In my south Louisiana childhood, dragonflies were so common they sometimes looked almost like a fog overhead, especially in the late afternoon; if you sat still for a few minutes they’d start landing on you. The most common colors were blue and green, but in the canefield behind my house there were yellowish-orange ones with stripes on the wings, and we’d occasionally see big purple ones or shiny bronze ones. At my granduncle’s farm in Ponchatoula, I once caught an absolutely enormous bright orange one. They weren’t all that hard to catch, and if one held them by the wings for a minute or two their wings would become too damp to fly, and they’d simply cling to one’s finger or hand like the one in this picture while their wings dried off, then they’d soon fly away again. I remember one day when I was probably about 11 or 12, I organized the neighborhood kids to catch as many as we could in about an hour and put them in an empty garbage can with an old sheet over it; I then theatrically whipped off the sheet and they flew out of the can like a cloud. On another occasion, a gigantic swarm of them passed overhead while we were playing tag; it took over a minute to pass, and there must have been tens of thousands of them at a minimum.
But by the Eighties I barely saw them any more, and I haven’t seen one in person in decades. I believe the reason they became rare in the New Orleans area was the spread of mosquito control; dragonflies are predators (we used to call them “mosquito hawks”), so fewer prey means fewer dragonflies. There was no mosquito control in my home town in the ’70s, but there was when I returned in 1988 from years of living in the city. And while mosquito control is a necessary evil, of all the things lost to progress, I think the loss of dragonflies is among the ones I feel most keenly. So much so, I’ve intentionally included them in my stories, in descriptions of New Orleans summers of the 1920s. Yes, all progress has a price. But I wish beauty didn’t always have to be part of that price.
I’ve never followed the maudlin practice of turning September 11th into an observance, but because today marks 25 years since the event, I decided it would not be inappropriate to do the “Where were you when…?” thing today. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was “Where were you when you heard Kennedy had been assassinated?”, and in the ’90s it was “Where were you when you heard about the Challenger disaster?”; I imagine in the ’50s people used to ask, “Where were you when you heard Japan surrendered?” But for quite some time now the event so referenced has been the September 11th terrorist attacks. I have told mine many times in person and I may have mentioned it on social media, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never brought it up on this blog, so here goes.
At the beginning of September, 2001, Grace and I were living in an apartment near New Orleans International Airport and operating our successful escort service; I had just recently become engaged to Matt, but he was in Los Angeles at the time. I typically took gigs from 2 pm to 2 am and then took over answering the phone until 4 am so Grace could sleep; after that I forwarded the phones to our day operator and went to bed, turning the phone ringers off so nobody could interrupt my well-earned rest. Our answering machine had a light which flashed once per message, so for example if there were three messages it would go Blink Blink Blink {pause} Blink Blink Blink {pause}, etc. We also had a caller ID unit. Typically, I woke up between 11 am and noon, and that day was no exception, but when I went to turn on the ringer I saw the little light flashing so rapidly I couldn’t count the number. I pressed the playback button while looking at the called ID unit, and what I heard on the tape was a long series of hang-ups except for a single message from Matt, saying, “Don’t worry; they closed LAX so I’m heading home.” That was mystifying, as was the fact that the caller ID showed all those hangups had come from our friend Doug, who owned another escort service I did calls for. But before I could call Doug to find out what the hell he was thinking, the phone rang and this time I answered. The conversation went like this:
Doug: Can you believe this shit? Me: What shit? Doug: They blew up the World Trade Center! Me: What’d they use, a nuke? Doug: No, they flew a plane into it! Me: You’re shitting me! Wait, there are two towers; how could a plane hit both? Doug: They used two planes! Me: OK, you are definitely shitting me. Doug: Turn on your damn TV! Me: What channel? Doug: Every damn channel! Me (after complying): OK, you obviously aren’t shitting me.
If you’re wondering how I could possibly be so nonchalant, it was because A) I was only half-awake; and B) I had been expecting some major terrorist action for some time, though I was obviously surprised by the supervillainous method the terrorists employed.
