Time’s Picayune

1. The Times-Picayune

The local newspaper in New Orleans is The Times-Picayune. For many years, I thought the title was chosen to convey a philosophy of time, and of our life in it: that every story reported in the newspaper was like a picayune—a small, insignificant thing in our daily lives, washed up on the shores of time.

That was how I took it from the very first day I arrived in New Orleans to attend graduate school at Tulane, itself something of a relic from another age, with more than a touch of Gone with the Wind about it.

I never really gave my interpretation a second thought. I suppose that if anyone had asked me what the title meant, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said, “What else could it mean?” That was simply how I saw it. It stayed that way for all these years.

But I was wrong.

When I recently sat down and looked into the matter, I discovered that The Times-Picayune was simply the result of the merger of two separate newspapers: The Times and The Picayune. The former was, no doubt, the product of local men of letters thinking big; the latter originated in the simple economy of a newspaper that cost no more than a picayune, something to read while lingering over a drink on Bourbon Street, sitting on the veranda of a mansion along St. Charles Avenue, or feeding pigeons in Jackson Square.

What a pity, I thought.

Time’s picayune—the Lincoln penny of its day—is such a wonderful metaphor for the small events of everyday life, each one washed ashore in the river of time. Yet it appears the founders of the newspaper had nothing of the sort in mind.

Or perhaps that doesn’t matter.

History tells us where a name comes from. It cannot tell us what that name may come to mean. Words have lives of their own. Once they enter the world, they gather meanings their creators never imagined. A title chosen for entirely practical reasons can, years later, become a metaphor in the mind of a stranger from another continent, newly arrived in New Orleans and eager to find poetry in everything he saw.

Perhaps that is not a misunderstanding after all. Perhaps it is simply another chapter in the life of a phrase.

I wonder if Robert Penn Warren ever thought of it.

2. Party on Soniat Street

Speaking of picayunes, that was about all I actually owned in those days: pennies.

Every two weeks, when my student stipend arrived in the mailbox, I took the check to Whitney Bank to deposit it. The balance always showed the same frightening figure—something short of a month’s rent for my little apartment in the lower end of Uptown, near the levee. I would glance at the old Black man standing in the next line, wearing a broad-brimmed white hat, and think that even he probably had more money in the bank than I did.

One time, when I was a teaching assistant entrusted with my first class of my own, a group of students decided to come over to my apartment on Soniat Street for a party. About ten of them showed up that evening, all crammed into one tiny Toyota—or was it a Ford Pinto? I was amazed by both the size of the car and the number of people it managed to carry. At the time, though, I simply assumed it was a young-people thing and thought no more about it.

Among the students was a young man from Boston, who remarked that the city felt like a ghetto. Several of the others were from the South—Georgia, I seem to remember. There was also a petite girl of Asian ancestry, the only woman at the party that night. She wore an elegant black dress with sleeves cut high at the shoulders. We were all rather taken with her.

All of them, especially the boys from Georgia, treated me with unfailing respect. They addressed me with a courtesy that both surprised and pleased me. Before they left, each of them wrote down a contact address for me. I noticed that, almost without exception, they gave me their home address. It occurred to me that they probably didn’t yet have homes of their own. They were still students. I have always remembered that little detail. And I have always remembered them as such nice young people.

Two of the students who came to the party that night arrived in their own vehicle—a minivan with a spacious interior and a complete entertainment system, from television to stereo. One of them, I remember, had the last name Silverman, and both were from New York City. They didn’t stay long, though, and left well before the others.

It would take me many years to understand why. At the time, class was simply not a category in which I thought about the US. The signs were all there—the minivan, the ease with which they carried themselves, the fact that they left early. But I didn’t know how to read them.

3. Wine Shop in a Shotgun House

For a while—a few years, no more—I was a wine nut.

Not what you might think. I did not drink like a fish, nor did I sniff a glass the way a dog follows a scent. What mesmerized me were the French words that filled the pages of American wine magazines and wine guides.

