TulaneLSU

Friend,

Crabby Jacks might be the most glaring error. I can name 32 better restaurants that serve poor boys. In fact, I would argue that Crabby Jacks is one of the worst places to get a poor boy in the
Metro. Liuzza’s is unworthy and if you served the food served at Mosca’s anywhere else it wouldn’t stay open more than three months. Impastato’s will remain a locals only secret I suppose.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

That was an incredibly interesting storm. We stayed at Uncle’s Portofino condominium on Pensacola Beach, where the tropical storm force winds began around 3:00 and provided a bit of entertainment. We cheered as the storm pulled eastward, just as Mother had predicted it would, well before the National Hurricane Center, because we thought that meant we would not face the storm’s brunt.

By 6:00, we thought the storm was over. The skies to the west were thinning and light began to beam down as it does at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm. Based on pictures of radar that Cousin sent us by text, as our internet was unusable, we had missed the western eye wall. Uncle suggested we might even have a miraculous sunset like the evening before. I considered going downstairs to walk along the beach and collect shells.

Things changed quickly at 6:30. Even though the sky was still light, very light actually when looking west, the winds suddenly began to howl. For the next half hour, we endured sustained winds of 80 MPH, with gusts above 100. There was a great number of lightning flashes for a short 15 minute period that I wondered if somehow that screenshot of the eye wall missing us was a fraud. The wind and lightning were ferocious, reminding us of our humble place on this planet.

Uncle’s condominium faces southward over the Gulf, but the terrible winds were coming from the northeast, and our windows were not exposed to their full force. Thanks be to God, we sustained no damage to the condominium. Several neighbors whose condominiums overlook the Sound were given a different lot. Their windows faced those northeastern winds directly and were blown out. One of these families is now sharing our space. We are glad to have them with us amd we hope the power returns so Mother might make all of us her Calliope chocolate chip cookies for breakfast.

By 8:00, the winds had become remarkably calm, punctuated every five or so minutes with squally gusts, but the violence of an hour earlier had subsided. Now the winds are coming from the west, probably at only 15 miles per hour, and there is a wonderful calm on the beach.

In a couple of hours, I intend to awaken everyone to see whether they would care to join me on a shell expedition. First crack after a storm rewards the early riser with a panoply of shells to make any conchologist jealous. If any of you are on the beach you are welcome to join me, or I hope, us.

We have much for which to give thanks. The condominium is undamaged, we have been sheltered through another tempest, and we have room for a family of refugees. Let us all give thanks to the Lord. If the morning brings a beach full of shells, I shall consider that an additional blessing, grace heaped upon grace.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

There was a glitch between the squalls.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

We are enjoying ourselves a Portofino at Uncle’s as we get the first few bands of Isaiah. Gusts I would estimate have hit 45-50 MPH. But the reason I write is Mother said something quite important.

Mother accurately predicted Isaiah this year, when on Sunday she projected a Category 3 storm landing near Navarre. “This storm will be a repeat of Opal in ‘95,” she said shortly after church five days ago. The NHC and all the meteorguessologists were significantly off in timing, strength and landfall. But Mother showed her skill once more.

“Hurricane season for New Orleans comes to a close next week,” she announced just minutes ago as we watched the Gulf churn in the distance. And everyone within earshot turned and with the joy of watching a baby come into this world stood up and began cheering.

This will be the earliest Front Day since 2014. So please get your favorite drinking chocolates ready. The cookies and hymns will be waiting for you.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

The storm surge on the Southshore of Orleans west of the Industrial Canal and Jefferson Parish ranged from 9-12 feet. The design of the I-wall levees along the outfall canals led to the failure of those levees. Water did not overtop the I-wall levees along the 17th Canal and London Canals. Catastrophic failure of those poorly designed levees is what led to the flooding of much of Orleans Parish west of the Industrial Canal and Old Metairie. Had the engineering, construction and maintenance of those I-wall levees held up to what they were designed to do, none of Orleans west of the Industrial Canal would have flooded.

The well designed levees along the shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans East to Kenner held up fine. The levees along the MRGO in St Bernard and New Orleans East were overtopped. And the I wall levee in the Lower 9th Ward probably would have failed had the barge not knocked it down.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

I do not enjoy suffering, but experiencing suffering may be the first requirement for writing about its virtues. The great mystic of the last century Simone Weil understood something about affliction that I have slowly come to recognize and that is that suffering does not merely hurt us. At its worst, it humiliates our belief that we are autonomous, important, and in control. It reduces the self until there is nowhere left to stand except in dependence upon something beyond the self.

