Dear Friends,

Kenner is the neckbone of the pig that is New Orleans. I did not always hold this opinion. For many years, the city was an afterthought, a place that was sort of a place, a between place, but not really a place. Perched as far west as one can get and still be in what I consider New Orleans, no child who does not live in Kenner has any reason to go to Kenner, unless, perhaps, he is going to the airport, or the Mardi Gras Museum or Frank’s Baseball Cards, when they were open.

Trips from the airport followed a standard pattern. Upon exiting the airport’s automated doors, the smell of New Orleans kisses you as only a French city does. The humidity hugs you with the same force as my embraces of Mr. Pillowcase, my faithful childhood security blanket. Especially when returning from a soulless, uncultured wasteland like Chicago, it is a wonderful feeling, a true homecoming. All sojourners deserve a place like New Orleans to call home.

Father would retrieve his emerald Jaguar from the lot and gather us on the second level. When the real airport was open, after descending from the ramp, drivers only had a few seconds to cut across three lanes of traffic to get to I-10. We entered the Airport Access Road, walled off from Airline Highway by concrete barricades. For a while there was no wall or crepe myrtles blocking the view of the concourse and runways to your left.

Before people became obsessed with safety, before Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis, in the days when children rendezvoused for adventure and treasure hunts on their bicycles well past dusk, there were no barriers between the oncoming lanes of traffic on the Access Road. The speed limit was 35 MPH, and it felt slower than that because the road looked like an interstate. To the east, in that barren grass field, a quiet reminder of Pan Am Flight 759’s tragic one minute takeoff-plunge, felled by an afternoon thunderstorm’s downdraft.

Police officers took post near revolting billboard signs for the hedonist. These ground traffic controllers, cloaked behind signs for Pat O’Brien’s and the Maiden Voyage, were merciless to speeders. I recall father getting a ticket for going 38. To be fair, he transgressed the law and fell short of the glory. Nonetheless, he cursed the city of Kenner for abiding by the letter, or rather, the number.

As Kenner is a Catholic New Orleans city, there is grace in the law, but only if that grace comes from above. In the Catholic Church, this would be from a priest or bishop, who according to Tradition, not Scripture, is able to forgive sin. In matters of man’s law in town, absolution comes from having a friend on the inside. This could be a relationship with another police officer, a politician, or simply a good friendship with a connected restaurateur. Father had them all.

One of the noble things father taught me was facing punishment for sin. He said, “Do not abuse your station in life. Do not ask for favors if it compromises the other. If you kill the albatross, you must spend the rest of your days teaching others the God who loveth us made and loveth all.” Father paid that ticket.

Life is not samsara, and by extension, the notion of karma is a farce. Jesus was right, as always, teaching the rain falls on both the just and unjust alike. Neither, though, is life a straight line. No American city exemplifies this axiom better than New Orleans. Nothing about the city is straight. Its crookedness is part of its beauty. The ground of being for the city, or water of being, is the Mississippi River. Its curves mock lineal and linear thought and life. The curves are why you feel so alive in this city. Conversely, the miasmatic grids of cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago kill the soul.

The city’s essence invites you to wander, and this is one of the city’s most entrancing qualities. Some of the great figures of literature and history would be at home in this geography. I think of Moses, who, rather than make a beeline from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, wandered in the wilderness for forty years. It does not take but a month to walk the Exodus journey, but Moses found God in that meander.

What of our good friend, Don Quixote, the knight errant whose duty was to go where God led, undoing injustice and wrongs? His path was never easy nor was it straight. To dwell and pilgrimage in this city would not have been without cost, but he would have known this is his homeland.

So it was George Washington Cable, a man after, or before, my own morals, who never touched Satan’s brew or leaf, and, for most of his life, abstained from the theater, for its amusement was often filth. His path, encumbered by friendships with those who fought for wrong at Liberty Place, was circuitous. It was also headlong into the swift current of white supremacism in the postbellum city. What courage these men had.

Before I learned how to wander, Kenner was not much of a place to me. It was a passage, a tacky one at that, littered with an unkempt canal, Bonnabel High School, and lots of billboards. Cousin occasionally brought me there to buy baseball cards, but my head was buried in a Beckett most of the drive.

In May of 1998, that changed. Mother and I were responsible for meeting Uncle at the Airport. When he got in the car, he thanked us for being there and suggested we go to a restaurant he had learned about from a caller on The Food Show. “It’s over on Loyola by Sam’s. Kenner Seafood, I think.”

Driving down that part of Veterans was interesting, and I stared at the unusual mix of commercial and residential properties. There was a park called Susan and a discount bakery. Once on Loyola, I noticed the Kenner Welcome Center and a Wendy’s. I asked Mother, “What does America’s City mean?”

“It means they had no imagination to create a better name,” she quickly snapped.

Loyola Drive was a very unsightly place. It had lots of gas stations, a Popeye’s I later learned had an all you can eat buffet, a Rally’s, a Taco Bell, and a video rental store. It looked like the type of place you would never remember, a piece of a pig you might discard. It was anywhere, except it wasn’t.

Behind the anywhere-in-America facade was a hidden gem, Kenner Seafood. Like its city, the restaurant wasn’t and isn’t much to look at from the outside. The front was cinder block, painted a bluish grey with cheap plastic latticework, more common in gardens, covering the window. The pediment above hosts a vent that is off center. A tin overhang offered minimal relief from rain and sun. There were some benches out front, presumably for long waits. I’ve never seen anyone eat in what is essentially the front parking lot. A larger parking lot buttresses its north side. A large AC unit perches, seemingly, precariously on the slanted roof.

Once we entered, we knew we were somewhere special, it just took a little time and effort to get there. There has been a Kenner Seafood in that location since Salvadore Joseph Pardo, Jr. opened it in the mid-1980s Pardo moved on to open Stingray’s by Esplanade Mall. His sister-in-law, Sylvia Perigoni, and Trudy Alexander took over the operation around 1996. It has blossomed under their ownership.

This post was edited on 2/29/20 at 8:33 pm