Homecoming

Homeless!

Well, I grew up in the area, but I moved away for 27 years, and I finally found my way back here last August.

That's what I've been telling people lately when the question of where I'm from comes up.  I've noticed that this stock reply has undergone a subtle shift recently. I used to say: I grew up in the area, but I moved away for 27 years, and I found myself back here in August.

Did you catch the difference? I suppose that "finding my way back" as opposed to "finding myself back" reflects a growing sense of being at home. This place certainly didn't feel like home when I first got back. In the early days after my return I would say things like: "I thought I had escaped the orbit of South Louisiana, but here I am again."

When my family and I came back to the States last summer, we had been living in the Balkans for 13 of the last 16 years. We had lived in three different countries -- Albania, Kosova, and Macedonia -- but always among ethnic Albanians, and I had dedicated myself to learning the Albanian language, immersing myself in their lifestyle, and loving their food and their folk music. (Speaking of which here, here and here are some really cool songs.) One of the highest compliments anyone ever paid me was author Katherine Paterson's comment in an interview with Publisher's Weekly that when she saw my photos of Kosova, she knew that she had found someone who knew and loved the land and its people. When I imagined my future, I saw myself living among the Albanians for at least the rest of my working days if not the rest of my life.

Still, I never had any illusions of being truly "at home" there. Whenever an Albanian friend flattered me by saying, "You're one of us!" I received the compliment joyfully without ever believing for a moment that it was true. "I'll never really be Albanian," I used to say. "But after all these years living with Albanians, I'll never really quite be American either."

My wife Mary and I were both from Louisiana -- she from the northwest corner of the state and I from the southeast corner; but neither of us had much emotional attachment to the places we had grown up. In fact, both of us had been glad to put some distance between ourselves and our hometowns as soon as we graduated from high school.

Our kids, Lydia and Luke, had both grown up in Southeastern Europe. A year or two ago Luke asked me: "Dad, when people ask where I'm from, is it OK to just tell them 'New Orleans'?" He had never lived in New Orleans. (In fact, I had never actually lived in New Orleans -- more about that in a minute.) But Luke had become a big Saints fan, and he had decided that if he had to identify with some city, New Orleans would be his choice. I doubt that the thought of actually living in New Orleans had even occurred to him as a possibility. He was just looking for a convenient way to respond to a very common question, which for him and his sister had no simple answer.

We all loved our life in Macedonia, and none of us wanted to leave. However, the relationship between Mary and me had been crumbling over the last several years. We had traveled far and wide for counseling -- Akron, Ohio; Springfield, Missouri; Budapest, Hungary; and finally Seattle, Washington, where we took a six month leave in order to devote ourselves full-time to marriage therapy. After each of these trips we returned hopeful that our marriage was on the mend. By last summer it was clear to everyone around us that we were still struggling, and the leaders of the organization we worked for finally concluded that for our own sake and the sake of the work we were a part of, we needed to leave Macedonia where we were living at the time. When the word finally came down that we had to go home, we came face to face with the fact that we had no idea where home was.

Mary and I responded at first by looking for job opportunities that would allow us to continue to live in the Balkans, but we couldn't come up with anything in time. When it became apparent that we really had to return to the U.S., we sent emails to our parents and siblings saying: "We're coming back to the States, but we haven't picked a place. If you would like for us to live near you, feel free to make your pitch." One step removed from putting on a blindfold and throwing darts at a map.

My youngest sister replied to say that she and her husband had a house in Slidell, Louisiana that they were trying to sell. She would rent it to us at far less than the market value until it sold, which was likely to be several months. So based on this offer of a cheap and convenient place to live, we settled on Slidell, the town where I had grown up.

Suburb vs. City

These days when I'm riding the pedicab in the French Quarter, and I tell people "I grew up here in this area," I'm using language that is just vague enough to avoid an outright deception. In terms of sheer distance it's true that Slidell is not so far from New Orleans; but Lake Pontchartrain, the barrier between suburb and city, is no mere imaginary municipal line. The 30-some-odd mile commute requires traversing a featureless bridge across five miles of open water -- not to mention several miles of uninhabited marshland with the carcasses of road-killed alligators strewn alongside the freeway.

Slidell has virtually no industry of its own. It's often referred to as a "bedroom community" for people who work in the city but don't want to live there. The relationship between Slidell and New Orleans is best illustrated by a recent conversation with an acquaintance in which I was complaining about the lack of public transportation between the north and south shores of the lake. Given the large number of people making this commute every day, it was shocking to me that there was no way to get back and forth other than in a private car. The guy I was chatting with, who's a few years older than me and has lived in this area his whole life, said, "Well, you understand why, don't you? There have been attempts in the past, but Slidell and the other cities on the North Shore have always been against it. Not that they would mind being able to take a bus or train to New Orleans. But they don't want to provide an easy way for the undesirables from New Orleans to cross to the North Shore. You know, the crime and all that?..." I can't say for sure whether this explanation is accurate, but it rings true to me. For many of the inhabitants of the North Shore the lake serves as a security fence. Car ownership is a key that lets you cross the fence whenever you need to. (If you're picking up racial overtones here, you're probably on target.)