Weil called attention the beginning of love, and perhaps affliction teaches attention by force, making us look at what we would otherwise ignore. I would not choose the wounds I have received, but I am increasingly grateful for what they have made impossible for me to believe about myself. There may be crushing defeat in affliction. But for those who put their faith in God and do not waiver, affliction opens the door to finding the meaning of Christ’s suffering.

May your illness be short and may you find God’s steadfast love and faithfulness in the darkness you now face.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Dear Friends,

The closing of old New Orleans businesses affects me with such disproportionate sadness. Mother tries to console me with words like, “It is only a store. No one is demolishing the Cabildo or The Napoleon House.”

Yet when Mother entered my room this morning to inform me that Hurwitz Mintz is closing, I felt the same peculiar ache I experienced when Adler's closed and when M. Goldbergs disappeared, an ache that returns whenever I am forced to buy casual menswear and remember that M. Goldbergs once existed. It does not help that we did not get one last meal this week in the Zodiac Room at the original Neiman Marcus before its closure.

Perhaps this is because I have always had difficulty distinguishing the places of New Orleans from the people who inhabited them, and the people from the memories I have attached to them. A store was never merely a store to me. It was where Grandmother took me for a Saturday outing, where my parents shopped, where my grandparents had shopped, where some long-forgotten New Orleanian had stood before me, and where, for reasons I often cannot articulate, I still feel that some portion of my family is waiting.

These old business meant something and their owners were willing to put their names behind them. The business was an extension of who they were. It was not a 9 to 5 job for them. The business was their calling and it was what I always believed was the American Dream, which has been whittled away by descendants that enjoyed the comforts of the dream without the duty and drive that created it. Now nameless stores like Pottery Barn, Rooms to Go, and Arhaus, stores that lack any connection to the past, replace the family named anchors that connect us to our ancestors.

For my family, Hurwitz Mintz is older than my own memory of it. Great Grandfather was a friend of the Hurwitz family and helped them during their early years in New Orleans. Out of gratitude, Mr. Hurwitz gave Great Grandfather a very special desk chair rumored to have been clad in a blue silk originally. Years later, Grandmother gave that chair to me. It was leather by that time, and I still have it, although it has been reupholstered twice during my ownership.

There is something wonderful about this chair I sit in right now as I type to you, my friends. I have spent a substantial portion of my life sitting, reading, and writing in this chair, a chair that carries the history of Hurwitz Mintz. I sadly did not ponder and appreciate its history until this morning. We are miserable creatures in our fallen natures, and we lack the courage and gratitude and attention to see God’s blessing in every space of life.

Hurwitz Mintz itself belongs to the great Russian-Jewish story of New Orleans. Although there is little today that would suggest a bias against Russian Jews in the city, in the first decades of the 1900s, New Orleans, and this includes the Jews from present day Germany who had arrived a generation or two earlier, was not too welcoming of the huddled masses arriving daily on the banks of the Mississippi near Jackson Square. Russian Jews received a similar welcome as the Sicilians. But Great Grandfather was no respecter of title or nationality and befriended the first Hurwitz and helped get him a job as a furniture merchant. It was not a glorious job, but it was how many Jews in that time got their feet in the door.

Joseph Hurwitz joined his brother in law, Morris Mintz, and established their first store in 1923 on Royal Street. Years later, after a visit to James Cohen’s coin shop, I was lifted on the shoulders of a unicycling busker not far from the original location, where Mother bought me a beautiful marble obelisk. When Mother refused to allow me to go on a fishing trip with Cousin in the late 90s I threw that obelisk against my wall. It was not my finest moment and is the reason it no longer is in my room with my chair.

Hurwitz Mintz may well have been the greatest Russian-Jewish retail institution New Orleans produced. And now it is going. I cannot but think this is at least partially the result of the recent death of Morris Mintz’s grandson, Mitchell, whose family history in New Orleans did include, at Galatoire’s, a rather unfortunate deviation from the customary etiquette of the ladies’ table. It was certainly popping at that lunch. Desperation and desuetude drive and deliver the dream. Comfort and complacency conspire to consume and crush it.

I cannot help thinking of Adler's, which survived for more than 125 years, and of M. Goldbergs, whose closing still creates in me a melancholy whenever I need to find something as mundane as a pair of casual trousers. I think of all the places that once made New Orleans feel comprehensible, places where you did not have to wonder whether the city still possessed the thing you remembered because the thing was simply there.

