Tuesday

Decorated Water Meter Cover on Oak Street

It's that time of year when it seems each morning is noticeably darker than the previous one.  I don't like that.  It signals the beginning of Fall, and those of us who get up before 6am are the first to feel its effects.  I took a few minutes to put the lights on the bike and headed out just as the dawn was filtering over the horizon.  Down on Freret Street, as I rode through a little cloud of marijuana smoke and approached the 4-way stop that I ride through every morning, a few school children waited for their bus.  Ahhh, the telltale signs of public school back in session. I should mention, for the benefit of those from elsewhere, that here in New Orleans, that public schools here are probably not what they are where you live.  My aunt, who was a school teacher, used to have a great story to explain the fact that one segment of the population here has a rather unique accent that sounds a lot like Brooklynese.  Way back in the early part of the century New Orleans already had a well-established parochial school system. The public school system was populated largely by recent immigrants.  It was also a disaster, so they city brought in a new director who happened to be from Brooklyn.  He then proceeded to bring in a lot of teachers from Brooklyn.  Since most of the children in the schools were from immigrant families, they learned English primarily from their school teachers.  Anyway, it's a nice story.

So there was a pretty big group up on the levee this morning, and to make matters worse there were a lot of other people up on the levee enjoying the relatively cool morning, or perhaps starting to train for the annual MS Tour ride.  As a result, it was a lot of stop-and-go for the first few miles today.  Otherwise it was a pretty uneventful ride and I ended up spending a lot of time sitting on the back of the paceline kind of zoned out. It wasn't until the last few miles that I snapped out of it and got back to work.  I stopped in at Zotz for a quick cup of coffee on the way home and noticed that someone had decorated all of the water meter covers.  The design on these old covers has become something of a New Orleans icon despite the fact that they were all cast in Wabash.  At any rate, you can actually by jewelry modeled after our water meter covers.