It’s impossible to understand the experience of Carnival season from someone telling you about it, reading about it, looking at pictures on someone’s blog, or even watching it on TV. Yes, you might hear the bands and see the floats and admire the elaborate and creative costumes … but it’s not the same as being there. No matter how strong your vocabulary or how good your camera lens, you can’t fully capture the feeling of the crush of the crowd as a band goes by – “back up, baby, back up,” the chaperones mutter, pushing everyone to the side – or the thwack of beads hitting your outstretched hands or the way your throat hurts after screaming and your calves ache after walking for blocks. It is a full-on glorious sensory assault that must be lived.
Likewise, it’s impossible to understand the devastation of watching Carnival season go on without you when you’re in another part of the country. You can write words like “bleak” or “lonely” or “empty,” but they don’t really get at how it feels when you know it’s Krewe du Vieux Saturday or Muses Thursday and you’re somewhere where life is just going on as normal, without even the distraction of King Cake to make things better.
My first Mardi Gras Day while I was away at college in Missouri was so sad that I still remember almost every moment of that Tuesday in the dead middle of a bleak gray February, from my shower-damp hair freezing as I walked to my first class past a field of dead cornstalks to the Hoppin’ John they served in the dining hall that night on purple, green, and gold paper plates in their attempt to be festive.
“Oh, Eve,” my friend Kim from Coffeeville, Kansas, said sweetly, “look! You don’t have to be sad – they brought Mardi Gras to you! See?”
And I said something to the effect of, “What the hell is Hoppin’ John and why can’t I just be left alone to suffer in peace.”
When you’ve lived 17 Carnival seasons in New Orleans, you can’t be served an oversalted South Carolina rice dish on a colorful paper plate when it’s 12 degrees outside and think that you’re in any way close to celebrating the holiday as it’s intended to be celebrated.
Luckily, Rowan, who is away at college this year, has heard me tell this story enough times that she bought her ticket home for Mardi Gras with her high school graduation money back in July. Although she will miss the fun of the run-up – Chewbacchus and Cleopatra and Freret and Barkus and King Arthur – and the actual day itself, she will at least be here for Muses and Hermes, Iris and Bacchus. It’s not the same as a full Carnival season, but she will stand on the route again, will hear the same bands and catch the same beads and feel that same familiar ache in her legs and throat. I am grateful that she will feel again this year what it means to be here when the city opens itself up and spills joy into the streets.
Carnival season, despite what many merchants would have you believe, is not something you can ship across state lines or dish up on a paper plate. Once you’ve lived it, it is something you carry with you wherever you go and that you always will know you are missing.
This year, Rowan will be here for enough of it, a reminder that leaving does not have to mean losing, that distance does not erase belonging to a place, and that some traditions always wait for you to come back.
