Mickey’s Gold Nugget on Nicholson

I couldn’t find any pictures of Mickey’s on the net so I subbed this one of a menu cover idea I was playing with. Bayou Sara Seafood is as real as Mickey’s now that Mickey’s has been closed for twenty odd years. But this is a good example of how restaurants can stay with us long after they are dead and gone. Mickey’s was one of Sue’s favorite places and we would go there a lot back in my undergrad days at LSU. Rumor has it that the place was brought down by cocaine and gambling, but that is always the rumor about restaurants that didn’t make the turn of the century in BR. The steaks were very good and reasonably priced and the Crabmeat Imperial was superb. Lump crabmeat, a little mayo and sour cream with green onions, baked and served in a seashell shaped ceramic dish. For some reason, whenever I think of my time with Sue, I remember Mickey’s Gold Nugget, the Gumbo Place (where we both worked at one point) and this one midnight at the old oak in City Park where she was late to the party and came drifting in out of the fog wearing an off-white muslin sundress. I’d never seen anything as beautiful before that moment, So I do believe that restaurants are a part of the fabric of who we are and who we remember ourselves to be. When you go out to eat with someone it is so much more than what you order and how they prepare it. There is atmosphere, there is romance, there is history and the future as well as being happy right now, in the moment. Happy enough for it to resonate years later. Here’s a couple more Soji shots I took the other night when a bunch of us got together for dinner and catching up and back in the day tales.

• 

• 

• 

Light of My Life

Kissing her the first time

on the levee, fireworks

reflect on the river below—

I know I’ve lost a friend.

Coppertone and sweet olive

a breeze that brushes like a kiss

were it not for this need, so urgent

we could wander hand in hand

through time, through misery

and happy history, but no,

we will love and lose it all

The Nydia

It is hereby an obligation and provision

of this will that my boat The Nydia

and her spars shall be carefully preserved

by Tulane University for at least 99 years.

                                        Albert Baldwin Wood

Who can explain the ghost of self

that walks with a man through his past?

Were he beside me here before his boat,

could Albert Wood tell me how it felt

to die at sea, hand on the tiller, sun low

on the haze of sea and sky together

where it seems an island is always

trying to press itself into existence?

Would he tamp a pipe, smile

the watery half smile of the very old,

and say nothing, nod his head as if

he had said everything?

The leaves have turned in the courtyard,

swept away from the black stone walks

to mulch the beds of ferns beneath the walls.

An old man fitted me for my first pair

of eyeglasses, the veins in his nose

startlingly clear through some lenses,

blurred and distant through others—

He kept repeating Which is better,

this, or this? Simple enough in theory—

He told me should I lose my glasses

in the woods to put a small hole in a leaf,

look through that aperture and I should

be able to see my way clear of the woods.

That would be the question I should pose

to the ghost of Albert Wood, Was it like that?

Sharp pain, here, then gone, the world reduced

to a pin prick and then . . and then . .

But why should he, being dead, suddenly learn

to remember perfectly even the most important

of the many events of his life? Could I,

come upon my younger self the same day

I first wore my eyeglasses then say to him

I remember this as if it were yesterday,

each leaf in each tree separate and distinct

Could I tell him what he ate for lunch,

or who he thought he was in love with?

I can smell leaves burning near here,

and I wish Albert Wood could be with me

even if we had nothing to say to one another.

I could admire him for any reason I wished,

or detest his astounding vanity—

Maybe share the peace of a good smoke

against the damp chill of October—

Which is better, this, or this?