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.We encounter a few smartlydressed people toting briefcases, probably on their way to that bastion ofauthority on Royal Street where the state Supreme Court sits.Breakfast is best spent at the Clover Grill, deep in Boys Town, where thestaff serves up entertainment and good, heavy food.We see a cross sectionof the mid-Quarter; waitstaff changing shifts, tourists surprised by the dawn( Oh, that moon is bright! ), hustlers and dancers now off duty, and olderresidents nostalgic for their roots of not so long ago.Moving further on to the little shops and corner stores, we find themstocked by the most wide-awake people we ve yet seen, with the keen interestthat only proprietorship can give greeting customers with babe regardlessof age or gender, signing receipts for the delivery drivers, and having chatswith fellow residents.Sidewalks are being hosed down and what little outsidecleaning is ever done is swiftly accomplished before the furnace of typicalmidday.In the lower Quarter people are trudging off to work, usually in the Cen-tral Business District (CBD) or elsewhere, giving the blank stare that only thejaded resident can give.Looping back up Barracks, we stop by the GoldenLantern for an eye-opener, lest we face Decatur Street with no fortification atall.Along with a Bloody Mary or a mimosa, we hear some interesting dish, to be stored away for consideration.Fortified, we walk up Decatur, alreadyhumming with traffic, though the banquettes are calm just now.The heavyshopping blocks between the market and Jackson Square are strangely quiet,as the tourists are mostly abed and the shops just beginning to open.At thesquare, the first few tourist buggies stand by, the mules with their eternal,doleful stare behind blinders, pawing a little in anticipation of the day s trots.Walking up St.Peter in the Square, a few artists, fortune-tellers, and musi-cians are setting up.Some folk called by whatever name now are dozingupright on the benches, denied the privilege of lying down by welded ironcensure.We see the first of the day s tour groups being sheparded along by apark ranger, giving the latest cadre of tourists the real lowdown.Down Royal now, the prime rib of Quarter shopping, stores of treasureand still, reassuringly, a few of trash, are opening with hopes for the trav-eler s dollar.Past McDonogh 15 school at St.Philip, the laughter and yells of interlude: time and life in the quarter 199youngsters remind us that families are still here and a few lucky kids get to goto school within a living, breathing village of long history.Noon passes with chores, errands, and quotidian duties.In the sum-mer afternoons, residential blocks are quiet, shimmering with reflected heat.A late cold lunch refreshes, and now it is time to nap.In younger days, wecalled this a disco nap; middle age has truncated that to simply a necessarylie-down.Shut the door, draw the veil, strip down to diaphanous garb or noth-ing at all, turn on the air conditioner and perhaps fan.Lie down with mistyyellow fingers of light caressing the room through the drapes.The calliope snotes faintly waft through, soap bubbles of sound, memory and imaginationcarrying our fading wakefulness away.An occasional thump from a passingtruck or boom car draws us near, but not to, the surface of waking.It is nownighttime, and in summer if we get up by eight o clock we may see a fleetingdeep turquoise sky from the palette of Maxfield Parrish.On the other hand, getting up at eight may be too early, if our mission is anight in the bars ending in an assignation.Perhaps we have aged beyond thatas our usual late-night errand.We may want to meet old friends for dinnerand then retire to a neighborhood bar to have a few drinks before bedtime.The neighborhood bars are still here, at least for now, and recognition uponarrival is instantaneous.Even for nonsmokers, the cologne of cigarette smokeand spilled liquor with a top note of disinfectant is comforting.Avoiding cig-arette smoke is well-nigh impossible; New Orleanians, and particularly Quar-ter denizens, continue to smoke far above the falling national norm.Here isthe extended family, here is where the gains are celebrated and losses grieved.Here is where the new beaux are shown off and hopefully not scandalized.Here is where they remember your costume of last Carnival, and perhaps theone before that.When it is time to go home, we walk, in that self-conscious walk of thetipsy over uneven ground, trying to be vigilant, and quickly let ourselves in,bolting the portals behind us.The bed we got up from just a while ago stillwaits, and our shadows are tall on the high walls.Tucked in, we dimly hearthe lullaby of Quarter sounds, coming from just beyond the horizon of theair conditioner.The smells of decades of cooking and washing and of oldwood, with a faint note of natural gas, surround us, and at some point, wejourney to the Quarter of dreams that is always just across the threshold ofwaking life
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