There is one rather odd detail I remember from that day. I had not seen Babylon 5 when it first aired, but Grace watched it every day in reruns on the Sci-fi Channel and I had seen enough in passing to get interested, so when they started running it again from the beginning I watched it. The day before, September 10th, they’d played the episode named “Believers“, in which the central conflict are aliens who believe surgery is evil and refuse to let a doctor save their child. On September 11th, they played it again; I thought that was odd, but I assumed somebody in their programming department was too upset by the morning’s events to change the tape or however that’s done. But then the next day they played the same one again, then again on Thursday and Friday; they didn’t move on to a new episode until the following Monday. I don’t understand why they did it, except that part of the show’s backstory is that terrorists had at some point in the past nuked San Diego, and perhaps the channel’s management wanted to put off getting to an episode where that was mentioned to avoid upsetting viewers; continually repeating an episode focusing on the harm done by religious fanaticism hardly seems like an improvement, though.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
I’ve always loved maps, from old-time gas-station road maps to historical maps to maps of imaginary places. As a child, I delighted in preparing maps of places I’d dreamed up for make-believe play, and in my teens that turned into preparing maps for the world of my D&D campaign, ranging from dungeons my players would explore all the way up to the entire world they lived in. And though I rarely draw my own any more, I’m still always excited to find maps which show me something I didn’t know before, or at least didn’t know in sufficient detail. Case in point, the map at right, which some of y’all may recognize as depicting the western half of New Orleans; the part that was important to me is a small detail which those of y’all unfamiliar with New Orleans history may not recognize as interesting without explanation.
Last month I wrote about discovering a guide (including maps) to New Orleans’ extensive streetcar system of the early 20th century. But before the streetcars there were canals, leading from the then-much-smaller city through the swamps to the north, ending in Lake Pontchartrain (which connects to the Gulf of Mexico through a tidal channel named The Rigolets). I always knew about the New Basin Canal because it was not filled in until the 1940s, and in my youth I knew several older folks who remembered it. But in one of those strange oversights which often affect even people with relatively sharp minds, it had never occurred to me to ask where the Old Basin Canal had been! Furthermore, I never realized just how far the New Basin Canal came into the city until I found this map while researching for The Big Boom. If you zoom in you’ll see a straight channel running from the end of Bayou St. John (the wriggly thing just to the right of the map’s centerline), labeled “Carondelet Canal“. That’s what it was officially named from 1794 until the 1830s, when people started calling it the “Old Basin Canal” in contrast with the newly-completed New Basin Canal. If you look at a modern map of New Orleans, you can see a narrow strip of green running from Louis Armstrong Park to the end of the Bayou (very close to where I lived from 2004-2006, incidentally); that’s the former route of the canal, which was filled in by the city in the 1920s after the new Industrial Canal opened in 1923. The famous Basin Street of Storyville fame and jazz legend was named for the turning basin at the terminus, just north of the Vieux Carre.
That was exciting enough, but the part I got really jazzed about (ahem) was realizing that the New Basin Canal went so far into the city. If any of y’all have ever driven on West End Blvd in New Orleans, you’ve probably been impressed with its incredibly wide neutral ground (grassy median); the reason it’s that wide is it’s the filled-in route of the canal. But at the foot of that Boulevard, where it meets I-10 today, the canal once jogged over and continued almost to the river. After the canal was closed in the late 1940s, the Pontchartrain Expressway was built over the route in the 1950s; in the 1960s the expressway became part of I-10. The area of the filled-in turning basin was used by the city for storage until the late ’60s, when it was decided to build the Superdome there. So if you ever drive through New Orleans toward the Superdome on I-10 coming from the direction of the airport, you’re following a transportation corridor which has been there for just short of 200 years, only now on land rather than water.
In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades. –
“So Long Ago, So Clear”
Trying to use [social media] without muting is like trying to have a garden without weeding. – “Maytweets”
Journalism that doesn’t at least occasionally offend the government isn’t real journalism. – “Yes, They’re Still Tweets”
My emotions are often insidious, slippery things, which is why I often used to refer to the “snakes in my head”.