One block off Jefferson Avenue was a tiny bookstore. Something drew me there one day. Upon entering, I spotted a pocket-sized wine guide. Out of curiosity, I picked it up.

Page after page, I encountered words that were not exactly French, yet somehow reminded one of things French—some as elegant as a woman’s evening gown, others as tantalizing as a miniskirt. A place where grapevines grow was not soil but terroir; a grape variety was not simply a variety but a cépage; a wine had an attaque rather than a beginning, and a finale rather than an aftertaste. Wines did not have a smell, only a nose. They did not linger in the mouth; they had a finish.

That little pocket guide, together with its strange mixture of French and American wine vocabulary, led me to my first visit to Martin’s Wine Cellar, the little wine shop in a shotgun house on the corner of Baronne and General Taylor, within walking distance of my apartment on Soniat Street.

I no longer remember what bottle I bought. Most likely it cost less than ten dollars but had somehow managed to earn 88 points from Wine Spectator, one of those magazines whose pages seemed sprinkled with French words and diacritical marks.

As much as the wine impressed me—by which I really mean that I had no idea what to make of it—it was the store itself that stayed with me. The staff were friendly, though always busy. The interior was warm and inviting in its simplicity and practicality.

One of my classmates was a Romanian. Like me, he had picayunes rather than dollars in his pocket. He had come to New Orleans with his wife and young daughter, who attended an elementary school on Jefferson Avenue. While my stipend supported only myself, he had an entire family to feed.

One day we were talking about our home countries when he told me how, back in Romania, families slaughtered their own chickens whenever they wanted a little meat.

“But if you tell people here that,” he said with a look of disdain, “they pretend to be horrified.”

As far as I know, he returned to Romania after finishing his Ph.D. and later became chair of the philosophy department at the University of Bucharest.

My Romanian friend may have been penny-pinching to survive, but unlike me, he could read French. As my fascination with Americanized French wine vocabulary grew, I eventually persuaded him to accompany me to Martin’s Wine Cellar—not to buy wine, but simply to read the French on the labels.

Only recently did I learn that the little shotgun-house Martin’s Wine Cellar had not survived Hurricane Katrina. I knew, of course, about the hurricane and the terrible destruction it had brought to New Orleans, especially to the Lower Ninth Ward. What I did not know was that the little wine shop where my Romanian classmate and I had once stood reading French wine labels had also disappeared.

I discovered that only as I sat down to write these notes.

It made me unexpectedly sad.

4. Hyatt Place by the Mississippi Bridge

About seven or eight years ago, the family made a trip to New Orleans.

We took day trips to Slidell, north of Lake Pontchartrain; to Oak Alley Plantation; to the Tulane campus—where else?—and to my old apartment in the lower end of Uptown, near the levee, where the neighborhood bar still stood.

At Oak Alley, as we stepped out of the old mansion into the garden, there was a little stand under the August sky of Louisiana serving drinks. While I ordered myself a mint julep, my wife hesitated, not knowing what to get. The two ladies behind the counter mixed her what they laughingly called a “virgin” mint julep, and the four of us had a good laugh.

That evening, my wife took our son to the riverfront to see Canal Street and the French Quarter at sunset. I stayed behind in the hotel room. The day had exhausted me, and I simply didn’t have the mental energy to go anywhere.

Earlier that afternoon, we had stopped at the Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas Street, near the foot of Jefferson Avenue. I had wanted to see the store bakery, about which I had such fond memories, but the layout had changed beyond recognition. So I ended up buying a bottle of Côtes du Rhône rosé instead.

I opened the bottle, poured myself a glass, and sat down by the window.

The sun was setting beyond the West Bank. The great Mississippi River Bridge would soon slowly dissolve into the twilight. Above it stretched the immense Louisiana sky, where towering clouds, still glowing with the last fire of the day, climbed toward the zenith.

Soon night would fall. The lights on the bridge would come on and twinkle above the river, while the deep horns of passing cargo ships would drift through the darkness.

And I thought: if The Times-Picayune was the river of time, with each day’s stories washing ashore like little picayunes, where did the Mississippi fit into the picture? Where did this bridge stand?

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