We went to hear our friends Little Red and the Renegades play their always good Zydeco music Saturday night at Greenbelt’s New Deal Cafe, and – for reasons that should be clear to you – Zydeco music reminds me of New Orleans.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in New Orleans, but I have been there quite a few times, usually just for a few days. And not for quite a while. But I started thinking about the times I had been in New Orleans and what I remember.

The first time I was there was in 1958, on a trip with my parents, sister and maternal grandmother. The trip was actually to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, but we went into New Orleans for a day or two. I think we spent all of our time in the French Quarter. We had dinner at Antoine’s, then the most famous and (maybe) one of the best restaurants in the city. I don’t think that’s the case any more. I just looked at a list of the best 38 restaurants in New Orleans on the Eater New Orleans website, and it isn’t listed. And on Yelp, it only gets a 3.3 rating. I remember we got a tour of the restaurant, including the wine cellar. I think the food was OK, but my father wasn’t impressed. He thought the place 65 years ago was dingy and old. “In St. Louis”, he said, “I’d never set foot in a place that looked like that.”

I also remember, on that trip, that we were looking at the art work on Pirate’s Alley and we ran into the mother of someone in my high school class (this was 1958, remember, I was a 15 year old sophomore). I was very surprised to see my friend’s mother wandering around New Orleans, especially since she was by herself. I remember her telling my parents that sometimes she just wanted to be alone, so she got in her car and drove to New Orleans for a few days. I just didn’t know what to make of that – one the one hand, I couldn’t imagine one of my parents just taking off on a solo trip, but on the other, it seemed to me an example of admirable independence. I got a better idea of what might have been going on when, a month or two later, my friend’s mother committed suicide.

The only other things I remember is being surprised that the main tourist church was called St. Louis, and that beignets were really good.

The next time I was in New Orleans was about ten years later, when I took a road trip from St. Louis with a friend and New Orleans was our furthest destination. I remember we stayed at what I guess was a bed and breakfast. I remember a white house, with a garden and a white picket fence in front. But – believe it or not – I don’t really remember anything else about that trip, although memories of one trip or another often do get confused.

Another ten years or so passed, and Edie and I got one of the only two time share invitations we ever responded positively to. We were told that we would be flown to New Orleans from BWI, that we would be put up in a time share development on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District, that we could select the time we wanted to come, and that all we had to do was listen to a sales pitch for an hour (or maybe two). Sounded easy, we looked at the calendar, picked the time of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and went. The festival then was a lot of fun, even though it is nothing like what it is today. It was about the 8th or 9th annual festival, I think, and there were multiple stages, but all in the same area. The crowds were manageable, and we heard some good music (I don’t remember who we heard), including music from some of the city’s krewes (google it). I don’t know if the krewes today take place in the jazz weekends, or just at Mardi Gras.

We also got a chance to see the Garden District, the St. Charles and Desire streetcars, and – I am sure – more. The building we stayed, a converted apartment building, was not a place we would want to return to. I remember we watched a film about the building, took a tour, and then spent an hour with a nice young man, who tried to sell us a time share not by talking about the building in New Orleans, but by using our time share time to travel the world. He did a fine job, but he was very new to the business. I asked him what he had done before. “I sold cemetery plots”, he told us.

I went to New Orleans several times on business trips. I remember going there by myself, I remember going for a conference or two, and I remember traveling once with a client. Because my mind totally blanks when I think about who most of my clients were and what I did for them, I don’t remember who I traveled there with or why, but I remember that he and I spent a couple of evenings just walking around the French Quarter talking, and that I ran into someone I new from Washington, who seemed to be doing the same thing.

At any rate, I have explored the French Quarter thoroughly in my day, I have gone to Preservation Hall (it’s closed now?) and heard a lot of music. I have witnessed New Orleans drinking, and been amazed at the early hours the bars open, but don’t remember ever over-imbibing myself. I do remember going alone into a bar once and ordering a drink. I think I watched a hockey game at the bar, and started talking to a stranger doing the same thing. He was in town on business as well, and I was surprised, when I asked him where he lived, when he told me Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada. I couldn’t imagine a more different town in North America, especially since this was winter and it was spring-like in New Orleans and clearly not so in Edmonton. I asked him how his family (if I remember they were Irish, although maybe something else, but European) established themselves in Edmonton of all places (I now know that a lot of people moved to Edmonton, which now has a population of over 1 million), and his only answer was “I think it was summer”. (By the way, my smart phone tells me that the average high in Edmonton in June is 70.)

And I remember going into a small corner grocery years and years ago. The owners were a young couple who came from India and who spoke with heavy Indian accents. They had two young children running around, maybe 4 or 5. The children had no Indian accents at all. I was really surprised. I guess I never had thought about it as a possibility. You think times don’t change?

What else? I remember being in New Orleans in the summer when it was hot (to be sure), and humid (even more humid than hot), and when the skies broke loose with thunderstorms every afternoon at 4. I remember, on one trip, spending a day driving around the bayou country, which I found fascinating. I remember driving to Baton Rouge to go to what was then the country’s largest used law book store. I remember crossing Lake Pontchartrain several times on that wonderful bridge that is so long (20 miles?) that you can’t see either shore from the center.

But I have never really toured all of New Orleans. I’d like to see the Tulane campus. I certainly would like to see the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience that just opened within the past couple of years. And the other museums in the city – if you Google New Orleans museums, 49 come up. That would fill a weekend.

The funny thing about all of this? Except for that night in 1958 at Antoine’s, I do not remember one restaurant in New Orleans that I have ever eaten at. And there were probably dozens of them. Strange?