Reunited After 25 Years 47: New Orleans

The motion of the train soothed Andrea, and she was napping on Anton's shoulder when it pulled into the station. Gently he shook her awake. "Wake up, Andrea. We are here!"

"Oh! Already?" Startled awake, she looked around. "Wow! So we're in Louisiana. First time I've ever been."

Together they exited the train station and walked out into the bright sunshine. Cars whizzed busily past on the street. Andrea gasped, amazed. "The streets here sure are busier than the streets in Gloucester," she remarked.

"It reminds me of early morning in the Kremlin," Anton observed. "That was when the Communist Party members were on their way to meetings."

"Let me guess: on how to build bigger and better nuclear bombs to threaten us with, right?" Andrea teased.

"Actually on how to make a bomb more powerful, yet smaller."

"Why smaller?"

"Easier to hide."

"That makes sense."

They hailed a cab to the motel and checked into their room, which was small and rather plain but comfortable and cozy, then decided to visit the Audubon Zoo. Andrea especially loved the butterfly house, and Anton took several photographs of his wife standing still while butterflies landed on her shoulders and arms. Afterwards they went to a darkened, romantic restaurant for dinner, where they listened to live jazz while they ate boiled lobster and shrimp scampi. Much later, they stood on the street corner listening to saxophone music. At about midnight they returned to their motel room.

"The music here in New Orleans is very...how do you say?...soulful," Anton remarked. "It is different from any other kind I have ever heard."

"It's called jazz," Andrea told him. "It has its roots in the African-American spirituals from the days of slavery. It is very soulful. They had very hard lives, and sometimes the only thing that kept them going was the hope of a better life after this one."

Anton looked very thoughtful. "It sounds very similar to the Russian peasants during the Tsarist times."

"I imagine it was very similar," Andrea replied.

"There are much happier things to think about." Anton grinned. "I have been in New Orleans for most of a day and have yet to make love to my wife."

Andrea giggled. "Well, there's no time like the present, is there?"

The following morning, they went to the Aquarium of the Americas, and Andrea enjoyed it even more than she had the zoo. They had oyster po boys for lunch at a little street-corner cafe.

"This reminds me of home," said Anton.

"New Orleans is bordered by the Mississippi River, just like Gloucester is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean," Andrea replied. "It's only logical that seafood would be popular in both places."

After lunch, they took a stroll through the French quarter and walked down Bourbon Street, past voodoo shops, hooker motels, and night spots.

"This is one of the most famous streets in the entire country," Andrea told her husband. "It's incredibly rich in history. It would be amazing to be here during Mardi Gras."

"Fat Tuesday." Anton grinned. "My grandmother tell me about it. The day you eat only foods cooked in fat, right before the beginning of Lent."

"You know more about it than I do," said Andrea, whose religious background was generic Protestant. "All I know about it is the parades and floats and king cakes and doubloons and moon pies."

"What is a moon pie? A pie shaped like the moon?"

"Yeah, I guess it is kind of shaped like a moon. I never thought about that before. I'm sure there's a place near here that sells them."

Sure enough, a few minutes later, she found them in a little corner grocery.

"Chocolate, vanilla, or banana?" she asked Anton.

"Banana," he told her. "Why are they called pies? They are much too small to be pies. They look much more like big cookies."

Andrea shrugged. "Well, 'moon cookie' sounds a bit strange, don't you think?" They both laughed.

They stayed in New Orleans for several more days, went on a steamboat ride, enjoyed the night life, and made love several more times. They returned to Gloucester relaxed and refreshed the following weekend.

"You know, it really will be OK if it's just the two of us from now on," Andrea told her husband in the train on the way home.

Anton laughed. "That is what I have been trying to tell you for ages."

Yet something miraculous was happening inside Andrea's body, something that had yet to be made manifest.