Growing up in rural Indiana, I never really thought about living in New Orleans. My aunt lived in the suburb of Kenner for a time when I was little, and my mother loved the city, but for me, New Orleans was the cheap tourist-shop prints of St. Louis Cathedral and Brulatour Courtyard that hung in our dining room, Marlon Brando yelling for his Stella, and the lyrics to “House of the Rising Sun.”  Nothing against the place, but it just didn't appeal much to me.

But as it turns out, I came here on a three-day conference in 2002 and never really left. I was editing The Evansville Review at the time, and that year the Associated Writing Programs annual conference was being held at the Radisson on Canal Street. This being New Orleans, in the weeks leading up to the conference, everything that could go wrong with the arrangements for getting myself and 200 copies of my magazine to the same general location during the same three days in March went wrong, and yet this being New Orleans, everything worked out just fine in the end. I fell in love with this stinking, sinking city, and by the time my flight back to Indiana left, I’d decided to move here permanently, which I did on August 18, 2003. I have not regretted that decision for a second.

Now, for this particular conference, I had to put everything--plane tickets, food, lodging, shipping for the magazine, etc.--on my personal debit card, and then have my expenses reimbursed by the University of Evansville when I returned. Unfortunately, being a 21-year-old college senior, I had all of six hundred bucks in my checking account. A $24 cab ride was out of the question. Instead, I would be taking the Airline Express bus, which I was told I could pick up just outside the old terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport and which, for $1.40, would take me to the heart of downtown New Orleans.

So I got off the plane, collected my suitcase from the baggage carousel, and headed outside. The problem, though, was that I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling a bus stop. I’d traveled extensively on my own throughout Mexico and England. I was no stranger to asking directions in a foreign city. I went up to a security guard and asked her where I might pick up the Airline Express bus. Now, I’ve gotten much better at deciphering Y’at speech in the past seven years, but at the time, I’d never heard a New Orleans accent before. I therefore had absolutely no idea what this woman said to me, other than something about a brown bench. So I went outside and found a brown bench. Of course, because this is New Orleans, there was nothing so convenient as a sign indicating that the bus would stop there.

I sat down and decided to wait and see if a bus showed up, and if none came in twenty minutes, I figured I’d go ask someone else and hope I could understand them a little better. A few minutes into my wait, a trio of very worried and flamingly gay Austrian tourists joined me and asked me 1.) where to catch the Airline Express bus and 2.) for directions getting to the French Quarter.

I told them I wasn’t sure if this was the bus stop or not because there wasn’t a sign, but that I was planning on waiting and seeing, and if the bus came, they should take it to the end of the line, then head across Canal Street and towards the river. They were visibly relieved, and the gayest of the three said, “Oh, so you’re from here?”

“Nope,” I replied. “Never been here before.” And, in the words of the great Arlo Guthrie, they all moved away from me on the bench.

When I recount this story to natives, all of them laugh and ask if I’m sure I wasn’t born here, because “you do realize that’s the most New Orleans story I’ve ever heard.” And I laugh along with them, but for me the quinessential New Orleans moment came during Mardi Gras 2006. I was with my boyfriend, a tightly-wound, vegetarian, health-nut insurance adjustor from the suburbs of D.C. We were on the neutral ground at St. Charles and Felicity, waiting for some night parade or other--Muses or Hermes or Endymion--to roll by. We’d been there since five that afternoon, staking out our spots amid the beer bottles and broken beads and Popeye’s and McHardy’s chicken boxes left over from the previous night’s parades. The boyfriend was growing antsy. “It’s 7:00.” “It’s 7:30.” “It’s 7:45.” “It’s 7:57. What time is this thing supposed to start?”

“Well, honey,” I answered. “The paper said it would roll at seven. That means it will start at 8:15, and that’s up on Napoleon, so it will probably get here at close to ten.”

“TEN! I’m not waiting around till ten o’fucking clock! Why can’t this goddamn city get its shit together? Fucking lazy assholes.” And so on and so on.

And that’s when our parade-going neighbor intervened. I had never met her before and have never seen her since. She had the most terrifically sprayed and teased bangs I have ever seen. She had a tattoo of the Grateful Dead dancing bear on her ankle. She chain-smoked Virginia Slims. She wore a sweatshirt proclaiming she was a Proud Chalmette Football Mom. She had a family-sized box of Popeye’s spicy fried chicken on her lap. She probably weighed close to three hundred pounds and was wedged into an LSU lawn chair, which was rapidly sinking into the mud. And in an accent straight outta St. Bernard Parish, she said to the boyfriend,

“Baby, you gotta settle your ass down. It’ll get here when it gets here. Have some chicken.”

Yes, it’s rightfully famous for its food and music, for Stanley and Stella and the streetcars, for magnolias and Mardi Gras and Old Man River, for Louis and laissez les bon temps rouler. But live here long enough, and you’ll discover that more than anything, New Orleans is a city about waiting, waiting for the bus to show up, for your food to get here, for the voting machines to work, for the stoplights to be fixed, for the potholes to be filled, for the insurance check to come, for the parade to arrive.

