Walking through the French Quarter is how this particular story begins, and this story is like many other stories just like it. It is based in repetition and polyrhythm, and it is also enormously self-conscious, and the French Quarter is self-conscious in the daylight but at night it becomes unaware and unashamed. That’s the exact time for a card reading, on the moment of day becoming night, at least in this story, and sitting before a woman that would never be trusted with any trade secrets I could think of was what happened at that particular time. This is a time for traveling on a shoestring and still finding pleasant surprises, and elegant surprises, in lodging that is surprising and elegant.

The cards were telling me something about a flag, and something about a grandfather, and something about learning how to pay attention or having to pay the price of falling off the edges of the earth. Both options seemed reasonable, so I took them, and that’s where I noticed that her eyes were reflecting red and black clothing from a boy standing behind me. This is another story about a haunting moment, where the main character turns around to see the boy in red and black, and no one is there, but there are three pennies on the ground.

New Orleans does something to me, something that hits the skin immediately upon entering the city, a moisturizing treatment whose ingredients are memory and salt. Salt seals at the end, and salt is the seal of the beginnings of jazz . We get to live in the middle period, the passage between a start and an end, and the center of this is New Orleans. I think about the card reader when the street becomes Congo Square, and processionals open with a spectacular show of flags, and the footprints of a boy are left in chalk dust on the ground at my feet.

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5. For additional information, visit the Company s website at www.halcyonjets.com