nowhere better to be

I had every intention of writing about food this week — but then I spent two hours standing on Napoleon Ave. in Uptown New Orleans Friday night, doing nothing, with a dead phone. No texts, no Internet, nothing to do besides wait and sip a beer and make small talk. So I wrote about that fleeting, perfect moment.

Two little boys sparred in the street, waving foam swords and jumping over stray beads and smashed beer cans. A girl, maybe 3, perched on top of a ladder and chirped in a mimicked accent, “Throw me somethin’, mista! Throw me somethin’, mista!” Light-up headbands flashed and conversation hummed. A priest gulped from a solo cup and a pack of teenage girls stomped a coordinated dance, over and over, along the curb of Napoleon Avenue. We all waited, collectively, for a mista to appear and throw us somethin’. 

It was the kind of February Friday that tempts you believe in a higher power. An electric blue day had faded to a deep navy night. My legs were bare and there was a beer in my hand and occasionally a beam of light hit a speck the glitter around my eyes and spun the world into a kaleidoscope. There is nothing like Mardi Gras in New Orleans — which is impossible to replicate anywhere else yet perfectly replicated each year along these oak-lined streets, unchanging, undisturbed. 

Mardi Gras will make you forget you’re 36, not 23. It’ll make you forget you’ve got a cell phone in your pocket and a manic job back at home. It’ll freeze you in your silver boots, freeze your brain in a state of satisfaction — and as the foam swords meet and the little girl chirps, you’ll forget to wonder why there hasn’t been a parade in an hour. 

We live in an invisible cloud of information. When will the train be here? There’s an electronic sign to tell you. What about the bus? Check an app. Why’s my flight delayed, why’s my toe ache, when will it rain, how soon can I get a pizza, how long will it take to cool my house down a few degrees, how expensive will it be to park the car downtown … why, how, how, why? Questions barely have a moment to exist before we zap them into easy solutions. 

But at Mardi Gras, I forgot to wonder. Parades break down, and then they restart, usually after just a few minutes. Sometimes longer. Tractors are fickle, and so are multi-story art projects loaded down with people and fluorescent detritus. So I barely noted the absence of plastic raining from the sky. I leaned against a ladder and sipped a beer. I looked up when friends called my name — friends who’d just spotted me on the street, without a call or a text or a plan. Music played from somewhere. Everywhere. And eventually, after some handful of dozens of minutes, I paused. There should’ve been a marching band by now, I figured. I checked my phone, and sure enough, the second parade of the night was more than an hour delayed. I clicked my phone locked again, and it died. 

During parades, the streets are more porous than you might imagine. Crowds swell into the road, and the bravest, eagerest souls will jog alongside a float for a block, chatting and negotiating and filling their arms. Horses step inches from human feet, and those same humans dart between floats, after marching bands, scrambling from the neutral ground side to the sidewalk side and back again. When there’s a delay like there was Friday night, it doesn’t take long for the wave of humanity to fully wash over the pavement. 

So for an hour or so, it was like a block party: toddlers skipping and teenagers roving under a beaded canopy. We were all there for the parades, no question, but in their absence, we made our own fun without pausing to wonder why, or for how long, or how this might affect bedtime or dinner or even our beer supply. 

Eventually, a friend looked at the parade tracker app. (The information cloud never fully lifts.) It’s built with technology straight out of 2008, and it told us next to nothing. She scrolled Twitter next, and there it was: a video of Float No. 3 in the Krewe of Cleopatra, scraping against an ancient oak limb. The bathroom capsized, and the whole double-decker pink behemoth appeared to have gotten stuck. Nothing changes at Mardi Gras, but maybe that live oak’s branch had grown imperceptibly fatter since the last parade last February. 

At some point, the float wedged free. How? I don’t care. When? My phone was dead. Eventually, police cleared the street and the babies went to bed and Cleopatra rolled past, hours late, and so what? We’d all seen a million parades before and will see a million more. The real beauty of the night came in between, when we stood for hours without wondering, without caring, without having anywhere better to be.