Once Upon a Tavern

At first, one might think this is a guide to local drinking venues. While there is no doubt that those types of establishments had a great influence on my story, it's not about the actual businesses but rather how life evolved around and through them. First of all, in New Orleans, no one refers to these types of businesses as "taverns." They are more affectionally known as good old "bar rooms," but the term "tavern" goes back to the 1400s and generally describes a place to drink alcoholic beverages (naturally) as well as an Inn or a place with living quarters. While at times it may have appeared some of us spent more time at these bars than we did at our homes, no one really lived in any of them except for a few family owned businesses that had adjoining living quarters. But undoubtedly, it was a way of life, and just as I and many of my friends and acquaintances progressed from one stage of life to the next, so did these tavern experiences. I started writing and putting my memoirs in the form of a book 28 years before it was ever published. I began writing about my childhood experiences up to my early college years back in 1995. I wrote four chapters on an old - I guess now you could call it antiquated - floppy disk. There was much going on in my life, as you will eventually learn, but there were a few things I needed to vent out in one form or another to keep a few "demons" at bay. Things no one knows about or would imagine. And let me tell you, it was damn fine therapy! I wrote the first four chapters of this book that year and then put the project on hold for a later time... obviously much, much later. Over the years, I had mentioned my little project to many acquaintances, and when asked over time what happened to the book, my reply was always, "it's on hold, but I'll get to it one day". Since I knocked out those first four chapters, I moved three times, and so did that floppy disk. I knew it was packed away somewhere, but I had no idea where I kept it. Every now and then - more "then" than now - I would get the urge to dig into one of the boxes I had packed away in storage from one of my moves to see if I could stumble across the floppy disk, only to fail again and again. But then, about a year ago, I was looking for something in a cabinet in my dining area and came across a Tupperware container I didn't even remember ever packing. I opened it out of curiosity, and lo and behold; there were about five floppy disks with the one on top labelled "book". Al last, my long-lost treasure had been found! I don't even remember what I was originally looking for at the time, but I came looking for copper, only to have struck gold. With the rediscovery of my long-lost treasure, I now had two challenges at hand - one was to get the creative juices going to pick up where I had left off three decades ago, but perhaps the bigger challenge was getting it converted from a floppy disk to something modern that I could work with. Since I am extremely technologically challenged, I had no clue where to begin. Lucky for me, I knew exactly what to do, and that was to call on my sales assistant at my office, Brittany, who I swear has the solution for everything. And so, it happened. She found a device that I could plug into my computer and use as an adapter to convert it. Buying it was the easy part - doing the actual conversion was a different story. Brittany asked if she could take some time to figure it out.