– “Thirty Years Gone“
…Alan Manning Chambers…[has been] arrested…in [Orange County, Florida for talking to a cop fantasy role-playing]…as a 14-year-old boy…Chambers is the former leader of Exodus International, an Orlando-based organization that promoted so-called conversion therapy and claimed for years that people could change their sexual orientation…in 2013…Chambers apologized to the LGBT…community and announced Exodus International would shut down…[admitting] that he had masked his own attraction to men…
The…latest [stupid social media fad], known as “ballmaxxing,” has [foolish] men injecting fluids like saline or Surgilube into their testicles to increase their size….[sometimes] to the size of grapefruits…for [fetishistic] purposes…Physicians have called [it] one of the most reckless body modification trends to emerge from male online communities, warning that [it] often leads to permanent damage…Specific risks include infection, abscess formation, and cellulitis…kits bought online…may contain toxic materials that are not only harmful but also unsterile, increasing the risk of…permanent disfigurement…Surgilube…is not bioabsorbable…which…can…result…[in] the need for surgical intervention to remove embedded material…
…Montreal sex worker Adore Goldman is organizing a…[stripp]er strike…in the midst of F1 weekend — one of the busiest times of the year for the city’s clubs — to demand greater labour protections and push for the decriminalization of sex work. She says strippers’ employment status as independent contractors, which is now an industry-wide norm, has for too long shielded club owners from ensuring safe working conditions….[presentl]y, she and members of…the Sex Work Autonomous Committee (SWAC)…[ar]e zeroing in on the “bar fee” that clubs charge dancers to work…but…clubs…treat…[dancers] as…employee[s] despite the self-employed label….[dictating] what time [they] can come in, what time [they] can leave and penalize [them] for being late…The strike also includes erotic massage parlour workers…One of…SWAC’s ultimate goals is to create a union grouping all kinds of sex workers…
Cops across California are getting incentivized to arrest more people for stealing from chain stores with the help of millions of dollars in grant money that they can use to buy surveillance technology from companies like Flock…[which are] facing national backlash for [enabl]ing…privacy violations ranging from stalking ex-girlfriends to tracking people seeking abortions out of state. It all goes back to a [fascist] collaboration between the retail industry and the California Governor’s office…based on the [false] premise that retail theft is linked to organized crime…a narrative largely pushed by lobbies like the National Retail Federation…[which has] no [demonstrable basis in fact]…Walgreens famously walked-back its complaints about shrinkage three years ago…[but]…the…plan…helped unleash ALPRs on California cities…including…Bakersfield, Irvine…Chula Vista…Los Angeles…Santa Rosa…Vacaville…and…Modesto…[but]…the most Flock-happy [cop shop] appears to be th[at of] San Francisco…which received $15 million in grant money…to install 400 Flock cameras around the city…
The FBI wants to buy access to automated license plate readers…nationwide, which would likely allow the agency to [unconstitutionally] track the movements of vehicles—and by extension people—across the country without a warrant…The…[only two] companies that [can] provide the [level] of data the FBI is seeking…[are] Flock…and…Motorola…which acquired Vigilant Solutions…in [Search of Problems]…
…a [typical and representative] North Carolina [cop] planned to kill Black people in a mass shooting at…the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival…Christopher Gillum…was arrested…[on April 22nd] at a hotel in…Destin, [Florida] and…will be extradited to Louisiana to face charges there…Gillum’s family reported him missing on [April 21st] and he has a history of self-harm…[but] left the state before…the [family could] involuntarily commit him to psychiatric treatment. [North Carolina cops didn’t bother to try to stop him because he was only threatening to murder]…Black people…
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
As a lifelong bibliophile with a special interest in reference books, I’m always delighted to find a useful one that I didn’t even know existed. Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a novel, The Big Boom, set in New Orleans of 1925 and featuring the characters from “Until the End of Days“ and “Hellhound”. It will surprise no one who has read more than a few examples of my work that I’m an absolute fiend for accuracy; anachronisms and other such errors really annoy me when I encounter them, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let them creep into my work if I can possibly avoid it. But once in a while, the fact one needs is far too obscure for the enshittified latter-day Google to turn up, and since there is no academic library nearby that can turn into a complicated search unless I want to rewrite that section of the story so as to avoid referencing unknown facts.
