Star-Crossed Times For the Crescent City

It helps a little bit, even as your heart is breaking over those TV hurricanescapes of New Orleans under water, to remember that "the city that care forgot" has always danced with death.

New Orleans was born amid ghastly yellow fever epidemics, where corpses stained with black vomit were piled on carts to be hauled to above-ground crypts. The sepulcher flower vases bred the fever-freighted mosquitoes.

Climate, Catholicism and voodoo shaped the city, along with Latin fatalism, languorous hedonism and an atmosphere of poignant and elegant decay. It's no accident that Anne Rice lived there to pen her vampire tales.

And yet, inseparable though they may be, New Orleans has always been more about the dance than about the death. Somewhere in the shade of its majestic live oaks and the shadows of its lacework balconies, among the saxophone riffs in its echoing alleys and the soft magenta glow of its crape myrtles at twilight, the flickering ghosts that haunt New Orleans whisper huskily of sweaty, sensual love and the promise of enduring memory. Even the street names whisper promises: Desire, Amour, Abundance; Pleasure, Treasure and Joy.

It is not comforting to realize that, in the wake of Katrina, bloated bodies are floating on those streets today. But to speak of New Orleans's resilience is simply to cite its history -- a demographic and cultural melting pot of German industry and French and Spanish elitism, of Irish gregariousness and Sicilian emotionalism, of African exuberance and American frontier cussedness that embraces death, too, as a part of life.

Lives, levees and live oaks are merely temporary in any case. Katrina's catastrophes will no more define New Orleans than the Nazi occupation defined Paris, though they may last almost as long.

For those of us lucky enough to have come of age in New Orleans -- even more than for the tourist who falls for her instantly -- the decadent majesty of the city is like a forbidden love. You want desperately to explain the depths of your enchantment, but you know in your heart that others will acknowledge it merely as an easy infatuation or a passing fling. You know they will never awaken at night drunk on the coffee-and-banana fragrance of her docks or the beery sweat of her pre-dawn streets or the humid hum of her streetcar summers. How could they ever understand the depth of your passion?

How could they understand your love for a city in which life itself is an art form and the poorest, least privileged inhabitant a knowledgeable artist?

Thus with children one seeks to inculcate a New Orleanian view of life at the proper age, by carefully introducing the concept of breakfast beignets, jazz lunches and gardenia-scented patio dinners, where they set fire to dessert.

One instructs them to notice the immense cultural difference between the growling, attempted intimidation of street beggars in Washington ("Spare some change?") and the amused, self-confident hustle of New Orleans street people who will bet you $5 they can tell you where you got them shoes. ("On yo FEET!")

This catechism usually works, but not always in the way intended.

One April Sunday afternoon in the French Quarter, you are bemoaning the touristy changes of the city and the decline of its music when you come upon a Dixieland band playing in the middle of Bourbon Street with a musical integrity, artistry and enthusiasm unheard in decades.