In my growing up years New Orleans was just foreign enough to be a little bit frightening, mysterious and thrilling. When I was in college, I got into the habit of bringing international students home with me for weekends and holidays, and I enjoyed taking them into the city and showing them around. The truth is I didn't know my way around all that much, but I could find the aquarium and the zoo and Cafe du Monde and the Superdome. Every time we made the trip, and we didn't get mugged and my car didn't get stolen or towed, I felt as though I had successfully completed some epic quest.

Returning to Slidell last August, things looked different. Having lived almost eight years in Kosova, what could be so scary about New Orleans? Mary and I disagreed about many things, but we agreed from the get-go that we weren't really the kind of people who wanted to live out our lives in the suburbs. My sister's house was a big blessing in a time of need, but from the beginning we decided that if we were going to live in southeast Louisiana, we wanted to get to the other side of the lake as soon as we could.

Something better than Sam's Club

Before we could think about moving, we had to find work. When people asked me how I ended up on the pedicab there are two distinct ways to answer. On the one hand, I found myself in a situation where I really didn't have a lot of other options. A couple of years earlier I had told our counselor in Budapest that as much as I loved my life and work in the Balkans, I was ready at any time to return to the States permanently for the sake of my marriage. "That's bullshit!" he told me. "You'd end up as a greeter at Sam's Club." (I figured that I might enjoy being a greeter at Sam's and that I'd probably be very good at it; but I had to admit that it would be hard to make enough money to take good care of my family.) As it turned out the counselor had a point. I ended up returning to the U.S. armed with a 23-year-old degree in journalism at a time when newspapers were going broke left and right and a highly specialized set of skills for which there was no market. (Know of an job openings for an albanologist anyone?) I sent out quite a few resumes but never heard back from anybody.

None of this is to suggest that becoming a pedicabbie was an act of desperation. When I saw the help-wanted ad, it looked to me like a dream job -- which turned out to be true more or less. (By the way, the timing of the whole thing was pretty close to perfect. We arrived back in the States in August.The very next month pedicabs were finally cleared to operate in New Orleans -- the conclusion of a two-and-a-half year legal battle. I didn't actually start the job till November, but I still manage to catch the industry in its infancy. I was among the first full-time pedicabbies in the city.)

When I first began pedicabbing, I knew next to nothing about the layout of the city. I didn't know how to find Frenchmen St. or Pat O'Brien's. Despite investing in a smart phone with GPS and a bluetooth headset, I managed to get myself into some pretty embarrassing situations in those early days. But it wasn't long before I was finding my way around like a native. After all, there's probably no better way to get intimately acquainted with an urban location than to spend days and nights riding the streets on a big trike for eight hours at a stretch.

Rediscovering my roots

Speaking of getting intimately acquainted, the more time I spent on the pedicab, the more I found myself captivated by the Crescent City. Despite the fact that I had never lived in New Orleans, it started to make sense to me that these streets would feel familiar. After all, my father had grown up here as had his father before him. My great grandfather had immigrated to New Orleans from Spain by way of Cuba. I hadn't really given it much thought before, but my roots were generations deep in the city's swampy soil.

Riding by the exquisite Le Pavillon Hotel on Poydras St., I remembered my dad having pointed it out to me when I was a kid. "That's where your grandfather used to work," he had said. I called him up to make sure that I remembered right. Turns out that my memory had served me well. It was called the Hotel Desoto back then, but it was the same location, same building, same Romanesque facade featuring fifteen-foot tall limestone statues. My grandfather, who died before I was born, used to sell tours there for a company called Gray Line. (Bike Taxi Unlimited, the pedicab company I work for, has a contract to provide transport for Gray Line guests.) I couldn't resist telling my passengers every time I dropped off or picked up at Le Pavillon:  "My grandpa used to work here!"

On another occasion I was riding in the Garden District, and I suddenly recalled hearing my dad say that he grown up in that part of town. I called him to ask for the address. It turned out that he and his family had lived in two different Garden District houses. Later, when I had the time, I found the houses and photographed them. Both were shotgun houses tucked in among the antebellum mansions for which the Garden District is famous. In one of the houses, my father, his brother and their parents had lived together with two other families. Imagining three families living in such cramped conditions gave me a picture of the poverty in which my father was raised.

Immediately downriver from the French Quarter I discovered another utterly delightful neighborhood, the Marigny. In a conversation with my youngest sister (the one who provided us with the house and the only of my three siblings still living in the New Orleans area) I was telling her how enchanted I was with the Marigny, and she said, "You know that our great grandfather lived over there on Spain St. when he immigrated to New Orleans, right?" I hadn't known. It's possible that I had heard this fact before and hadn't found it worth remembering, but now I was intrigued. Just as with Le Pavillon, I began pointing the site out to my passengers as though they had actually signed up for a tour of the Crescent City Pedicabbie's ancestral homeland.

Postscript. Finding my way home as my home breaks apart

On Wednesday (day after tomorrow as I write this) my wife and I will finally be leaving my sister's house in Slidell and moving to New Orleans. After having shared our lives for 22 years, we will be sharing the moving truck on that day, but unfortunately, we will be unloading our belongings at two separate houses. It has finally become clear that our marriage is beyond repair. We have chosen to live just four blocks apart so that our children will continue to have the benefit of two parents. 

Looking back over the last few months, I realize that I have relied on the pleasure of pedicabbing to help deaden the pain of seeing my marriage come to an end. And now, as I enter the next phase of my life minus Mary's companionship, I am seeking comfort in the Crescent City's warm embrace.