Now, some of you may know that early 20th-century New Orleans had one of the most extensive networks of streetcars in the United States, but as automobiles proliferated in the 1930s some of the lines began to close down, and after World War II an unholy alliance of Detroit manufacturers and corrupt New Orleans politicians conspired to replace the clean, quiet, efficient, and long-lasting (there are streetcars still in operation today which were built in the 1920s) electric streetcars with filthy, noisy, inefficient, “modern” buses which must be replaced every few years. By 1953 only the St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street lines were left, and in 1964 the Canal Street line was pulled out as well; the only line which survived into my adulthood was the St. Charles line, and even it was reduced to about half of its former range. So when streetcar routes came into the plot twice in the first four chapters of my book, I started trying to find maps of the network in its 1920s heyday, only to be repeatedly thwarted. Finally, a few weeks ago, a serendipitous search turned up a photo of the map someone had posted to Reddit; it was much too low-resolution to be of any use, but the poster had the good sense many internet denizens lack: she named the source. I immediately went to Amazon, located a copy, bought it for the very reasonable price of $20, and it arrived a week ago Saturday. It was published in 1955, was written by a New Orleanian who was an age-peer of my main characters, and was even better than I’d hoped for; it had three different maps (1880, 1906, and a combined 1915-1930 map), detailed descriptions of each route, schematics of the cars, period photos galore, and a wealth of facts I couldn’t have hoped for (such as the fact that the normal fare from 1922 to at least 1955 was 7¢). The whole thing was so exciting that I spent most of the following afternoon immersed in it, editing my text to insert small details, and generally feeling like a kid in a candy store. I know some of y’all probably find this amusing, but as I’ve said many times, “You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the girl.” Or the old woman, for that matter. And I always treasure books which connect me to a world I was born too late to explore for myself.
It's fascinating to watch men with severe, easily-recognized mental illnesses publicly blaming others' mental illness on behaviors that the speakers are incapable of due to their own undiagnosed, untreated psychopathologies.
My teen self would be confused by this.1981 Maggie: So there are new "Star Trek" shows all the time, but you haven't watched one in 20 years?2026 Maggie: CorrectM81: Ditto "Star Wars"?M26: YepM81: Plus all kinds of D&D fantasy stuff?M26: Right again.M81: I DON'T KNOW YOU
Reporters: doing something willfully is not a "failure", regardless of what politicians call it. If a party refuses to comply with some illegal diktat, that party has not *failed* to comply with said diktat; he has REFUSED to comply. The former is an omission; the latter an active rejection.
"Dabbled in cross-dressing" makes it sound like alchemy or some other occult practice.(Yes, I know about the shamans and mystery religions; this isn't that, so let's not)
This is how partisanism warps minds.Distrust of politicians *in general* for wholly rational reasons is subjected to the duopoly's Procrustean bed, then for 21st century readers must be trivialized & infantilized. So anarchists & true libertarians are described by the asinine tag "double haters".
Meanwhile, books on my shelves which were published as far back as the 1920s, and which I purchased as far back as the 1970s, are still 100% readable. And all I have to do to access them is walk over to my bookshelves.
A friend who grew up on Country/Western was unfamiliar with Zeppelin, and when "Ramble On" came on she asked me what it was about. I replied, "A dude who gets his girlfriend stolen by Gollum."
Trump is someone who consistently cheats at Solitaire and still repeatedly loses, and when he's done the deck only has about 49 cards. And some of those are from kids' game decks, like one with a picture of an old maid.
First Palantir came for the sex workers, but nobody cared because "sex trafficking".Then Palantir came for young minority men, and nobody cared because "gangs".Then Palantir came for migrants, and nobody cared because "illegals".Now it's coming for you, and I think you know the rest.
While I was working on “Until the End of Days“, I realized it would only be the first of a series of stories featuring Angela Morgan & Diane Rousseau, pulp-adventure characters based on Grace & myself. And by the time I was done with the first story, I already knew that the second installment would be a prequel, telling the story of how they met. Now that one is done as well, so I’m about to start the process of getting Lost Angels, the collection in which they’ll both appear, into shape; I’ve already started discussing the cover with Chester Brown, so I think we’re on track to publish by the end of spring. And here’s the really exciting news: my experience with these longer tales has convinced me that the next adventure should be a short novel, which I’ll probably begin in the next couple of months. But in the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of “Hellhound”, describing the events of Saturday, June 10th, 1922; the video at the end is a song which plays a part later in the novelette.
