Earlier this week, I took my 7-year-old son, Truman, who’s on Spring Break, for a quick, three-day holiday in New Orleans. I realized on the drive down that it was my first time traveling alone with one of the kids, and, I’m happy to say, it went even better than I hoped it would. We stayed in an Airbnb in the Central Business District, an area of the city with which I didn’t have much experience, but it worked out really well – our apartment was lovely, parking was pretty convenient and we were only a couple blocks away from the streetcar stops on Canal Street. And, although my sense of direction is abysmal, I found it easy enough to navigate my way to the places we wanted to go.

Naturally, the trip got me thinking about the New Orleans of my childhood. The first time I can remember visiting New Orleans, I was probably about 6 or 7. Mid-’80s, New Orleans was very much the debauched bacchanal many people still imagine The Big Easy to be.

(Note: “The Big Easy” is, in my considered opinion, the worst and least accurate nickname for New Orleans in the history of the world. Love it madly as I do, I’ll nevertheless readily admit there is not and has never been anything “easy” about it. Unfortunately, “The Big Difficult,” while more correct, lacks a certain allure.)

My first memory of New Orleans is The Legs. On some trip or other with my parents down south, probably a business meeting for my dad, I had occasion to glimpse the sexy swinging mannequin legs in the window of Big Daddy’s, a famous strip joint on Bourbon Street. Now, we didn’t actually go inside – libertinistic though my parents could be when the mood struck them just right, they were dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives, and they were most certainly not the kind of people who would take their young daughter to the French Quarter and show her how Big Daddy’s got its reputation in a city known for its topless bars. For one thing, it would’ve been highly illegal, even in Louisiana, where anything is legal if you’ve got enough money.

Although I can’t say I remember the circumstance under which I ended up within sight of The Legs, I’m also quite sure we weren’t on a walking tour of the Quarter. My dad, a Vietnam veteran and an executive in the construction industry, was the straightest of straight arrows, and he despised the corruption, vice and crime inherent in a city (state, really) controlled practically in its entirety by the late mafia boss Carlos Marcello, including, of course, all significant commercial construction. For her part, my mother saw a naked man (a “cowboy” wearing only a hat, chaps and boots) for the first time as a young girl on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras and never fully recovered from the experience.

But, to me, those fishnet-clad legs were positively breathtaking. I don’t recall exactly how old I was, but I was young enough that most of my Bingo balls were still floating in the draw-tank, and so I didn’t realize The Legs were simply a mannequin perched on a mechanically swinging trapeze. I imagined a glamorous lady paid to sit all day on a swing and show off her fabulously sexy legs in order to entice passers-by into whatever sort of establishment Big Daddy’s might be (a gift shop, I surmised, based on my parents’ unwillingness to let me go inside and check it out). What fantastic lives they must lead in New Orleans, I thought.

The Legs, I’m sure, have a lot to do with why I am, to this day, utterly besotted with a city one of its most legendary criminals, Frenchy Brouillette, called “[a] stagnant, steamin’, pestilential, below-sea-level mud bowl.”

Some North Louisiana folks, myself included, use a term, “NOLA crazy,” not entirely pejoratively. “NOLA crazy” refers to the particular kind of affable, optimistically nihilistic, psychologically resilient, half-a-bubble-off-plumb one must be in order to make the conscious, intentional decision to pay exorbitant housing prices in order to live inside what Brouillette once described as “a few feet of muddy, rockless river silt spread thinly over the sea like chocolate icing” located nearly seven feet below sea level.

And so I took my boy back to the beloved Crescent City for the first time since he was a chubby two-year-old that goggled at a girl who got on the St. Charles streetcar wearing glittery silver star-shaped pasties and little else. I admit, no small part of me hopes that, as he grows up, he’ll fall as head-over-heels for New Orleans as his mama has. There are, after all, far worse fates for a young man than knowing “what it means to miss New Orleans.”

Sadly, I learned a couple nights before we left that The Legs are no longer there to help me in this endeavor. In 2008, Big Daddy’s quietly closed its doors and, thus, The Legs retired. Pasties aside, I hope Truman glimpsed something marvelous that captured his imagination the way The Legs did for me. Maybe it’s for the best that I can’t show them to him – I enjoyed learning what he found spectacular, and, one day, I look forward to listening to him tell about his first, most salient memories of New Orleans. I think we made a few on our little mini-break. Laissez les bon temps rouler, my sweet T-Bird.

New Orleans, you keep doing your part, and I’ll do mine.