Further signs of gentrification in our New Orleans neighborhood appeared as handbills posted on utility poles.

“Vegan Buffet,” the handbills advertised, on Sunday afternoons at Grit’s Bar.

Grit’s Bar is the neighborhood watering hole across Wisner Playground from our house on Laurel Street. It backs up to F and M Patio Bar on Tchoupitoulas Street.

Vegan fare may sound out of character for a bar named Grit’s, but we’ve seen signs of the bar’s evolution for some months. First they were hosting Sunday afternoon neighborhood meetings where neighbors were invited to come in and discuss issues up to and including the rowdiness of late night/early morning revelers most recently libated in that every establishment. Go figure.

I figure that after years of neighbors’ complaints, they just decided to approach issues head on.
Once, after an especially raucous confrontation between Grit’s owners and neighbors that ended up in City Hall, the bar owners started sending out a litter patrol early on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They don’t just pick up beer bottles, they clean up all the litter along the blocks near the bar.

The Streets of the neighborhood have never been so clean.

Meanwhile, we maintain an uneasy truce with one of the next door neighbors. I’m not sure how relations deteriorated to the extent they have. Truth is, the guy is just plain weird — part-time security guard, part-time vampire or some other nocturnal creature with a uneasy disposition.

He does wave a greeting to me occasionally. Hopefully he will someday allow more than one digit.

One the other side, the house is occupied by a young family whose daughter recently passed her first birthday.

And beyond that, J’Monque D. whose feelings we hurt when we did not let him know when grandson Eli came to visit. We should have, but at the time Eli was overreacting to loud sneezes. He’d start crying anytime somebody sneezed. The other loud noise that Eli would freak out over was that of an electric hair dryer. His mother went around for hours letting her hair air dry to avoid scaring the boy.

If a sneeze or a hair dryer was enough to startle Eli into crying, what would J’Monque’D’s loud blues baritone do? Even his whisper in the front of the house is loud enough to be heard at the back.
So Eli and J’ Monque’D’s meeting is postponed until his next visit