I recently booked a trip back to New Orleans. I lived there once and it was a great time in my life. I was born and raised in NJ and yet I felt like I belonged in the South. When I graduated, my first job was in Baton Rouge. Good days. When a Yankee moves south, you will get mocked for quite a while, but I always thought it was a friendly mock, the kind that tests your mettle to see if you really might be an OK person underneath your cold NJ exterior. If you allow this mocking and suck it up with humor, you will make some wonderful friends. The South can be both very racist and at the same time, extraordinarily inclusive. I experienced and observed both – but overwhelmingly more friendliness than hatred.
Every time you leave a place to go somewhere else, I believe you take parts of that culture with you. And I don’t just mean a good jambalaya recipe or Mardis Gras beads. I’ve been back in NJ for more than 30 years but I try to keep a “laissez le bon temps rouler” attitude – ‘let the good times roll’. And I try to remember the neighborliness of my experience.
When I go back, I will feel like I’m back home in many respects. I’m going to spend a day with a realtor looking around town a bit. Ya’ never know what retirement ideas might stick someday. Although much as I love the city and its people and culture there are two parts I don’t like – hurricanes (the storms, not the adult beverage!) and the crime – there is still too much of that. But I’m not afraid of the mocking.
Every time you leave a place to go somewhere else, I believe you take parts of that culture with you. And I don’t just mean a good jambalaya recipe or Mardis Gras beads. I’ve been back in NJ for more than 30 years but I try to keep a “laissez le bon temps rouler” attitude – ‘let the good times roll’. And I try to remember the neighborliness of my experience.
When I go back, I will feel like I’m back home in many respects. I’m going to spend a day with a realtor looking around town a bit. Ya’ never know what retirement ideas might stick someday. Although much as I love the city and its people and culture there are two parts I don’t like – hurricanes (the storms, not the adult beverage!) and the crime – there is still too much of that. But I’m not afraid of the mocking.