My Favorite Mardi Gras

Imagine Mardi Gras. Perhaps you’re thinking of New Orleans or Rio. Carnivale, parades, costumes, music everywhere, dancing in the streets. Everyone is happy, laughing, sharing abundantly. Letting their hair down before the contemplative, prayerful, inner-focus of Lent.

Today is Mardi Gras, and there is snow on the ground in Boston.

The snow is putting me in mind of another Mardi Gras.

That New England winter had been unrelentingly cold with snowstorms every other day. All February, we’d been shoveling waist-high snow drifts and jump-starting cars. Finally, in early March, it was merely gray and slushy.

I called my husband. “Do you want to go for a drink tonight? Or just come home?” We had a long tradition of Tuesday date nights, a tradition we’d started in order to spend weekends with our four daughters. “I have meetings this afternoon,” I mentioned. “so I’ll be out anyway.”

We talked about fancy places near his office, and a cozy Irish pub near my meetings. One was expensive, another had no place to park. We wanted a spot quiet enough to hear each other, somewhere we could talk about what we were each thinking about for Lent.

I recommended a Holiday Inn tucked into an industrial section of metro Boston. It’s a sad, strange spot, sharing an entry drive with the mechanical guts of the transit system. The Holiday Inn sits next to a pipe supply outlet, an auto towing shop, a food bank, a dog park, and a dive bar appropriately named Tavern at the End of the World. I’d once met a client in the small bar/restaurant which overlooked the parking lot.

David laughed. “Not much of a Mardi Gras celebration. But I bet it’ll be plowed.” We agreed to meet at six.

Just before I left for my meetings, I found an old shoe box in the family room. In it were dozens of Mardi Gras beads that our daughters had collected on service trips to New Orleans to rebuild homes and businesses after Hurricane Katrina. The box held a favorite photo. One of our daughters, dressed in full men’s work coveralls, safety goggles, and a tool belt, stood next to a man a full head taller than she was. He was the owner of a candy shop in the 9th Ward that their team was re-roofing and wallboarding. The shop’s colorful sign, removed while the exterior was being painted, was leaning against a pallet of roofing tiles. In the photo, he and my daughter were both grinning ear to ear.

When I got to the bar at the Holiday Inn, David had already been there for ten minutes, saving my seat with his snow-dampened coat. There were four other men at the bar, all probably traveling salesmen or contract workers, in Boston for a night or a fortnight. As men at a bar will do, each sat three seats away from the others. At the formica-topped dining tables were two young families. One had three kids under eight, the other had two. The young moms looked exhausted, and I gave silent thanks that two of our brood were already in college.

At the front of the restaurant, a ways from the bar, the hostess greeted me with a smile. I told her we didn’t need a table, I’d be joining my husband at the bar. “You can order anything off the menu at the bar,” she told me helpfully.

In the entire space, no one was talking except one toddler, so David heard my comment to the hostess. He glanced around and waved, as though I were finding him in a crowded Mardi Gras celebration instead of a quiet Holiday Inn bar that would double as the hotel’s continental breakfast room twelve hours later. I smiled as I joined him in the bar area, then dusted the snow off my coat and placed it on an empty bar stool. David and I hugged, and I breathed in his familiar scent. We talked about the snow, which seemed never ending that winter, and reminisced about other Mardi Gras — warmer ones, playful ones.

David leaned in and whispered, “I’m not sure what I’m giving up for Lent, but being here, I feel like I already have.”

I laughed out loud, and one of the men at the end of the bar laughed spontaneously. I spied an opening.

“We were reminiscing about another Mardi Gras.” I winked a bit. “A warmer one.”

He was from Nashville, with an IT contract with the city. He hadn’t been home in a month. “It can get cold in Tennessee in March, but not like Massachusetts!”

I worked to get a lively conversation going with the other folks at the bar. One guy was a trucker, who’d delivered his load an hour earlier and wanted a good night’s sleep before he set off across the country in the morning. The red-headed guy would be visiting his brother in the morning, and they were taking their mother to their father’s gravesite for Ash Wednesday. His girlfriend had stayed back in New Jersey.

I leaned into David. “Will I embarrass you if I go full extrovert?” I asked him. He winked at me. “Go for it, hon.”

I reached into my backpack for a handful of the shiny purple, green and gold plastic Mardi Gras New Orleans beads. I got off my barstool and walked to the IT guy. “It’s Mardi Gras. Would you like some beads?” He grinned and chose a bright green set. He put it on over his tan polo and touched them with wonder. I approached the trucker with the same question. He laughed heartily. “I’ve been in New Orleans when they’d throw these from the floats. Where did you get these?”

I explained about our daughters, and he took a gold set.

My husband chose a purple string, and I popped them over his head with a kiss. He held them out from his chest and ran his fingers over the shiny plastic. He said, so quietly that only I could hear, “The purple is symbolic of justice.” I shook my head and whispered, “How do you know this stuff?” He just grinned, and offered a set to the bartender, who chose a gold string.

“Gold is for power,” David told him, and the bartender, whose nametag read Kieran, stood a bit taller and grinned.

I took a handful of beads and walked down to the red-headed guy. “This is fun,” he said. He cocked his head a bit and looked at me. “Why are you doing this?”

“Well,” I answered, “if we’re all in a Holiday Inn bar in Boston on Mardi Gras, I think we need beads, right?”

He chuckled, then grew serious. “Can I take some beads to my mom tomorrow?”

We had plenty, and I told him to take as many as he wanted. He chose a couple of each color. He stretched the beads out lengthwise on the bar and smoothed the beads into parallel rivers. “My dad loved everything green.” He touched the length of shiny green beads. “I might put these on his headstone tomorrow.” I touched his arm lightly and nodded.

By this time, the young families had noticed something was going on. I approached each table slowly, careful to ask the moms, not the kids, if they’d like beads. The young parents seemed charmed, and asked for beads for their kids, not themselves. I gave them enough for everyone. I gave each kid two strings of beads, and they started comparing colors.

As I was walking back to the bar, I noticed the hostess staring wide-eyed at my journey around the tables. I walked over to her and offered her some beads. She beamed. Then she paused. “Could I, I mean, do you think I could take some home to my girls? I have to work tonight, and they’ll be asleep when I get home, but they’ll love them tomorrow.” I smiled and gave her six sets. She put two over her black shirt, and pocketed the others.

By this point, everyone was talking to everyone else. Even with no music, with a view of the slushy parking lot, it felt like a party. One of the young dads came over to the bar and joined the conversation. The two families with kids were talking and laughing, and the hostess joined them. Two men in their forties walked in and quickly joined the group. I still had beads enough for both of them.

David paid for our drinks and snacks, and helped me on with my coat. I handed the rest of our beads to Kieran, who promised to share them with whoever else came into the bar that night. As we passed the red-headed guy, David said to him, “Green is for faith.”

The wind was whipping snow around the parking lot when we got out to our cars. David pulled me in for a hug, and we looked back through the windows framing the small bar, which looked cozy and lively from the cold spot between our cars. “So,” I asked him, “What are you giving up for Lent?”

“I think this year, I’ll add something instead.” He looked up at the stars, and his voice was drowned out by the commuter train rumbling by. He looked at me, really looked at me. “I’ll add a sense of wonder. It’s all around us anyway. We just have to notice.” He touched the set of beads around my neck. I had chosen green, without knowing what that meant.

The Holiday Inn bar in Boston in early March wasn’t Carnivale. It wasn’t Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Yet it had the best of every great Mardi Gras celebration — connection and laughter and a sense of abundance even in the darkness of winter.