Tomorrow, March 4, is Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Let the good times roll!  That’s Mardi Gras in New Oleans, an adult way of playing, expensive and very ritualized, that begins on Twelfth Night with a parade and ball and continues until this morning, the “Fat Tuesday” before Ash Wednesday. It’s been going on for generations.

In 1947, when I was a senior at the Jesuit High School, I took my permanent date Dolores and we got on one of the add-on “floats” in the Rex Parade on Mardi Gras day, joining about twenty other couples and dressed as “Chinese peasants. “We had had to get up at a very early hour to get downtown and onto the float—a small price to pay for such fun.

We then fell into the parade, followed it down boulevards among young and old people (many not native to New Orleans) yelling “Throw me something, mister,” to get a string of fake beads. I lasted until early afternoon—we might have been headed for supper somewhere in the French Quarter—but I got off and took my date home. Years later, her mother (I’d grown up with the family) told me Dolores had cried because “He didn’t even kiss me.”

She had no notion of what the “Mardi Gras” experience had done to me. I wasn’t as clear myself as I am now. This empty fake-believe play felt like the whole of “ordinary” human life in my city and country and time. I did not want to endure it.

Vocation?  As a senior I’d spent four years marching in (real) Marine uniform, in the only high school with real Marine ROTC in the country (our Senator was head of the Armed Services Committee; this is Louisiana and D.C.) . We had real Marine instructors (careful not to ape their language before our parents), drills daily, parades down Canal St. some four miles marching to monthly Mass at the Jesuit downtown church. So I was feeling drawn to the Marines as well as to the Jesuit novitiate, or maybe to some maturing years in the Marines and then the novitiate. Laissez les bons temps rouler, maybe.

The Mardi Gras of 1947 settled that. When I got off that “float,” and when I delivered Dolores to her front door, it was already settled. I can’t say I never looked back. I can say that there was never a serious question whether I would remain Jesuit until they buried my ashes in Grand Coteau, LA. where I began Jesuit life—the only entrant, alone, ending the bons temps—on July 2 in 1947. It’s been the  real bons temps almost every single day since. Praise You, Lord.