…While I was perfectly happy to dress and behave like a respectable maid of honor instead of a flapper for one day, there was no way I was going to indulge the government’s current exercise in wet-blanketry. So I took a generous sip from my punch to make room while on my way to the ladies’, then once I was safely away from prying eyes I lifted my skirt to get my flask from its hiding place in my garter and topped the glass back up with rum. Then I checked my hair, smoothed my dress and opened the door to find Tante Mathilde standing just outside.
She gently raised my hand to sniff my glass gracefully, and said, “Just as I thought.”
“Honestly, Auntie, it’s not like you’re a big fan of the Volstead Act yourself.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “No, I’m not, but you’re still too young.”
“I’m twenty-one, Auntie, and I just graduated with a real degree and everything; I’m not exactly still in pigtails.”
“Hmph. Well, at least you haven’t chopped off your lovely hair like so many girls your age.”
“Remember when I fell out of that tree when I was about twelve, and they had to shave my head to stitch it up? I know what I look like with short hair, and it ain’t pretty.”
“Nonsense, dear girl; you’re always pretty.”
“Thank you, but I know you didn’t come looking for me just to see if I was drinking.”
She took my left arm in the way she always did when she wanted a favor. “No, it’s because I want to introduce you to someone.”
“I think I already know most of the guests.”
“She’s not technically a guest, and I think y’all probably met in passing once or twice a few years ago”…She took me over to the doorway that led toward the hotel kitchen; in the next room were several large tubs of ice with electric fans blowing across them to cool the air. That may sound quaint to the modern reader, but keep in mind that air conditioning was extremely expensive back then, and it was still several years before even theaters and hotels in New Orleans began to install them. Diane was standing nearby, apparently taking the opportunity to cool off; she was a tall, fairly slender woman in her mid-twenties with long, straight black hair, hazel eyes, and strong features, and she did look somewhat familiar. “Angela, this is Louis and Claire’s youngest daughter, Diane. Diane, this is my grandniece Angela.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, turned to face me, flashed a quirky but winning smile, held out both of her hands to clasp mine, and said, “Hey there, honey! Ah think we met before.”
“Since you’re Miss Claire’s daughter I guess we have, but I don’t remember exactly when.”
“Ah been tourin’ with the band for almos’ five years, so musta been when we was in town.”
“Must have. I’ve been to the Orpheum quite a few times since then, but I guess never when y’all were playing…Are you doing anything with your friends tonight? You could come over to my house and we can make up for lost time.” She did not answer, but instead looked pointedly at my aunt, whose innocent expression had yielded to a rather sheepish one.
“Actually, that was why I wanted to introduce y’all. Diane has a little problem and I thought you might be able to help.”
“Oh?” I had instantly liked Diane, so I was already inclined to help if possible. But I wasn’t about to make it easier on my aunt; this wasn’t the first time she’d volunteered me for something.
“Normally, Diane stays at my place when she’s in town. But a strange man has been lurking nearby since she arrived Thursday evening, and she thinks he’s been following her.”
“We been seein’ him in the theaters an’ hotels for the last three stops, but we jus’ figured he was a fan; some of ’em are pretty devoted. But he’s hangin’ aroun’ your aunt’s instead of the hotel where the other girls are stayin’, so it must be me he’s after.”
“Ah, so if we can get you over to my place without him catching wise, maybe that’ll throw him off. But won’t he just follow y’all to your next gig in…?”
“Mobile. Yeah, we’re hopin’ to confront him before that. Mah daddy tried las’ night but he took off like his pants was on fire as soon as Daddy came out on the porch. If he loses mah trail today, he’ll need to come to the theater Monday night to pick it up again, then the bouncers can catch him without havin’ to call the cops to the house.”
“Makes perfect sense. You can have Marie’s room; she won’t need it any more!”
“Thank you, ah really appreciate it.”
“I’m guessing you already brought your luggage?” I asked, giving my aunt a look.
“Yeah, it’s in the green room.”
“I hope it’s not a lot; the only place we can carry it in my car is the rumble seat.”
