I’m not sure what started my love affair with the Big Easy, but last night I realized it was still as vibrant as ever.

Sitting in my closest friends’ living room just before the kickoff, one of them asked me, Why do you like the Saints? Its a legitimate question given that I’ve watched less than 10 professional football games in my life. I thought for a moment, and she asked… Do you just like the city? Yes… that’s it really. You see the city? She’s a friend of mine. We have history.

My earliest memories of New Orleans were from the music I loved. Jazz that played first on the record player, from albums that had been my father’s. Louie Armstrong and then Harry Connick would sing of the city that was a friend of theirs. I felt like I knew her by proxy. I could see the narrow streets and the street preachers. I could  hear the music coming out over the din of the clubs and smell the sea. She may have been my first crush.

The first time I met Nola I was 23 years old, having been married for all of 24 hours, our little red Sunfire rounded a turn in the interstate to see the bridge that takes you over the Mississippi River and into the French Quarter. I was young and naive, and the city was the opposite. I looked into her old weathered face and saw a woman, some how a sly old grandmother who was ready to teach and a young flirtatious girl at the same time. My first wife, for all her amazing qualities, saw a dirty stinky city with panhandlers and bad drainage. And we were both correct. It was the first of many times we would see things a bit differently. That night we sat down to eat fresh seafood in a little hotel bar where the one waiter and the one cook resembling Jack Sprat and his wife balanced their time perfectly between taking care of their only table and taunting each other with phrases that made the little white girl I had married blush, all while maintaining a singularly impressive level of inebriation. If this was Nola and I’s first date… it was going very well.

On that first trip I would sit in a courtyard and smoke a cigar in public. Something I had never done before. I ordered the first beer I’d ever drank. I wandered the streets and bookstores and shops wearing a suit with a pretty girl on my arm. I listened to music that made my soul soar and saw the smiles of people that seemed so authentic, so genuine that it made your heart hurt. I wandered through Jackson Square and the little vintage hat shop that has no prices.

Near my last night of that trip, we ate in Arnau’s and I laughed as my then wife would sip her water just to make the waiter run over to fill it. After dinner we walked down Bourbon Street, where in the midst of all the chaos and revelry, panhandling and congestion, a little old man handed me a gospel track with a smile.

The second time I visited Nola was for a religious meeting. I traveled with three companions, all excellent men but with a very different world view than mine. One night while walking back to the hotel we happened upon a house with no sign, just a sandwich board with a menu near its front door. We wandered into the best meal of our trip. Much to my embarrassment my companions seemed to increase their accents when asking questions. “You see, we’re from Oklahoma…” they would start. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m from Oklahoma but my soul is from somewhere else. My friends saw a world of debauchery needing saving… I saw good people living honestly.

After my divorce, I remember wearing a Saint’s cap when I went backpacking. My father, my backpacking companion, never questioned my choice. I think he knew without asking. Some might say the city is special because of its connection to my first love. I won’t say it isn’t true. But I don’t love the city because it reminds me of her, I have plenty of things that could do that. Its more like the city was a friend that knew us both. Nola was a part of my life. I don’t have to tell the city about those stories. Nola already knows. And Nola is very good at remembering the good times regardless of how bad things might get.

Its almost time to go back… To see my Nola again. In a few months I’ll travel back to the city that always welcomes me. I’ll walk her streets and search her shops and savor all the excitement she’s come to symbolize for me. I’ll pay too much for a shoe shine with a panhandler and I’ll drink too early in the afternoon. I’ll stop and listen to the street preachers and I’ll say amen too loudly. And for the third time in my life… maybe I’ll feel at home.