Not Such a Bad Way at All

The wind banked off the otherwise languid Mississippi in big, billowing gusts ensuring an extra chill would envelope the revelers on the wharf near the Café Du Monde. Everyone had on their war paint, but the taunts and jibes of just minutes earlier had subsided. An unspoken ceasefire took hold as we all counted down the remaining moments of 1980.

My recollection is uncertain, but most likely I wore a fairly dingy corduroy jacket, some off-brand blue jeans and something or other in plaid. Without doubt, however, I sported an oversize, bright-red ball cap that enlisted me as a Georgia Bulldog. Outside of family and the church, my Dad – well, as I am Southern, I called him Daddy until the day he died – had four passions in life: gardening, fishing, the Saint Louis Cardinals and the Georgia Bulldogs. He had a fifth as well, unbeknownst to me at the time, but that one brought no joy to him or anyone else in his orbit. Why the Cardinals for a man from the most rural of rural Georgia? Well, that’s a story for another time.

As goes the father, so often goes the son, and at all of 12 years old, being a Bulldog never even fell into question. That is the only of his four passions I’ve inherited, though even that is on a significantly lower flame than my Dad always burned with, despite having graduated from there as he failed to do. And I managed to dodge the fifth as well, thus far.

There were four of us on the wharf that chilly New Year’s Eve near the edge of the French Quarter. Only three of us were related. From the age of five I had been an only child. My Dad won this trip to the Sugar Bowl at his work for top sales performance, and I was allowed to bring a school friend with me. I remember his name was Gary and little else. He moved away a year later and I have no clue where he is now, or even if he is now. I barely recall his face.

But Gary held the dubious honor of being my best friend at the time so he made the seven-hour trek with us to New Orleans. It doesn’t seem like 1980 should really be all that long ago, yet of course it is. I recall we brought a big box of bottle rockets with us and my parents let us go alone to the river bank to shoot them off that first night without even the slightest unease. We came back with all our fingers, both eyes and grins bigger than the Hurricanes at Pat O’Briens.

Twenty-some-odd hours later, however, Gary stood by awkwardly at eleven-fiftyish the night before the big battle. There is something about the wisp of an event that is the changing of a year that is quite personal. At least that is how I’ve always interpreted it. And Gary clearly felt that vibe.

My Dad leaned against a railing, ever-present cup in hand, and recounted the stories from earlier in the night when Georgia and Notre Dame Fans had taken up mostly verbal arms on Bourbon Street. Sometimes a bit of drunken shoving would ensue, but nobody ever took it to the level of serious violence. This was well before the late-evening armistice took hold.

My Mom just smiled and listened, as she so often did, and nodded in agreement. I believe she was still making some kind of peace with my Dad’s insistence on strolling up and down the Rue Bourbon after 10 pm with two 12-year-old boys, whose eyes grew to the size of footballs, padding along behind.

The sound of trumpet-driven jazz escaping an open bar door perked up the rhythm of our walk. A glimpse of a sequin here, or pasties there, teased of more as we strained to look where our eyes didn’t belong. Crowds encircled street performers competing for our change. We wondered aloud at the words “John Lennon Lives” in fresh spray paint saturating the edge of an alleyway wall. It was magical.

Even then, I knew her protestations were feigned. I’m unable to tick off preoccupations of my Mother as clearly as I recall those of her husband. They always seemed a bit more muddled or impermanent to me and impossible to separate from my Father. But one thing held a special enchantment for her. My Mother adored New Orleans. No place on Earth did she speak of with such overt joy. She squandered not one moment when there – the food, the architecture, the energy – she feasted on all of it. The closest she would ever get to Europe, New Orleans never felt as if it were a consolation prize. She blossomed there.

As I stood beside her that night, almost certainly with teeth chattering, I surveyed all the people, mostly couples, around us – their faces now as lost to time as Gary’s. While my Dad continued to scan the ancient river’s light chop and prattle on, my Mom had been looking back at Jackson Square.

I turned my gaze up to the back of her salt-and-pepper hair and asked, “Aren’t you supposed to kiss somebody at Midnight?”

She slowly turned back with a deep, warm smile growing across her face as she knew this was just the type of thing to absorb my mind. My youth still kept me from seeing the years of pain etched around her eyes competing with every smile. “It is one tradition, sure,” she said.

The ten-second countdown had started to crescendo around us as everyone joined in, growing more insistent with each passing number.

“How about a hug instead?” she said in as close to a shout as she could muster in her Southern lilt, which my future Midwestern wife would hear only once some 13 years later.

My Mother reached out and pulled me to her and we both then stood silent, not belting out the countdown.

I’ve forgotten nearly all the no-doubt countless hugs my Mother gave me in our brief time together in this world. But this one I recall in every detail and with the deepest of affection in my heart. It was one of those moments when everything else fell away and all you knew was serenity and connection.

As “Happy New Year” burst through the air around us and we pulled apart, she looked down at me and said, “Not such a bad way to start a year.”

Too many new years since have come and gone without the possibility of another hug from her.

Her understatement holds true for so many of the small, often forgotten moments in our lives. No Mother, not such a bad way at all.

– In loving memory of Jean Faulkner Hester and RC Hester