The comparison that haunts me is New York's Jewish deli. During Mother’s lifetime, there were roughly 1,500 Jewish delis in New York. Today there are only about twenty. Imagine being born into a city in which 1,500 such places existed and living long enough to see almost all of them disappear. At some point the question ceases to be where one can get a good pastrami sandwich. The question becomes what happened to the civilization that required 1,500 places to sell it?

New Orleans, no, our world, is experiencing its own diminishment.

One by one, the names become memories.

I look at my chair and think about Great Grandfather and a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who came to New Orleans and built something that lasted more than a century.

And I suppose that is why this hurts so much. I am not really mourning the disappearance of a furniture store. I am mourning another piece of the New Orleans that made my family possible, and the increasingly uncomfortable realization that the world I remember is becoming something that must be reconstructed from chairs, photographs, stories and a floor mosaic before doors that no longer open.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

Getting a good pizza in New Orleans on a Tuesday is as difficult as finding a Freemason who will explain what the Freemasons actually do. St. Pizza, Zee’s, Forbidden, Il Supremo, Pizza Domenica, Margot’s, and the rest have apparently entered into a clandestine Tuesday accord, the terms of which are known only to their owners, a cadre of in the know streetcar conductors, and that one elderly man who wears the wig and lives behind the Superdome. I might have to travel out to Old Metairie tonight go get Tower.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

The buffet or smorgasbord may be one of the last expressions of American abundance remaining in this time of inflation and rising costs.’There is something wonderfully democratic in standing before an abundance of food and being permitted to take what you want. At Golden Corral the accusation of lifeless, standing food is particularly difficult to sustain. You can watch the steaks being cooked before your eyes. The pot roast, fried chicken and fried shrimp are replenished every few minutes. In the morning, eggs and omelets are made to order while pancakes and French toast hiss upon the griddle as you enter. This is not food awaiting a funeral. It is food continually becoming.

And perhaps that is the deeper beauty of the buffet. It does not ask you to pretend that abundance is shameful and gluttonous. It simply places abundance before you. No one is judged by the table and there is room for appetite and second helpings, those human impulses that polite society has spent centuries attempting to conceal beneath linen napkins.

The buffet is America because it believes that there ought to be enough. It is excessive and democratic and miraculous. A table is continually being replenished. The waitress is non-intrusive and present to clean your table, not make small talk or bring you anything but order. And if you are hungry, you simply go back.

While I despise everything about today’s Las Vegas, I can say that the city’s one and only positive contribution to the world is the buffet, which ought to be called the smorgasbord. Had it been given that name instead I think far fewer would take issue with this style of freedom.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

I am skeptical of the accuracy of this message from a less than reputable source on forum filled with lies and half truths. And I remain genuinely dumbfounded by that anti-science branch of the anarchists, the populist and libertarian assortment who have somehow persuaded themselves that refusing a flu vaccine is an act of liberty rather than an exhibition of that oldest of sins, pride. Christianity has never taught that prudence is a failure of faith, nor that we honor Providence by refusing the ordinary means through which Providence preserves us.

The influenza vaccine is not a sacrament and offers no guarantee against illness, but the evidence from many studies and surveillance systems is remarkably consistent: vaccination reduces the risk of serious influenza, hospitalization, and death. This goes for two year olds. It is the same for 102 year olds.

And yet here come the self-appointed apostles of individual sovereignty, suspicious of epidemiologists but apparently trusting some fellow on the internet who has discovered that virology is a conspiracy. There is something almost theological in the absurdity: the creature insisting that humility requires him to know better than everyone who has spent a lifetime studying the creation.

I shall take the vaccine, thank you, and regard it not as submission to the state but as a small exercise in prudence, gratitude, and the Christian understanding that accepting the gifts of human knowledge is not a rejection of God’s providence.

Yours,
TulaneLSU

Friend,

I like the cut of your jib, too. To clarify, the only Book of Common Prayer I own, and the only one I use, is the true standard: the 1928. Mine is not merely a prayer book but a small family relic. During the war, when Grandfather was in Europe, he helped save the lives of a crew of RAF men. Out of gratitude, one of the chaps gave Grandfather his pocket Book of Common Prayer.

Grandfather kept it for half a century and on Christmas morning in 1992 he gave it to me. I have carried that gift ever since, and scarcely leave the house without it in my pocket. Its pages have become soft with use, its corners worn by years of being carried from one place to another. There is something wonderfully Anglican about it all and if you ever come across a tall sport who says he is I yet is not toting in his pocket an English man’s 1928 BOCP, the truth is not in him.

Yours,
TulaneLSU