To live here is to grow used to this or else go completely insane. Natives never really acclimate to other locales, and when a non-native ventures back outside New Orleans into what John Kennedy Toole referred to as “the heart of darkness,” there’s a sort of reverse culture shock at play. I went to visit my father in Indianapolis and marvelled that the streets were paved universally smooth and all of the stoplights worked. (And people invariably stopped for the red ones.) I went to visit a college friend in Washington D.C. and wondered what was going on that could possibly be so important that everyone was in a hurry to get there. I went to visit England, where I’d gone to school years before, and laughed aloud when the loudspeaker in the London Underground profusely apologized for a train that was running two minutes late. Say what you will about our gluttony, lust, and sloth and it’s probably true, but if there is one virtue New Orleanians have in spades but don’t get credit for, it’s patience.

It’s a cheerfully fatalistic place. After two disastrous city-wide fires just six years apart, the Battle of New Orleans, seventeen yellow fever epidemics, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the floods of 1927, 1965, and 2005, and with a current per capita murder rate that’s higher than anywhere else in the nation, it’s said that in order to go on celebrating life with that voodoo only it does so well, New Orleans has been forced to make peace with death. It hasn’t done any such thing. New Orleans was never at war with death in the first place.

The use of above-ground mausoleums is not unique to New Orleans, but the attitude towards them is. Walking into a cemetery in New Orleans is not like walking into a graveyard but into another neighborhood. (In the case of St. Roch, the cemetery itself forms the popular cultural anchor for and gives its name to the surrounding neighborhood of the living.) Ernest Morial, the city‘s first black mayor, has not been buried beside Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen; their bones live next door to each other in St. Louis Number One just outside the French Quarter. The “Cities of the Dead” aren’t memorials to those that have gone before, they aren’t “Garden[s] of Memories.” The tombs may have been whitewashed, but their reason for being has not been. The cemeteries aren’t places of mourning and eternal rest. They’re way-stations.

Tellingly, out of the enormous repetoire of music to come out of the Crescent City, the brass band standard, the fight song of our beloved but perennially disappointing football team, the one ditty most closely associated with New Orleans is none other than a Christian funeral hymn:

This rollickingly upbeat yet violently apocalyptic anthem is an unsurprising theme song for the Big Easy (which is, by the way, a term no New Orleanian would use to describe his hometown, except in jest). To live here is to be continually stripped of the delusion that what's visible is necessarily permanent and that you are the one who is ultimately in control, and that’s harder for most Americans to accept than hurricanes, floods, violent crime, endemic poverty and racism, epidemic cancer rates, garbage in the streets, political corruption, a piss-poor education system, satanically steamy summers that last ten months of the year, mosquitoes the size of cockroaches, cockroaches the size of rats, and rats the size of small dogs. It’s said that there are no atheists in foxholes, and there are relatively few in New Orleans. We have followers of a multitude of faiths, quite a few agnostics, and plenty of flamboyantly unrepentant sinners, but true atheists generally don’t last long here--they either begin to believe or else they leave for Austin or New York or San Francisco or another city where housing is more expensive but nihilism promises to be more affordable.

During the Katrina diaspora, when a million and a half people from the metropolitan area (that’s roughly one in every three hundred Americans) were forced by first a monster hurricane and then by catastrophic levee failures to leave their homes, their jobs, their extended families, their neighbors, their city, their way of life--sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes permanently--a popular slogan began appearing on the exiles’ t-shirts and bumper stickers. It exhorted folks to, “Be a New Orleanian. Wherever you are.”

Some folks in other cities--namely, Houston--took offense, and that was understandable. New Orleanians take special delight in making fun of Texas in general and Houston in particular. When hundreds of welfare cheats, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, gangbangers, and general riffraff descend all at once upon a place, drive up the rents and the crime rates, and then complain about the lack of beignets and crawfish etouffee, it creates a lot of hard feelings. But no offense was intended.

We know that to be a New Orleanian isn’t to wear plastic beads when it isn’t Mardi Gras, flash your tits at any time of the year, or pee in the gutter and vomit all over Bourbon Street. But it also isn’t necessarily to be born here or even to return. It isn’t to know that you drive east to go to the Westbank or to live in a shotgun between Piety and Desire. It isn’t to eat red beans and rice on Monday or to make groceries at Dorignac’s or Ferrara’s or Zuppardo’s. It isn’t to use any excuse to have a parade, to throw vegetables and panties on St. Patrick’s Day and build altars out of cake and cookies two days later on St. Joseph’s and then dress up as an Indian on the Saturday after that. It isn’t to drink 40s atop ladders on the neutral grounds and to dance in the street at funerals. It isn’t to roller skate down the sidewalks of the French Quarter in a bridal veil and mink coat, followed by a flock of ducks. It isn’t to know exactly where you got them shoes. It isn’t to go to City Park to see Mr. Bingle at Christmastime, it isn’t to count Ignatius Reilly as a personal hero, and it certainly isn’t to keep $90,000 in marked bribe money in your freezer or to continue to vote for someone who does.

To be a New Orleanian is to trust that the bus, the parade, the Rapture--it’ll get here when it gets here.

In the meantime, settle your ass down and have some chicken.