didn’t need to scout for hotels and restaurants by reading reviews and write-ups and recommendations; I had a laundry list of favorites.

And with all of that sentimental personal history came a sort of vaguely formed and somewhat romanticized general picture of the trip, I suppose. Somewhere, subconsciously, I think I was operating under the perfect setup for Things Going Awry: I had a picture in my head…

The first night, we’d eat crawfish and po boys at a place with vinyl red and white checkerboard tablecloths. The next day, we’d hit Café du Monde early for beignets and then hit Mother’s for a debris sandwich on our way to the Pelicans-Grizzlies game that night and see rising star Ja Morant. The third day, we’d hit one of my favorite places for a big, hearty meal of their signature slow-cooked pork. It would make for the kind of evening you linger over and remember and talk about.

That all sounded quite good and wonderful and well sequenced. It was a set of train tracks. Per my intro though, life hates train tracks. And travel plans never runs straight as a rail.

So, things derailed early and often.

The places I had in mind were closed, too busy, closed, too busy, and closed.

The basketball game with the rising star? He was scratched from the lineup.

In parallel, my son developed a cold that got progressively worse. Poor kid. Got him cold medication. It helped but not much…

What he most wanted was to veg out and rest and maybe hit the pool for a while and then maybe Uber somewhere later to eat. And I didn’t blame him one bit.

While I totally understood and wanted him to rest up too, it left me feeling restless a good part of those last couple days. So, I filled little one-hour windows. I wandered out to Bourbon Street and took pictures. I popped into a bar across the street and had a beer and then popped back to the room. I sort of flitted about from room to street to room and then shuttled us off somewhere to eat and shuttled us back.

That wasn’t quite what I had pictured heading into this trip.

I have a tendency to see my time with my son and especially our time spent traveling together in this warm, perfect, golden-hour light.

I picture it with this sweeping, cinematic nostalgia as if our trips are scenes from a father-son movie narrated by Jack Kerouac. Part of that comes from just loving my son. My time with him is so meaningful to me, it feels epic. It feels like magic and adventure. It feels special and grandiose enough to fill a movie screen. It feels like unbridled joy because it is.

And when you operate from that place, you tend to see meaning and importance in moments. And if there were a trip where that would likely be the case, this one was it.

When my son was two years old, his mother and I went to New Orleans for a long weekend. By that point, our relationship had already devolved into being so entirely untenable, I literally had no idea whether we were even going to get along for long enough to get to the airport.

And then we didn’t. Argued on the way. Checked in. And then she went and sat in one place and I went and sat in another.

Now, in my opinion, people use the phrase ‘I had an epiphany’ entirely too cavalierly. They use it to mean ‘I realized something’ whether that something was important or not. To me, an epiphany is a lightning bolt. It is a blinding flash across dark clouds that illuminates what was once dark. It is an insight so sharp and sudden, it cleaves apart what had been impenetrable murk.

I have had one epiphany in my life. It was at that moment, alone at an airport bar about to leave on a trip that was already poised to be just another trainwreck. Sitting there, I heard all of the things I had been saying in our endless arguments. The shorthands that had now become practiced as a result of the repetition of the same issues. I suddenly understood my son’s mother with a stunning new clarity. I have never had so sudden a crystal-clear realization about something important in my life either before or since.

Oddly enough, that epiphany thawed the ice because it gave me something to work with… and then we went and had a decent weekend.

The event I remember most from that trip was the two of us going out to dinner one night at one of my favorite places. We had a long meal. She had the rabbit stew. I had their signature dish. We lingered over dessert and then had after-dinner drinks.

I don’t remember what else we did that weekend but within a couple days, it was over and we were home. For the next couple months, I tried to work with the insight from my little airport epiphany to find some adjustment or reconfiguration or reworking of priorities that would make it somehow possible to stay together. There just wasn’t one.

No amount of swimming against the riptide was going to change that. And when you have kids, you can’t both drown. Eventually, no matter how much you might wish it were different, someone has to swim back to shore.

So, I did.

Made the decision to separate and that was that.

Sandwiched around that decision was just an absolute avalanche of terrible shit though. The deaths of three people in my life. A friend, my mother-in-law, my stepfather. A job loss. And on and on and on.

Over the next several years, one of the few respites was my annual trip back to New Orleans with friends. Each and every year, we would invariably end up eating at that same restaurant where my then wife and I had that last long, memorable meal before separating. My friends and I would drink mojitos at the bar and then sit down and eat well and laugh and drink for hours.

I was there in body. In spirit though, not so much. My life was just in such utter freefall. I was just reeling. I was unmoored… spinning… just trying to stay on my feet.

