Life continued on. I went to work every day. We went to church on Sunday and our social life was pretty much the church. We really didn’t like New Orleans very much. It was a great city to visit, especially as a single guy, but it really sucked to live there. The heat was stifling. It was humid. It literally rained every day. Along with my briefcase, I carried an umbrella everywhere I went. And the bugs. There were cockroaches everywhere. Along with electricity and water and other utilities, we had the monthly bill of having the exterminator come over and spray our place. You had to do that once a month to keep them out and then it didn’t work very well. Since we lived in a 4-Plex, the roaches would just leave our apartment and go next door while they were spraying. Then when the poison had settled away so it was safe, they would just come back. I remember many times going into the kitchen late at night, turning on the light and seeing several scatter into the cracks as they ran to get away from the light.
Roaches are probably the main reason I wanted to leave New Orleans. But it wasn’t the only reason. I mentioned the heat and the rain. The politics were corrupt. Seeing Mardi Gras once was enough. After that it just seemed like a drunken orgy. As a married person, it held little appeal for me. I remember one day we were driving around town and I asked Karen if she could name one reason why someone (well, us) would want to live in New Orleans. We thought and thought and the only thing we could come up with was that the flowers were beautiful. And they were. The city is beautiful to see, especially in the spring when the flowers were blooming. The azalea’s were fantastic to see. But that’s all we could think of and, in the end, that just wasn’t enough to keep us there.
Besides, I wanted to go back and finish my education. I knew that without at least a bachelor’s degree, I would never be able to get a good job. What I was doing paid pretty good, but not nearly as much as an engineer makes.
It was time to leave New Orleans.
Dad