Fifty-Eight and Not Mad About It

Today I turned 58. Which, if my math holds up better than my knees do, means I’ve now been alive for fifty-eight full trips around the sun, and this was the first one I got to make as an actual resident of New Orleans.

I used to care a lot more about birthdays than I do now. Somewhere in my forties I think I quietly worked out what I actually believe about them, which is this: the day itself isn’t the point. The point is that you got another one. Every year the list of people who don’t get to add a candle grows a little longer, and every year you’re still here to complain about the ones on your cake being too many. That’s the whole trick of getting older — the birthday matters less as an event and more as a checkpoint. You clocked over on the life odometer again. Say thanks and keep driving.

This year’s checkpoint came with a bit of history attached. The last time I had a birthday in New Orleans, it was 2018, my 50th, and Chris pulled off the kind of production only he pulls off — a city full of friends, flown and driven in from everywhere, celebrating with me in a city we didn’t even live in yet. It was loud and generous and exactly the kind of birthday you tell people about for years afterward.

This year was the opposite of that, on purpose. No production, no guest list, just Chris and me, actual residents now instead of visitors, which still feels like it should come with some kind of certificate.

Except Chris did manage one production of his own, and it landed about ten minutes before we walked out the door for dinner. A delivery showed up, and inside it was a Lelit Bianca — which, if you don’t know espresso machines, is the kind of thing people build entire hobbies around. I’m about as far from materialistic as a person gets, but I stood in the kitchen staring at this thing like it had just been beamed in, because it’s genuinely beautiful and it was an enormous, thoughtful gift. We were already running late for the reservation, so we headed over to Peche, over on Magazine Street in Uptown, a place we’d had on the list for a while.

I wish I had better news. The food, with a couple of exceptions, just wasn’t good. And the service managed to be worse than the food, which is genuinely an achievement I didn’t think was possible in this city. I’ve had meals before where the food was mediocre and the service saved the night, and meals where the service was an afterthought but the food made up for it. Peche found a way to miss on both, which I’m told takes real commitment.

And yet — the night was still good. Because that’s the other thing I’ve figured out somewhere around birthday fifty-something: the meal isn’t really the meal. It’s who you’re sitting across from. Chris took the time to plan it, took me somewhere new, and sat with me while a restaurant did its level best to test us. We laughed about it more than we would have laughed about a five-star dinner, honestly. There might be a whole separate post in me about Peche specifically — the service alone probably deserves its own write-up — but that’s for another day.

So: 58. First birthday as a New Orleanian. A beautiful espresso machine, a bad meal, a good husband, and another year in the books. I’ll take it — and I’ll be drinking a lot better coffee while I do.