At some point during each of those dinners, I would excuse myself and quietly slip out to the street for a few minutes. I’d turn left out the door and walk just far enough down the side street to be out of sight of the restaurant’s windows. And then I’d just lean up against the brick wall and just… breathe. Inside were some of my closest friends. Outside, there was me standing under the orange neon glow of the restaurant sign taking deep breaths until I felt a settled calm.

It wasn’t just about catching my breath though. It was also about taking a personal inventory of sorts. It was about taking a step away to just process where I was at that very moment in the most chaotic period of my life. It was a pause to reflect on the whirlwind of shit that had happened in my life since I had been there last… and since I had been there with my then-wife.

My little sneak-aways were a tallying of the books… and for years, that was just a grim-as-fuck accounting. But each and every year, I did it because I knew at some future point, I would be right back there with those same friends and would excuse myself from the table and walk out to that same sidewalk and take that same inventory and see how far I had come.

I had absolutely no idea what that future might be. I didn’t know what it would like. I just knew what it would feel like. Or more, what it wouldn’t feel like: reeling, trying to hold on in a tornado as the world around spun.

About five years ago, I had to bow out of that annual trip. Along with it went those annual touchstones out on the sidewalk. I hadn’t been back until this past week when I took my son there. We went the first night we were in town. The wait was long and the food was great and we ate well and lingered over dessert.

At one point, just like I always did with my friends, I excused myself and walked out to the sidewalk for a minute and stood in the same place I always did. This time though, it wasn’t to ground myself for a minute in a place where I just felt the tornado tearing through my life acutely. It wasn’t to take a personal inventory.

This time, I walked out to the street to take a picture… because what I wanted at that moment was to remember it exactly as it was. Free of the overhang of the visits before. Unthinking about what might someday change or be different. Just that one moment. That Tuesday night in April 2023 on a last-minute trip with my son. Eating there together. The cochon and rabbit stew and pineapple upside down cake. Him, fifteen years old. The two of us just adding to the long, running Kerouac of our travels together.

The history of that place didn’t even cross my mind that night.

And I think that’s the ‘future me’ the reeling ‘former me’ took all of those personal inventories for…

This one. Me today.

For years, my life was a perpetual struggle to wrestle down trauma by finding a deliberate opposite in the few rays of sunlight that shone through dark clouds – even if only for a moment.

Finding One Good Thing.

If you follow me on Twitter and have seen my weekly tradition of asking people to post one good thing that happened in their life that week, this is why.

When the good things are the fewest, that is when you need them most. It only takes one thing to hold onto to make it through a tornado. I think that’s how I got through mine. I just found one good thing at a time and held on for dear life.

That dinner last week with my son at the restaurant with the long, heavy history, it was the first time I’ve been there free of its weight. It’s the first time I’ve been there without having to breathe deep or take stock of the past or prop up hopes for the future.

I was just present and settled and happy.

I think that’s what happens when you no longer have to make work of emotional survival.

You get to just be…

And, man, that is a fucking luxury. That is one damn glorious feeling.

For years, I made deliberate, stubborn work of scratching out moments to experience that feeling as a means of getting to a time when it hopefully wouldn’t be so goddamned hard.

I clawed for those damn moments. Sometimes, even the work of that was exhausting; and the relief was like a smile through gritted teeth.

Traveling with my son though… has always been among the purist and most complete of my joys no matter the windspeed around me.

I picture all of our times away together in such a grandiose, cinematic way. It is captured only in installments; but it is the story of his childhood and my fatherhood and a decade and a half so far of the two of us just rolling on together through fire and flood.

If it were a movie, the final scene would be the two of us pulling out of some little town somewhere in the Southwest. A convertible with the top down. Me behind the wheel. My fifteen-year-old son, arm on the window. The shot framed tight on the back of the car as it pulls out onto a two-lane highway and the fades off into the distance as the camera lifts up into the sky and the shot widens until the car is just a Matchbox on an endless road as the credits roll.

If these trips were a movie, that would be the sweeping, panoramic, final scene; the characters just heading off to the next someplace, the next somewhere. It doesn’t matter where. It’s the travel that matters.

So, anyway, I’m back. We’re back. New Orleans went too fast. Our plans went awry. Some things went right and some didn’t. There were things we will remember. The place we went for crawfish with the outdoor tables. The big breakfasts.

Most of the memories will be shared.

There is one that will be mine alone though: a Tuesday night in April in 2023, a warm night, a restaurant, my son inside, and me out on a familiar sidewalk taking a picture of the scene lit up by a warm orange neon to capture it, store it up...

Something to hold onto.

One good thing from a time after the tornado.