New Orleans – Books Can Save A Life

Tea — A whimsical front yard in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans

Making our way across the country, we spent two days in New Orleans – Halloween Eve and Halloween night.

The revelry was, as you can imagine, over the top both evenings. There were lots of children trick or treating. In the French quarter, there were parades galore and every elaborate costume you could imagine. The nights were warm and pleasant, and we enjoyed walking and watching the spectacle.

NewOrleansHalloween

One morning, we took a ferry ride across the Mississippi River to the quiet neighborhood of Algiers.

LittleAlgiersHouse

The streets there are lined with quaint shotgun-style homes, many being renovated.

StairwayGarden

Letters

CarnegieLibrary — There is a Carnegie library in Algiers….

SeedLibrary — …with a seed library in an old card catalog.

We loved the garden district, too. Great little shops, and the homes were old and stately, with lots of character, plenty of wrought iron, and well-tended gardens.

Vintage — A vintage shop in the garden district and a pumpkin-hued dress perfect for a Halloween ball.

Cemetary — Lafayette Cemetery with 19th century tombs

Hop on the trolley with me in the garden district:

Back in the French Quarter, I inquired about dipping pens in Papier Plume on Royal Street. I don’t have the faintest idea how to use them, but it’s part of my art exploration project. I was able to try out writing with various pens and nibs. A wonderful staff person analyzed how I hold the pen – I’m left-handed – and recommended a set of nibs. He gave me a quick lesson on making strokes of various widths, too. I bought a pen, three nibs and sepia ink, and I can’t wait to try them.

I bought this set, made in Venice, with three nibs and sepia ink.

CafeDuMonde — On Halloween night, we had beignets – warm, light as feathers, covered in powdered sugar – and café au lait at Café du Monde on Decatur Street.

Coming up: Next on our journey we encountered great beauty, as well as something quite the opposite.

“He would push 10 mg of morphine and 5 mg of the fast-acting sedative drug Versed and go up from there.” – Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

In light of Hurricane Harvey, I’m reposting this from four years ago. Five Days at Memorial is a fabulous work of investigative journalism about one hospital’s desperate decisions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Much was learned the hard way about emergency preparedness in health care settings during Katrina, which seems to be making a difference as Houston copes with Hurricane Harvey. But with more mega-storms likely in our future, this is something we should all care about. Click on the link below to read my previous post about Five Days at Memorial, a work of nonfiction that has won numerous awards.

Source: Five Days at Memorial

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