Seasons

Audubon Park was an amazing place for me. There was an open-air stage made to look like a Greek or Roman ruin, and that was close to the lagoon where they rented boats. A train ran all through the park and passed by the zoo.
The branches of live-oaks hung low to the ground...making it easy to slither up into the trees, and we boys played "king of the mountain" on a dirt mound called Monkey Hill.
The seals played in a huge pool and bellied up on a smooth rock island at its center. I wanted to be a seal and fought the urge to jump the fence to be with them...particularly during the summer.
And then there was a dreamy merry-go-round with lots of ponies all about...and mirrors reflecting the strung lights...and music, like syrup in the air.
Around and around....and with each round a chance to grab at a ring. I would stretch out far...had to have that ring....
I never slipped off my horse, but it was worth the gamble...the risk...
Each time around the urgency was there, but then the ponies would became still, the mirrors didn't catch as much light, and there was no more syrup in the air.....just children, some laughing....some crying as their parents took charge of them.
And when the carousel emptied, so did the desire I had for the rings I grabbed at.
Situations give things their value.
Many things I did as a child were associated with a particular season of the year...and they had a sweetness only then. When the season passed, so did the magic.
Mardi Gras is the ultimate example. Night after night...parade after parade, I would snatch and grab at the beads, trinkets and doubloons. It's a good thing my mother never found out the insane chances I took. But I filled my room with this treasure...sometimes grabbing handfuls of it...letting it run through my fingers. I was rich!
After Mardi Gras? Who knows what happened to it all? And it didn't matter, because the season was gone.
During the summer, it was marbles. I filled CDM coffee cans with the marbles I won shooting marbles with neighborhood kids.
In the spring, I collected baseball cards and flew kites.
The fall was the season for tops and a game called "spike".
War was muti-seasonal.
Kids would divide up into teams and gather up acorns, pine cones, chinaberries ....anything that could be thrown....and the war would begin.
I remember finding a whole mess of chinaberry trees...and filling bags with their fruit. But the berries rotted in the bag before I had a chance to use my stash. The season had passed.
Situations give things their value....but my mother didn't seem to understand this.
Once we got free tickets to the circus at the Municipal Auditorium. As we went in, the smell of popcorn was everywhere, and I threw some huge hints....more than once.
I can hear her, "Bobby, I can buy you enough popcorn to last you days and days for what it will cost for me to buy you one little bag here at the circus."
How could I tell her about the rings on the carousel...and Mardi Gras beads...and marbles and chinaberries.....?
How do kids explain to their parents about seasons?
Maybe seasons are something that parents have to remember about. They used to know about seasons when they were kids...but somehow, they forget.
I did.

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The block of time in which I grew up in New Orleans was a period of vast transition. There was so much hope and anticipation that the city would grow and sprawl as so many other cities across the South seemed to be doing. I remember constant comparisons between New Orleans and Houston, for example.
But for some reason, New Orleans never got the juice.
The grids for the planned growth were optimistically drawn out in the form of highways that let to nowhere much. The city fizzled.
Black New Orleans proudly advanced the cause of civil rights and the recognition of the importance of black culture in the city. But it was slow going...involving demonstrators being hosed down by firemen at city hall...demonstrations in front of businesses down town.
As I was growing up, most blacks had jobs as maids, doormen, custodians. restaurant help, sanitation workers...mostly subserviant roles. Even during Mardi Gras, the black flambeau carriers lit the way for parades they had no real part in....except for Zulu and the Mardi Gras Indians.
The machine of segregation was in full throttle...and this was a rather harsh reality to a white kid born in Phildelphia...a kid who stole his first kiss in kindergarten from a little black girl.
I rode the city transit system quite a bit...there were no school busses. Every morning the busses, trollies, and street cars carried white business men into the center city, the maids and yardmen out to homes in Lakeview, and kids like me to a variety of private and public schools all over the city.
For seven cents a person could travel the whole city. But for blacks, it wasn't the price of public transit, it was the indignity.
There were two holes on the back of every seat...there were also wooden signs that read "No Colored Beyond This Point". There were two pegs on the sign that made it possible for the sign to be mounted on the back of the bus seats.
When a white person entered a bus and there were no seats available except those occupied by black, he could move one of the signs in back of a seat...causing the black(s) occupying that seat to get up and stand so the white could sit.
If a white was already sitting in a seat, and there was still a seat available next to him, no black person could occupy that seat. This made for a very interesting "game" among white kids going or coming from school. When they got on the bus or trolly, each white kid would take a seat all to himself...meaning that the seats available to black passengers were very limited.
Although I didn't participate in this cruel game...some of my friends did. My attitude adjustment toward the whole rotten thing came one afternoon when a heavy, older black lady got on the bus with bags of groceries. No seats were open to her in spite of seats next to white kids.
The lady stood trying to manage her bags and keep her balance at the same time as the bus stopped and started. In short order, she fell with her purchases rolling all over the floow. I immediately thought of my grandmother, Emma. I saw Emma on the floow...I saw Emma's purhases rolling all over the bus.
What was happening here was wrong...very wrong.
I helped her pick up her stuff. This was not some noble gesture to somehow salvage race relations in the South...but shame. Biting, head-hanging shame. This was not some stranger...this was my grandmother...somebody's grandmother.
I was changing...more aware.
The separate water fountains, bathrooms, entrances to movie theaters...separate shcools, housing projects, waiting rooms at doctors' offices....
And our churches....?
When civil rights legislation got serious, lovely public swimming pools were filled with concrete to avoid integrating them.
I wonder if it's coinccidence that New Orleans fizzled when respect and tolerance fizzled? ...Did it all happen when the "city that care forgot" forgot to care?
The racial intolerance I observed was at least one of the things that disillusioned me with "Bible Belt" Chrisitanity...and into a life style that promised love and acceptance...and a mind-opening drug experience.