Some of my best childhood memories involve creativity, and almost all of them are from the years
that we lived in New Orleans, in a funky, pink stucco duplex a couple of blocks from Tulane
University. I remember my mom and me spending hours painting wooden key chains shaped like
turtles and snails, and making crafts out of sequins and felt with my friends.
I can vividly see my mom and her friends in their bell-bottoms coming home from the market in
the French Quarter and making stuffed mirlitons and other delicious dishes. I was so fascinated with
helping her in the kitchen that one Sunday afternoon she and my dad let me cook alone. They said I
could make anything I wanted with any ingredient that I wanted. I made oatmeal-raisin cookies. With
crawfish boil spices instead of cinnamon. The entire house stank for days.
My mom also loved to sew. She made matching shift dresses that she and I wore (along with my
doll, who also had her own tiny matching dress). It’s so strange to me that all of these memories that
involve creating are so real and textured to me—I can almost feel them and smell them. They also
hold so much tender meaning.
Sadly, my memories of creating end around age eight or nine. In fact, I don’t have a single
creativity memory after about fifth grade. That was the same time that we moved from our tiny house
in the Garden District to a big house in a sprawling Houston suburb. Everything seemed to change. In
New Orleans, every wall in our house was covered with art done by my mom or a relative or us kids,
and homemade curtains hung over every window. The art and curtains may have been out of
necessity, but I remember it being beautiful.
In Houston, I remember walking into some of my new neighbors’ houses and thinking that their
living rooms looked like the lobby of a fancy hotel—I vividly remember thinking at the time, like a
Howard Johnson or a Holiday Inn. There were long heavy drapes, big sofas with matching chairs, and
shiny glass tables. There were plastic plants with hanging vines strategically sitting on top of
armoires, and dried flowers in baskets decorating the tops of tables. Strangely, everyone’s lobby
kinda looked the same.
While the houses were all the same and fancy, the school was a different story. In New Orleans, I
went to a Catholic school and everyone looked the same, prayed the same, and, for the most part,
acted the same. In Houston I started public school, which meant no more uniforms. In this new school,
cute clothes counted. And not homemade cute clothes, but clothes from “the mall.”
In New Orleans, my dad worked during the day and was a law student at Loyola at night. There was
always an informal and fun feel to our lives there. Once we got to Houston, he dressed up every
morning and commuted to an oil and gas corporation along with every other father in our