New Orleans: The place to perfect the gentle art of going nowhere

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New Orleans: The place to perfect the gentle art of going nowhere
January 30, 2011
Spud Hilton
SFGate

It turns out that "going nowhere" is an art form - which makes New Orleans the Louvre.

After years of trips to the Crescent City for work and sightseeing, my wife, Ann, and I got on a plane the most recent time without knowing exactly why. It wasn't specifically the music or the food or the history.

It was just to be in New Orleans. We were homesick for a city that isn't our home, and just existing there was the draw.

The trick, apparently, to finding our New Orleans (each person's New Orleans is different) is learning the gentle art of going nowhere.

We stay in the same ancient, third-floor vacation rental flat in the Quarter on Burgundy Street. No mint on the pillow or maids, but it has a kitchen (for cocktails) and a creaky, comfy living room with floorboards yanked off Mississippi flatboats in 1840s.

But on this trip, nearly every time we walked out the lopsided front door, we were going nowhere. One day, we went nowhere - right into Community Coffee. Ann read her novel while I leafed the Times-Picayune front to back, a printed reminder of Louisiana's birthright to crooked politicians.

One day, we went nowhere until we boarded the St. Charles trolley (which went nowhere faster), riding past the Audubon Park and Tulane and the ubiquitous Mardi Gras beads hanging from the power lines, stepping off in Carrollton, home of Jacques-Imo's restaurant and the Maple Leaf Bar. We went nowhere to the former, then the latter, where almost everyone seemed to be going nowhere.

Another day, we went nowhere right through the doors at Commander's Palace, where on weekdays at lunchtime, they offered 25-cent cocktails (possibly for the businessmen and society ladies). After paying our $2.50 bar tab, we ambled nowhere past Garden District homes, barely noticing the millennia of Southern architecture. It was all somewhere.

During the week, we went nowhere along the levee, over to Algiers, through the French Market, and to Clover Grill for omelets and Acme for grilled oysters - and, sometimes, to nowhere in particular.

An artist's work, I guess, is never done.