Green

I have a confession to make. Drive through the Quarter on my first day. Think it’s not really my first day. Pass a man in a cape. Just waking. Think under promise and overdeliver. Pass Welmon Sharlhorne, his cane covered in glitter outside the Abbey. Think how sometimes the world gobbles up artists like chum.

Many days I walked this same street, drunk and confused, searching for something. I sit now in traffic, on my way to the West Bank for a truck load of wood chips. Not yet eight in the morning and five men play horns outside Cafe Du Monde. One sings about In the city, oh so pretty…and I have memories of more stories, of green parrots flying across from Jackson Square, landing in trees near the river.

I told Ron on the way home from Alexandria that I’m not selling bracelets so much as I am selling a story. This is all a story, a curious middle beneath bright blue sky and white clouds before the rain, a drive, me and Siri, and she says Calliope like the way people everywhere else say, even though here in New Orleans we say Calliope. 

People used to ask why I moved here. I told them that the reality here was better than any fiction I could write. And I do have a confession to make, and we will get there before the end, but let me tell you about Wesley, way out past the Intercoastal Waterway, past the fancy golf course, along the levee, to a space where trees go to end their lives and begin new lives unseen beneath the ground.

Wesley used to tell a story of living in a trailer near these wood chip piles and how every morning he would wake up and tell himself that he was going to get out of there, find a real apartment, save some money–he made good money–and get on with his life. 

He would say, “Every day for seven–”

And the first time I heard this story I expected him to say seven weeks or seven months.

He said, “Everyday for seven years I told myself I was going to get out of that place. Then I would finish work tree trimming and just keep drinking.”

I understand this insanity. I understand the insanity of the confession. It's time to tell you, how a couple nights ago I saw a fallen papaya tree on Independence Street. A few days later, the giant green papayas still lay on the trunk and scattered along the sidewalk. Last night somebody had put some on the stoop in front of the house. 

I took four or five, a couple for me and I also knew my friend Anthony might want some. He reached out to chefs and the next thing you know I had forty pounds to deliver. 

This same man, Anthony, he shoveled soil with me from a pile that was not mine ten years ago. I did not even consider this illegal until a cop drove by while we loaded five gallon buckets and a laundry basket. I ended up returning the soil. 

I thought I’d grown past taking what was not mine. 

I decided to take the money from the sold papayas and bring this to the house where the tree once grew. 

Angie calls me. It’s almost noon. She says she has a bunch of extra papayas. I think God is Emmet Foxing me by giving me a reward for a thought, for an action I have not yet taken. I don’t really believe this is the way God works, but this idea comes. 

I think how I need to find more chefs. One has not responded so I check my phone. Angie sent a photo. It is the same broken trunk, the same scattered papayas from Independence. 

She says the woman who lives there gave them to her. She says Potter from the coffee shop lives with the woman. 

Now I know to whom I should give the money. I know those dead nuns smile down upon the prepositionless end of my sentence. 

Angie says not to worry, that the people from Independence are happy to give the papayas away, and maybe they are, but this would end the story.