This is a big one, for me. My parents are both from Birmingham, Alabama, a city we visited every Christmas and most summers when I was a kid. Not like Birmingham today, which I understand is perfectly pleasant. This was the Birmingham where they lit the streetlights in the daytime because there was so much smoke in the air you couldn’t see, where a white shirt would turn grey in an hour outdoors, where the skies glowed like those of Mordor all night long. I might have been born and raised there. Or in Iowa City, where they later lived. The less said about that alternative reality the better.

But I wasn’t. So instead I grew up on a beautiful Uptown street lined with live oaks, watched (and occasionally, second-lined) jazz funerals going past on their way to the cemetery where I sometimes flew kites with my childhood buddy John (because there were no overhanging trees there to catch them), ate some of the world’s best fried food and heard some of the world’s best music. It was New Orleans that taught me the vital life lesson that if a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing later, preferably with a drink in your hand.