molly peterson

When a friend told me about the New Year’s tradition here of shooting your weapon up into the sky, I laughed…nervously. True, they do it at Deep Springs, where my sister teaches. But, uh, fewer bullets, not to mention fewer targets.

Mid-City New Orleans has a fantastic — in every sense of the word — tradition on New Year’s Eve. A knot of people begins to gather toward dusk. Some of them haul their old Christmas trees out, and toss them toward the center of the neutral ground.

By 11 p.m., the crowd was a pulsing mass of hipsters and half-wits, po-lice and parents, children, couples, clusters of recently-introduced strangers, dogs and cats living together…Veteran residents of the ‘hood sported eye protection and pocketed keys to nearby houses, smug in their toilet privileges. Most everyone who braved the clearcold had the good sense to have something liquid in hand.

And the fireworks. Hoarded in front hall closets, stumbled upon in basements, purchased specially…I tumbled sparklers out of my glove compartment that I had stashed in Austin six months ago, bounty from my country-crossing brother. Turns out that’s a poor storage method; our five measly lights sputtered more than they sparkled. No fire danger there.

Which was just as well for the firefighters, turned out dapper in red suspenders and spotless yellow pants. They lounged smirking around the truck, admiring the height of the tree pile, warning the more incompetent rocket launchers to aim away from trees. As public events meriting a lackadaisical sort of fire protection go, few offer as many opportunities for repartee with attractive members of the opposite sex. They had their eyes on the prize.

Then around a quarter to midnight, a forestfire whoosh. Throat-clogging smoke obscuring the lazy curves of misaimed fireworks. Embers an inch long floated — well, that’s not a fair word, they put on a little speed — into women’s hair, onto jackets and bare skin. And the crowd roared above it, with abandon and joy and all those emotions that New Orleanians know as intimately as sorrow but seem to save now for only special nights.

Picking through to the center, my face changed temperature so fast it tingled. And we pulled around and around, laughing up and out of our tribe, passing around good and bad champagne indiscriminately among strangers and friends, looking for once neither forward nor back.