Rick Bragg: This Isn't the Last Dance

Rick Bragg, on New Orleans:

Ever since I was barely in my twenties, I have loved [New Orleans] the way some men love women, if that means unreasonably. I fell in love with the city and a Louisiana State University sophomore on the same night, eating shrimp cooked seven ways in the Quarter, riding the ferry across the black, black river where fireworks burned the air at Algiers Point. I drank so much rum I could sleep standing up against a wall. The sophomore left me, smiling, but the city never did.

There is no way to explain to someone who has never lived here why every day seemed like parole. Every time I would swing my legs from under the quilt and ease my toes onto the pine floors of my shotgun double, I would think, I am getting away with something here.

This Isn't the Last Dance (Washington Post, September 2, 2005)

Hat tip: enrevanche pal BobLee.