LETTERS FROM HOME: IN THE CITY WHERE MONET MEETS MARDI GRAS

March 2, 1995

Dear Julie,

Hawks on fence posts lined the drive to New Orleans like sentinels. On the way, DC asked how many places I'd lived since high school. Houses or apartments -- not towns. Feeling a bit like Wilt Chamberlain, only sheepish, I added up 26.

One of them was your beautiful Victorian in Arcata, left behind 10 years ago for a little piece of cockroach heaven on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. At the time I thought Northern California felt too much like a nest, too safe.

Watching TV at midnight two weeks after arriving in New Orleans, I heard a bang and went outside to find one of the apartment building's tenants being helped inside. He was a Harvard graduate who must have had some medical training because he showed me where to apply pressure on an artery to staunch the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived.

He'd just gotten out of his car when some kids who wanted his coat jumped him. He held onto the coat and screamed. One of the kids shot him and took the coat. So much for Harvard. As far as he was concerned, so much for New Orleans.

New Orleans isn't safe, but no place else is like it. A city where you can go to a Monet exhibit in the afternoon and a Mardi Gras parade at night.

DC had never been there, so I took her to the must-see places: The place I tended bar, of course, now renamed Taboos and closed; the Camellia Grill, where the waiters and cooks put on one of the best shows in town; the Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee with chicory; the French Quarter, where we schmoozed with a witch in a voodoo shop; and Tipitina's nightclub, where the Neville Brothers got started and George Clinton, the funkiest man in the universe, a man for whom every day is Mardi Gras, happened to be holding forth the night we arrived.

New Orleans was much as I remembered -- a bit ripe and corrupt and scary but a whole lot of fun. Sort of like that part of ourselves we don't admit to.

When we returned to the motel late one night I found two pieces of paper lying on the ground near our door. One was a list of first names and phone numbers along with a beeper number. The other was a prison visitor's tag. Another New Orleans experience.

We went to only one parade. DC collected plenty of beads and didn't even raise her shirt.

The Monet show was enlightening if not as aesthetically pleasing as the paintings everyone associates with Impressionism. These are from the last two decades of his life, when he moved to the countryside in Giverny and created the famous lily pond and the flower garden that became a living work of art.

It seems to me that Impressionists tried to mimic the ability of one of the great inventions of their day -- the camera -- to capture a transient moment created by light. But they attempted to transcend the camera's realism to capture the essence of their subject.

These paintings, critics say, anticipated the next great art movement -- Abstract Expressionism. They are not all pretty. The colors are bright and contrasty. In some cases, the titled is the only clue to the subject. His horizon lines have disappeared.

One possible explanation is that because Monet developed cataracts in his later years, this is what he truly saw. The explanation I prefer is that these riots of reds and greens were, for him, a further distillation of the essence of his garden.

The fact that he created the very thing -- the garden -- he painted makes my head go swervy. Which is the greater work of art?

Petal-by-petal planning and the love of devotion were required. He did not move every year.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.