New Orleans       My 15-year-old Australian Shepherd Lucha and I walk every morning before dawn when I’m home.  We have a fixed route Monday through Friday, which we vary on Wednesday, turning left, rather than right, at the dead end at the Mississippi River levee.  Whenever I have been out of town, even for only a couple of days like this last trip to Montreal, Lucha sniffs about to reacquaint herself with every bit of our trail, as if it were new to her.  As we make the next turn away from the river, there is a car we often see parked in the first block with stickers strategically placed over the rear window.  Local bands, Trump-takes, enviro solidarity, and the like all have pride of place, rather than the usual signals about the Saints or the Pelicans or places they’ve been.  The one sticker that dominates and prevents you from turning away in plain letters says simply: “memento mori.”

The Latin phrase “memento mori” is usually coupled with “tempus fugit,” which together adds up to “remember death, time flies.”  A Latin admonition to get stepping, this life won’t last forever.  This is something we all know, and, for most of us, don’t require constant reminders.

This morning it struck me a little differently.   On the evening before flying in the predawn to Montreal, I had called the family together.  Not being much of a tippler, I had asked our daughter to direct us to the best bar in New Orleans, a city of amazing bars and restaurants.  This was a bar so popular that we had to make a reservation on a Wednesday night for 6:45 pm months beforehand, and still ended up on a cold night in the patio under a smug pot.  I’m not exactly sure what the common name now is for the tall propane outside heaters that have become popular on docks and patios throughout the country.  My dad called them smug pots, because that’s what they called them in the orange groves of southern California, when he and his brother and sisters would be called out to keep them going overnight by my grandfather, when he was a foreman on an orange ranch, and they had to protect the trees from being damaged if there was the threat of a freeze.  The Jewel of the South was not just what many thought was currently the best bar in the city, but what many on the internet claimed was the best bar in the country.

We were remembering death.  My brother died a decade ago on that date in December.  I was in Grenoble, France visiting our affiliate there when I got the call from my weeping daughter.  I’m not sure how she had drawn that straw, but I imagine she volunteered.  The best way to remember death is surely to remember life, and my complicated, brilliant brother in ways both good and bad was sui generis.  He was also dearly loved in our family as uncle, tutor and friend to our children and not just a brother but a comrade in what a colleague has called “our life’s work” for me and mi companera.  

The gang ordered cocktails with wild names and unexpected combinations of tastes and liquors.  There was nothing maudlin, as we enjoyed each other’s company in our jackets and scarfs.  In our own way, we could imagine what he would say and make of us out there.  We shared two desserts passing them around among us until only crumbs remained.  My brother, Dale, liked cosmopolitans “very pale.”  In his memory, I drank my first one and raised it as we clicked our glasses.  Salud and tempus fugit!