the loot pile of a sultan's vault

All photos by me, except the top one. I think Jamye St. Romain took.

 (1) Our band played on Leon's porch after the St. Patrick's Day parade. After a couple of songs the trombone player, tambourine player (not in photo) and me (in the yard in green) walked to another party in the neighborhood. On the walk, we saw some guy stepping onto his porch with a National Tri-Cone Resonators, one of those all-metal ones that looks like it should be resting in the loot pile of a sultan's vault. We walked up his sidewalk and started playing with him on his porch for a couple of minutes and then walked on.

(2) I thought this contrail was a comet. There have been some comets recently, right? It was so striking, alone in the sky it felt like a comet, or at least an omen.

(3) I worked on a story that required three separate trips across the Huey P. Long bridge ("the old bridge") in north Baton Rouge, just before the bend in the river at Devil's swamp, just south of a turn referred to some as Free Negro Point - legend has it that ornery slaves were offered the chance to swim across the Mississippi to their freedom only to drown in the undertow. An entirely different story is that a young Ornette Coleman had his tenor sax taken from him and thrown down a hill just before he was beaten up in a bar for playing bebop in his touring R&B band, somewhere just around there.

(4) That's my buddy Clarke, a ghost in the gun cabinet at Bourque's Supermarket in Port Barre, LA. - Home of the World-Famous Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Bread. We were there, at my request, to pick up some of their world-famous jalapeño sausage cheese bread. There was exactly one ring of it left in the jalapeño sausage cheese bread aisle. I felt perfectly accommodated in this errand.

(5) One of the trips for the aforementioned story involved a bourré tournament - a Cajun card game like spades where you lose money to some of your oldest friends. I found out that bourré is pretty much only played in Acadiana, some parts of Mississippi and the Greek island town of Psara, where it is called boureki (mπουρέκι in Greek).  There is a French village in Loie-et-Cher called Bourré, so maybe that was one hop in the route. Google Maps cannot calculate directions from (A) Fordoche, LA, where the photo was taken, to (B) Psara to (C) Bourré. I can barely get to Fordoche from here. One wonders who brought the game to whom.


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(6) This man got bourré-ed out of the tournament early so he sat with me and told me about the 20-foot alligator that showed up in his yard and a number of things that may end up in the story. A woman sat a little ways behind him shaking her head, telling me in a cigarette growl to not to listen to anything he said.

(7) This is just another sunset. Sunsets seem like excuses to be poetic, or to ramble, which I am doing. It  seemed like an excuse to post something besides a slideshow of record albums and YouTube videos I didn't shoot. If comets can spin by once in a while, I suppose I can do this once in a while, too.