Dear New Orleans,

I’d always loved the power and force of drums - drums on their own, drums in harmony with a band. I played my brother’s drums through high school. When he left the house to play football with the neighborhood kids, I took the sticks. When he was out on Lake Pontchartrain with Dad, I took the sticks again. Women didn’t typically play the drums, women weren’t typically members of jazz bands. So I played mostly in secret - as secret as one can be playing the drums! Lucky for me, I lived in New Orleans, where the soft beat of drums somewhere in the distance is as common as the steady click-clacking of mule steps in the Quarter or the subtle rumble of the streetcar along the tracks.

I didn’t start playing music, I mean not really playing, until late in life. A divorce was the first catalyst, and a move back to New Orleans, and then, the storm. I was in my forties, had lived outside New Orleans my entire adult life, hadn’t beat a drum in decades. But I knew I wanted to, knew I needed to. I was rusty at first, needed a band, a community in which I could grow. Offbeat had a page in the very back, listings and classifieds and such, musicians seeking musicians. I flirted with the page for months. Each time I felt a rush of panic, an overwhelming thrill and terror. Could I take this chance?

Then, Katrina. In the months following the storm, the city was quiet. People were returning, but slowly. There seemed to a collective longing for music. We missed the lone trumpet solo, the long note of the clarinet, missed the soft tap of the drum, people gathering, moving to the rhythms. I felt brave then, rooted in and connected to these streets, to the people who were coming back to them. I gathered a band. We took ourselves to Jackson Square.

Playing had never felt so essential. Like it was what I was supposed to have been doing all my life. We wanted to help bring the music back. I’d like to think we did. But mostly, on that chilly afternoon spent in front of the cathedral, people gathering, people dancing, solemnly, joyfully, New Orleans brought the music back in me.

With love,

Cindy

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