A timely blog topic in Red Room this week, to write about our favorite cities.

I started out in Cleveland, a city that inspires jokes.  After that, things got better.   I spent a good part of my life in Chicago, a wonderful and underrated place.  I've come to love New York; my husband was born there and our older son has lived in the Village since he left for college ten years ago.  I live across the bay from San Francisco, a place half the world wants to live.   And I've come to love quirky little Berkeley, my home for the last twelve years.  I've been to London and Paris and a few other places.

But just one city changed my life.  New Orleans.

My husband and first I visited New Orleans on a whim, over a long weekend in the 1990's.  It was my 40th birthday trip. The travel agent suggested it, since we didn't have quite enough time for the romantic Caribbean cruise my sweet husband had imagined.  We've been back many times, before and after the horror of Katrina.

But that first trip shook me.  I fell in love.  

At the Louisiana Book Festival last weekend, I heard Louis Maistros,  a fellow Red Room writer, comment that it's almost impossible to write about New Orleans without lapsing into cliché's.  It's true.  The most European of American Cities.  The City Time Forgot. Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, brass bands, the French Quarter, jazz, Cafe du Monde. Voodoo.

Here's one more cliché:  New Orleans cast a spell on me.  But I'm afraid it's true.  The misty French Quarter in the early morning felt like stepping  back in time.  I felt unbalanced, opened up in ways I didn't understand.  But it was just setting the stage for the main event, as it turned out.

The real magic wasn't actually in the city.   It happened  on a swamp tour I decided we should take. A little day trip into the edges of Cajun country, an hour outside New Orleans.  

We spent the day with a Cajun guide named Papa Joe.  He picked us up in a beat up white Dodge van with Cajun music playing in the background.  We traveled down to Bayou Lafourche, by van and then in a pontoon boat. Mixed in with his tall tales, jokes, recipes, Papa Joe told us the history of the region--a true melting pot culture of resilient country people, black and white, bound together by the the French language.

On the way back to New Orleans,  our guide turned up the tape and started to sing along, in an exuberant, if off-key voice.   I started to hear the music for the first time.  Strange, like country western in French.  Or maybe the French blues.  A wild mix of accordion, fiddle, drums, guitar I couldn't really untangle. 

I struggled to make out the words.  It was tough, since my French had grown rusty over the years.

But I understood one line.  "On a trouvé un paradis dedans le sud de la Louisiane."

We found a paradise in south Louisiana.

I did.   I became obsessed with Cajun music.  I started having dreams of playing the accordion.  I was a shy midwesterner who didn't play music, didn't dance, didn't even sing in the shower.  But I decide to learn to play the accordion.  Something awakened.

It's been a transformative  journey that's shaped the middle years of my life.  I discovered music--along with a robust French-speaking culture, made up of  Cajuns and Creoles and "outsiders" like me.   I've met people I wouldn't have known otherwise.  

My passion for the Cajun accordion also brought me full circle: back to my own ethnic roots.  That mostly-buried Slovenian heritage became a lot more interesting.   

The greatest gift of all?  My obsession with Cajun and Creole music led me back to writing, an early love I'd given up.

This year, my first book, Accordion Dreams, came out.  It's a memoir of my life-changing obsession with Louisiana French music.  Last weekend,  I  presented at my first book festival--in Louisiana.  It was in Baton Rouge, but we flew in and out of New Orleans.  On the last day, we spend time at a little blues festival in the city.   Heard Cyril Neville.  

New Orleans always feels like coming home.