Saturday, December 20, 1997

Joyce has invited me to Christmas dinner with her sister's family in Metairie. Her sister has four children and, so far, six grandchildren, and Joyce says they will all look at me "like a new appliance." I said I've been looked at worse. She said "Not by my sister."

I bought her a pair of earrings on Royal Street, little gold fleurs-de-lis. The lady at the counter asked if they were for my wife. I said no, a friend. Then I said, "A good friend." She smiled like she'd heard that before.

No answer to the letter I sent Edwin in October. It hasn't come back, though. I'm choosing to believe that means it got read.

The Square has its lights up and the Cathedral looks like a wedding cake at night. Dolly has a red bow on her bridle that one of the little girls at the barn tied on her. She hasn't eaten it yet. That's how I know it's Christmas.

Tours: 8 · Tips: $66 · Dolly: festive

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Sunday, October 26, 1997

The first real cool front came through Friday night. You wake up and the air's different, like somebody opened a window on the whole city. Dolly was so frisky this morning she trotted the first lap of the Square before I could talk her out of it.

This morning Joyce rode in the carriage for the first time. She's lived in New Orleans her whole life, fifty-one years, most of it within a few blocks of the Square, and she had never once taken a carriage ride. She said that's for tourists. I said, ma'am, today you're a tourist, and she climbed up and sat in the back seat with her pocketbook in her lap like she was going to church.

I gave her the whole tour. The Cabildo, the Presbytère, the Pontalba ironwork, the old Ursuline nuns, the works. She corrected me twice. Once she was right and once she was thinking of a different building, and I didn't tell her, because I am not a fool.

When we got back to the stand she said, "You're good at this, Dennis." People have said that to me before, about the refinery. It meant something different this time. I don't know why.

Friday I wrote Edwin a letter. A real one, on paper, three pages, which is the most I've written by hand since the Army. I told him where I am and what I do, and I told him some things I should have told him in 1995. I mailed it before I could think better of it.

Tours: 10 · Tips: $92 · Dolly: trotted when she shouldn't, twice

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Monday, September 22, 1997

Supper at Joyce's tonight. It's Monday, so it was red beans and rice. In this town it's always red beans on Monday. The story goes that Monday was wash day, and you could put a pot of beans on the back of the stove with the ham bone from Sunday and leave it all day while you did the laundry. Joyce's beans had been going since ten this morning, and they were the best I ever ate. I brought a pecan pie from the bakery, which was a mistake, because she is a professional and she ate a slice to be polite and said "Store-bought crust" like she was reading me my rights.

She lives in the apartment over her shop, up a narrow stair with a balcony on the street. We sat out there after supper and watched people go by underneath and didn't say much. It was the first time in a long time I've sat with somebody and not felt like I had to fill up the quiet.

Also: Joyce came to the library with me Saturday and looked at this page over my shoulder and said it was as plain as a paper sack. So now there's a fleur-de-lis between the entries. I made it out of the typewriter keys. It took most of an afternoon. If it comes out crooked on your computer, it's straight on mine.

Tours: 7 · Tips: $48 · Dolly: put her nose in a lady's shopping bag

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Saturday, August 2, 1997

One year of this journal today.

I didn't think anybody would read it, and I was mostly right, but not all the way right. I've gotten e-mails this year from a retired schoolteacher in Ohio, a lady in Texas who rode in a carriage here on her honeymoon in 1961, and a fellow from Tennessee who told me about Mule Day in Columbia, which is a whole festival every spring just for mules. I'd like to go to that someday. I believe Dolly would want to go too.

The schoolteacher asked how much a driver makes. A fair question. It depends on the day, the heat, and whether there's a convention in town. So from now on I'll put it at the bottom of an entry: how many tours, how much in tips, and how Dolly did. Tips are most of it. The rest isn't any of your business, but it isn't much.

Thank you to everybody who wrote. I read every one twice.

Tours: 9 · Tips: $71 · Dolly: ate a silk flower off a lady's hat (the lady's, not hers)

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Thursday, June 19, 1997

There's a praline shop on Decatur Street a block down from where the carriages line up. I've walked past it every day for more than a year. Every afternoon about four o'clock a woman comes out of it with a paper sack of broken pralines, the ones that cracked coming off the marble, and hands them out to the drivers. I always took one and said thank you and that was it.

