Right after we moved to New Orleans, I saw an ad for a Food Festival in an auditorium downtown, by the river. We went down and looked at all the booths. I had a bowl of jambalaya in one hand and a cup of Dixie beer in the other, when, from behind a curtain, at a stately pace, strolled out the Onward Marching Band, playing "When the Saints Go Marching In."

I knew I was in the right place to spend the next three years. Being paid to go to school.

There were free public concerts in the park, of musicians playing Dixieland music, but also blues bands.

I don't remember any free bebop concerts, but I think if you wanted to hear bebop you could do it, in New Orleans. I mean, Wynton and Branford Marsalis were both from there, and they must have learned somewhere.

Out at school, we met Larry and Hazel, and started going over to their house on weekends. They had a baby, Charly, so it was easier for us to go over there than it was for them to come to our house.

Larry was an anthropology student, like me and Brenda. Hazel had graduated from St. Johns, the Great Books School, in Annapolis, with Larry.

But Hazel wasn't going to graduate school.

Hazel was at home with Charly.

Now, that may seem like an odd choice, but Hazel wasn't a suburban housewife, heating up TV dinners in the microwave and going to Tupperware parties. Hazel cooked, and sewed, and bought antique furniture, and gardened, and raised Charly, and sailed an ocean-going yacht, and bicycled, and led a bluegrass band, Hazel and the Delta Ramblers, and hosted a radio show on WWOZ, bluegrass and old-time country music, and taught aerobic exercising at the Jewish Community Center, and read books, keeping informed, her St. Johns education a living facet of her life with Larry and Charly, not then, but over the course of her adult life. Compare that to office politics with a leatherette attaché case, dumping your kids in day-care, and eating take-out food. Which is smarter, eh?

Also with me and Brenda and their other friends.

We'd eat and drink and laugh and cook and listen to records and sometimes Brenda would play her guitar and sing. We'd tell stories. We'd watch the Bergman movie on the educational station. On a black-and-white TV with a coat-hanger for an aerial.

Things turned sour out at school.

Brenda and Larry dropped out and went to work.

I stole the last year of my fellowship, signed up for thesis to draw my stipend, stayed at home, and taught myself to write.

I gave myself a fellowship year. My DIY fellowship.

School didn't do us right.

They had dealt with us in bad faith when they accepted us, knowing they weren't going to graduate us, because there were no jobs out there anymore, after Nixon got in. No research money, no fellowships for students. No demand.

We were part of an oversupply of teacher wannabes.

Supply and demand reached a new, lower equilibrium. There were a few human casualties, but that was collateral damage.

They blamed it on us.

We weren't as good as previous classes.

We didn't meet the standard.

What was the standard?

You couldn't quantify the PhD mystique. They'd know it when they saw it.

It sounded like doubletalk to me.

I got my DIY Fellow year out of it.

If you're a satirist, doubletalk is nice.

All you have to do is write it down.

The PI is a prick and you have to kiss his major-domo's ass to stay on the dig. That's how it works, Alfie. Is you is or is you ain't an existentialist?

I was writing a PI novel. About a campus cop. And his inamorata, who worked in the university library, mending books.

Brenda worked in the Tulane library, mending books.