Rather than think about the looming dystopian future, I remember with fondness my senior year of college in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ll never forget many details of my senior year in college. I was finishing up an English degree at the University of New Orleans. Prior to the start of classes in the fall of 1972, I found my first apartment in the Gentilly section of the city about two miles from school. I was soon to be liberated from the dreaded dorm and felt a sense of freedom that I had never known before. It was indescribable, except to say that I strongly sensed I was on the cusp of some great adventure or journey. Who wouldn’t feel this way at 21?

Finishing college would mean the culmination of four years of hard work, papers, exams, getting up for 8 AM Saturday classes, cafeteria food, and lonely hours in the library. Now, the end was in sight. I was taking some pretty heavy courses such as philosophy of literary criticism and upper level English lit courses, and I knew that the goal was at last attainable

It was also in that particular fall of 1972 that I had my most affectionate acquaintance with the city of my birth and youth, a period of months when I began to explore parts of the Lakefront and Mid-City neighborhoods that I had never seen before, or known much about previously. It was as if because I would soon be moving away to start a new life, those places suddenly became mellow and dreamlike in my imagination. The rough and grimy edges of the city I’d all my life had a love-hate relationship with, seemed more tolerable, the people more familiar, even endearing. Paradoxically, it was only when I knew I would have to leave that I developed a very special and deep, if short-lived, fondness for the city that had so often depressed me as a teenager.

One of the main reasons everything seemed a lot better that Fall of ‘72, was having my own place. I remember surveying the scene of the one-bedroom shotgun apartment in a duplex house on Wisteria Street. I recall the beat-up furniture, turning on a huge window exhaust fan in the kitchen, sitting out on the narrow front porch and saying to myself, “Wow, this is my neighborhood.” It was almost as if I had grown up on that street.

It was a very quiet street, although it was right off a major thoroughfare, Gentilly Boulevard. There was an art cinema about a mile away and a small supermarket just blocks distant. It was a nice straight shot up St. Roch Boulevard to my college, a pretty and very typical old New Orleans street with a “neutral ground” down the middle.

I drove my car, a 1970 yellow VW convertible, or rode my bike those the two miles to campus. I had a serviceable, not-too-fancy Royce Union ten-speed bike, which I used to explore parts of the city and neighborhoods I was seeing for the first time.

As I said earlier, it was as if I was in a new world, and yet no place had ever seemed so much like the homey neighborhood I had been searching for all the previous school year and summer.

That fabled Fall was a turning point in other ways as well. It was when I first came in contact with the work of the photographer Walker Evans, at a major exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and then later took my first tentative steps toward doing the black and white photography that was to become a passion of mine in the coming decade. It was when I discovered literature in a really significant way and started reading the novels of Balzac and other writers, and felt terribly educated and cultured. I spent hours in the small, crowded book-filled rooms of the Maple Street Bookshop, thinking lofty thoughts about art, literature, and the meaning of life.

It was then that I first began to really know what it meant to be part of a “place,” and to have established at least a “home of sorts,” only to have to give it all up a few short months later
and make my way in the world. My plan was to live someplace other than New Orleans, and that place was going to be South Carolina,
the land of all my youthful dreams of escape.

It is all of those experiences that I look back on fondly now these many years later. It was a brief time of innocence. New Orleans fairly glowed from this nostalgic perspective, then and now. That’s one of the nice things about not having been back for so long.

Also, I’m sure that if I walked along a certain street in Mid City, that memory-filled year would come back to me in particularly fine detail, infinitely more so than just lying here thinking about it now.

I am referring to Moss Street, one of the few winding streets in a city of straight grid-like thoroughfares. It follows the course of Bayou St. John to its beginning point in Mid City. It is the only place in New Orleans, other than, of course, along the levee beside the Mississippi River,
where you can imagine you were near a flowing stream or river.

Bayou St. John is about five or six miles long and is the remnant of a waterway that flowed at one time out of the heart of the ancient cypress swamps that surrounded the old city of New Orleans 250 years ago, and which were gradually cut, cleared, and filled in as the city spread beyond Its original French Quarter borders.

It now just a wide, winding, finger of water with no discernible flow, but which appears to be an actual river.

Back in 1972 I would occasionally drive to where it ended along lower Moss Street near City Park, get out of the car, and explore the area. I took pictures there one day and still remember many of the frames from that roll of film. Every single neighborhood of New Orleans has a way of etching itself into one’s memory. I felt a special fondness for that area, and recall thinking how much I would like to live there. After all, it actually had something that looked like a river, old historic houses and inviting porches, with enough hustle and bustle to ensure a big city feel.

I haven’t been back to New Orleans in 30 years, but if I do go back any time soon, Wisteria Street, Bayou St. John, Moss Street, and the university campus where I toiled away for four years on my English degree, are some of the first places I would revisit.

If I go back, I will relive a time when all the possibilities of life seem to be just around the corner of that old neighborhood, and just past the end of the bayou, waiting to be discovered.