Today she held onto the sack and asked me why Dolly's hat has pink flowers when all the other mules have red. I said because Dolly picked pink. Which is true, sort of: she ate the red ones. The woman laughed. Her name is Joyce Hogle. Her mother opened the shop in 1958, and Joyce has run it since her mother passed. She lost her husband in 1990. She told me all that in about two minutes, standing on the banquette with the sack of pralines, like she'd decided it was time somebody knew.

After work I went in and bought a box, and we talked for half an hour while she cut a slab of fudge. She says PRAH-leen, not PRAY-leen, and she corrected me every time I got it wrong, which was every time. Pralines are sugar, butter, cream and pecans, cooked just to the right point and beaten until they start to go cloudy, and then you have to spoon them out fast before they set up in the pot.

Sunday was Father's Day. Nothing from Houston. I didn't expect anything. I'm just writing it down.

I ate the whole box of pralines tonight. I'm going back tomorrow for another one. That's my story.

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Saturday, May 17, 1997

Back on the seat a month now, and the back is holding. I went to a chiropractor out in Metairie that one of the other drivers swears by, and either he fixed it or time did. I have a foam cushion now for the driver's seat and I do a set of stretches every morning on the kitchen floor that I'd be embarrassed for anybody to see.

Dolly sulked the whole time I was out. The young fellow who drove her said she'd stop at every corner and look back at him. The first morning I came back she put her whole face in my chest and pushed. I'm told mules don't hold grudges. I'm not so sure. I think she was letting me know.

Today I had a regular. There's a gentleman from Mississippi who comes every May on his anniversary and rides one lap around the Square. His wife passed in 1993. He sits on the left side of the back seat and leaves the right side empty, and he doesn't talk, and I don't do the tour. We just go around, slow. Then he pays, and tips too much, and says "Same time next year," and walks off toward the river.

I didn't know this job would have days like that in it.

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Tuesday, March 25, 1997

Typing this from the floor, more or less. My back went out a week ago Wednesday, lifting a harness down off the peg. I heard something in there go like a dry stick and that was the end of my day. The doctor at the clinic says it's a strain, rest and no lifting, and come back if it gets worse. It hasn't gotten worse. It hasn't gotten a whole lot better either.

I've been lying on the living room rug with a bag of frozen peas under me. Twenty-seven years of hard work and I never hurt myself once at the refinery. Now a harness gets me.

The boss put one of the younger drivers on Dolly. I worry about the rent, which is due the first. I worry about Dolly.

Mr. Jerome came by Sunday with a pot of his wife's gumbo and stayed two hours. He sat in my one good chair and told me every story he knows that isn't true, and a few that are. He said "Dennis, you're going to have a bad back now. Everybody on the seat does. You just learn to drive around it." Then he left the pot. I've been eating out of it for two days.

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Wednesday, February 12, 1997

Ash Wednesday. My first Mardi Gras as a resident of this city is over, and I am tired in places I didn't know I had.

The two weeks before were the busiest I've seen. Every hotel full, every carriage going all day. On Mardi Gras itself our barn keeps the mules home. Too many people, too much noise, nowhere to drive. So I walked uptown to St. Charles Avenue like everybody else and stood on a ladder somebody let me borrow and watched Zulu and then Rex go by. A man on a Zulu float handed me a coconut, painted gold. He leaned way down and put it right in my hands. I've got it on top of the television.

I caught more beads than I could carry. I gave most of them to children on the way home. That seemed right.

This morning the Quarter was dead quiet and smelled like a hangover. The street sweepers had been through. People were coming out of the Cathedral with ashes on their foreheads, a lot of them still in some piece of a costume. Dolly was glad to be back to work. She looked at all the beads hanging off the balconies like a mule who has seen it all before, which she has.

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Monday, January 27, 1997

The Super Bowl was in the Superdome yesterday, Green Bay against New England, and for a week the Quarter was full of people from Wisconsin and Massachusetts. Green Bay won it.

The Green Bay people wear foam rubber hats shaped like a wedge of cheese. They call themselves cheeseheads and they mean it as a compliment. I had a carload of them on Thursday, two couples, and one of the men asked if he could put his cheese hat on Dolly for a picture. I said she already has a hat. He said she could wear both. And she did. She stood there with a straw hat and a foam cheese on top of it and looked at the camera like she'd been doing it her whole life. He tipped me twenty dollars and the picture is going to be on a refrigerator in Wisconsin for the rest of time.

They all thought our January was summer. They rode in shirtsleeves and said "Can you believe this?" every block. I said, come back in August and we'll talk.

After the game Sunday night the New England fans were real quiet. I gave one fellow a ride back to his hotel for free. He looked like he needed it.

~ end of 1997 ~