Picturesque

Chapter 1: Royal Signet

It's hard to find a quiet place in New Orleans these days. The temporary yet ceaseless tourists on Bourbon Street and Jackson Square seemed to have colonized even the residential and outer areas of the sinking city, pushing out the citizens who have lived here their entire lives. I've been able to avoid Bourbon Street since the sewers started lifting up through the sidewalks and the shops were bought out by lewd bars and other lascivious services. Nonetheless, it is still beautiful to me. It's beautiful to pass a tacky souvenir shop whose insides are a capitalist regurgitation, a polar contrast to the Creole architecture that serves as its face. It's beautiful because it is home, my home.

The faded colors of downtown New Orleans shops were once bright and vivid, clean and new. The Big Easy has been defaced with decades of recessions, demoralization, crime, tourism, and the inevitable will of the Gulf of Mexico to one day swallow it whole in her muddy recesses.

My days are mostly spent on the campus of Tulane. Before I retired 10 years ago, I kept to my office and lounge areas in the building where I taught. Between my retirement and Mary's death, I stayed at home with her and took care of her during her final days, spending mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in my garden, and nights in the living room watching the nightly programs we had watched together for so many years. We'd become masters at Wheel of Fortune. For the past three years, in my solitary, I spend the entirety of my days on campus. The dean of my department offered to give me my office back due to my consistent presence, which made me feel quite like a cockroach, but I passed on the offer to let them save it for a young professor who would come along and take my place.

My station in the lonely corner of the university coffee shop was taken as I walked in this spring morning. A young man was sitting in my seat, lurched over his laptop, hands typing away at a speed my hands never knew. He didn't even notice me as I approached him, standing over the little circular white table situated at the corner of a purple leather booth seat attached to the wall. The heavy brown leather bag I carried started to hurt my shoulder.

My shadow over his laptop caught the young man's attention, and he looked up at me, eyes going wide at what I first believed to be the surprise of seeing an 80-year-old woman with a walking cane standing in front of him in the middle of a university café.

My beliefs were proved wrong when his mouth fell open, the gruff depth of his voice matching his muscular physique. He looked like the average football player, with his cap sitting backwards on his head of brown tufts. "Dr. Hayes," he greeted me by my name, the surprise on his face fading into a sort of an awestruck smile.

"Young man," I greeted him back with an edge of confusion in my tone. My eyes squinted over him, trying to see if I recognized him from one of my courses. I've taught thousands of students, but I've always been able to remember a face.

He stared at me wordlessly for a moment, and the discomfort of it made me imagine that his eyes kept getting stuck on the wrinkles in my face in their trek to recognize me. He then quickly snapped out of it, looking around himself and realizing that he must be sitting in my usual spot. He let out a rather dumb noise reminiscent of a cartoon giant before he quickly stood up and scooped his computer in his arms. "I'm so sorry, Dr. Hayes." He kept looking between me and the items he was taking from the table, which also included his cell phone, backpack, and a few empty coffee cups.

His arms full of his array of belongings, he shuffled out of the table space and to another table further away, letting his things all fall out of his arms, causing the multiple coffee cups to bounce off and to the floor. He scrambled to pick them up as I carefully took my seat on the booth, bent knees shaking until I was sitting down fully. I scooted over so that I was in front of the table, resting my cane down on the adjacent leather bench next to mine.