“Just a big carpetbag. Except for mah bass and such, ah try to travel light.”
“There is no way we can fit your bass in a Stutz Bearcat, unless you think you can balance it on the running board”…
…About midnight, I went to get myself another punch, and asked if she wanted more bourbon, which was what she’d been drinking. “Actually, if you don’t mind, ahmana roll myself a reefer.”
“Go ahead; better a legal intoxicant than an illegal one, eh? I’d use it myself, but I’m afraid my lungs are too delicate; I can’t even smoke cigarettes.”
“If you wanna try it, ah could make you tea. Ah usually travel with some ’cause marijuana is illegal in some states, and sippin’ tea is more discreet than smokin’ a reefer.”
I was definitely interested in trying it, so we adjourned to the kitchen and Diane fixed it for me…I can’t say I cared for the taste, but sugar helped, and it wasn’t like I was drinking it for the flavor. Diane told me it would probably take an hour or so before I started to feel anything, but warned me that it might hit me pretty hard because I was unused to it.
“Why don’t we head upstairs, then? We can get you settled in Marie’s room, then if I’m too bent to manage the stairs I can just stumble next door.”
“That sounds like a plan!” she said, so I locked up and turned off the lights, and before long she’d put on her pajamas and we’d made her comfortable in Marie’s bed. I sat in the wingback chair while she rolled her smoke, and soon we were giggling like a couple of schoolgirls. Because we were already in such good spirits I didn’t notice the effects of the drug until I was already highly illuminated, and I think I got quiet for a little while as I adjusted to this new feeling. When I finally spoke up I realized Diane had dropped off, but I was still content to just sit there quietly, looking at everything through chemically-altered eyes and enjoying the breeze through the open window.
After Diane had been asleep for a little while, something very eerie happened; at first it spooked me a bit, but I told myself it was just a drug-induced hallucination and I should sit back and enjoy the show. There seemed to be a greenish-purple aura around her body, and as I watched it seemed to become concentrated around her left hand; it then began to take form like smoke, blowing out from her ring like steam from a teakettle (but in complete silence). It gathered itself into a cloud above her sleeping form, then moved like a living thing toward the window. As it exited I really wanted to get up to see where it went next, but I just couldn’t get myself to move out of the chair; it was almost as though I were tied down with the softest ropes imaginable, or weighed down with an entire litter of contentedly-purring kittens. It was less like not being able to move, and more like I just didn’t want to, even though I did…
I honestly feel sorry for those who truly believe that the best way to “connect” with other people is by boinking them, and the notion that people must boink to feel “connected” is a tragedy. Sexual relationships are held up as the pinnacle of human interaction, but they’re not even close; they’re in fact nearer the bottom because they’re extremely conditional.
I have always felt very strongly about this, ever since I first started really thinking about the matter before I was out of my teens. Part of the fallacy holds that romantic love is somehow intrinsically different from other kinds of love, but I don’t think that’s true either. Take “love at first sight”, for example; we only ever hear the term applied to romantic love, even though the idea that it represents something other than plain animal lust in that context is highly dubious. And yet there are certainly cases in which another kind of love manifests itself at first meeting. The very first time I really thought of that was in a fictional context: in the movie The Emerald Forest, a tribal chief in the Amazon abducts the son of an engineer surveying for a dam project, and years later he explains to the father that he had fallen in paternal love with the boy at first sight, and could not bear to see him go back to “The Dead World” of concrete and steel which the natives feared and hated.
Over the next several decades I saw other examples in both fiction and real life, culminating in one I experienced myself. In November of 1997 I met Grace at a party and she gave me a ride home; we hit it off immediately, and within weeks I’d received an actual paper letter from her in the mail. After a few more letters were exchanged, she told me she wanted to move down to New Orleans from her father’s place in Monroe, Louisiana, where she currently lived; I invited her to move in with me, and she never moved out. From that very first meeting she was as devoted to me as any sister; there was never any sexual chemistry, and in any case Grace was only sexually interested in men. But looking back to those times, I have no better term for the rapid bonding she experienced and demonstrated than “love at first sight”. And it would be wrong to pretend otherwise merely because it was not romantic love.
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