Of Mardi Gras and Pelicans

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Pelicans and beads...

We meet on Ash Wednesday. But I want to talk about Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, so I ask my friends to imagine that I just wandered in from a long night of Mardi Gras partying. I'm wearing a 1940’s New Orleans Pelicans hat and utility shirt and Mardi Gras beads of purple, green and gold.

The current New Orleans basketball team is called the Pelicans.  But the original New Orleans team was called the Jazz and wore the Mardi Gras colors purple, gold and green. This made sense. Then they moved to Salt Lake City and became the Utah Jazz, which makes no sense. Then the Charlotte Hornets moved to New Orleans and became the New Orleans Hornets.  Until Charlotte wanted  the name back and  so New Orleans reached into  history and resurrected the Pelicans.

So why Pelicans?  The brown pelican is the state bird of Louisiana. Why? Early European explorers saw the strongly nurturing behavior of pelicans for their  young.  Medieval myth believed that the pelican would open its chest and feed its young with its own blood if there were no other food so the pelican became infused with Christian symbolism. So Catholic settlers of New Orleans held the bird as sacred and totemic for them. 

Today’s NBA Pelicans wear the red and blue of the old baseball team with some gold added.

Why purple, green and gold? Most legends have them connected to the first late 19th Century Rex parades and by tradition, purple stands for justice, green faith  and gold for power. But if you go deeper into the Catholic roots of Mardi Gras, the green is for the season of Epiphany just ending, the purple for the season of Lent just beginning and Gold for the Easter to which Lent leads.

When Louisiana State took the purple and gold for its colors, Tulane took the green. 

beads

And the beads? Primarily for giveaways tossed from floats by Carnival krewes in Mardi Gras parades.  And secondly for the traditional ribald escapades played out on Bourbon Street. My beads this year all bear peace signs, given the war in Ukraine.

But I also share three special  sets from my times in New Orleans. For the first five years after Katrina, I would spend one to two weeks a year working in the Central City neighborhood to help rebuild infrastructure  through a local ecumenical ministry. My special beads are from my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers, the famous Black Zulu krewe and the blue beads of the Presbyterian Homecoming Project which helped restore homes so that families could return from exile. At first, primarily in the Gentilly neighborhood.

New Orleans continues to live in my heart.

Shrove Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Exterminators.

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Shrove Tuesday. Mardi Gras.

I hate days that begin with 7 AM meetings. But in honor of Shrove Tuesday, I ordered pancakes at the City Diner. Hard sharing with community friends the latest developments. Working hard to keep spirits up.

The major event of the day is the exterminators come. Time to deal seriously with the mice. They’re a fact of city life, but have gotten out of hand ever since I let Rachel leave her carts here. They’ve gotten bold, lost all fear.

The exterminators hit the building like ghostbusters. Checking every nook and cranny. Filling every little hole. And then they get to Rachel’s cart in the back corner of the sanctuary. They come to my office to get me.

You’ve got to come see this, they say. We’ve been doing this for 15 years, never seen anything like this. And they show me the mound of paper torn into tiny shreds by busy mice creating winter condos in Rachel’s SUV cart. And the little guys, popping in and out. Unbelievable, they say, never seen anything…OK, I say, I get it. They set their traps, throw little poison bombs where no humans hang out. They’re supposed to come back in two weeks, but if there’s a high body count, they’ll come back earlier.

Later, Danielle and I are talking She mentions something about the  smell and from somewhere back in my mind, a hard memory. A short time after 9-11, a friend was visiting for an urban ministry conference. She’d come in from the suburbs. That smell, she said, it’s everywhere. The air….it’s like when they killed all the mice at our church…and then she looked at me, saw the look on my face, and her face froze. And then she began to cry. I think about sharing this story with Danielle. Then decide not to.

No Mardi Gras for me. Heading to Newark to reach my Theologies of Liberation class. I’m always tired when I get there, get passionately engaged while teaching for 3 hours, then exhausted when I get home. On the train ride home, I’m thinking about exterminators.