CALLING BATON ROUGE (RING LATE, HANG UP EARLY)

Me With the Tusas At Their Home for The Baton Rouge St. Patrick’s Day Parade

Having detoured around an accident, I arrived in Baton Rouge late Friday night where I’d been invited to attend the parade Saturday morning at the home of Dirty Little Angels author Chris Tusa and his wife Pam. I still miss those late-night, heavy conversations from my days in academia and Chris and I immediately dove into formidable quandaries of art, politics, life and literature, pontificating until after 3 a.m. The only downside of this verbal rambling was that, unbeknownst to me, Baton Rouge is an early party town. The parade that would pass by their front yard began at 10 a.m., so guests were already arriving 8 a.m., reluctantly rousing me. I guiltily yet groggily rolled out of bed searching desperately for coffee.

The Parade Finally Arrives

As we waited on the parade, Chris played dueling stereos with his braggart neighbor, eventually turning off his system in disgust at the one-upper next door while I stayed inside and had a pleasant chat covering a few hundred years of U.S. history with his former neighbor, a retired firefighter. Two consecutive sprawling conversations with well-read sparring partners—it was nerdy nirvana.

When the parade finally did roll by it was [Read more…]