I love New Orleans. My first trip there was in 1979. A young twenty-something visiting high school friends who were working there, I fell in love with the streetcars that cruised Canal and St. Charles, views of the Mississippi River, and the mountains of powdered sugar that seemed destined to avalanche from the tops of Café du Monde’s freshly fried beignets onto my well-worn jeans. I loved the street musicians and sketch artists that hung around Jackson Square. I even had a portrait done there during one visit.

I traveled there most recently with a friend in the fall of 2010. I also took my mother there for a long weekend ten years ago. I got her to pop for dinner at The Court of Two Sisters and brunch at Brennan’s. Odd to think about it, but one of my fondest recollections of my mother was her surprise (and spirit of adventure) when I showed her how we could buy gin and tonics, available in GO cups from an assortment of bars, and walk with them down Bourbon Street.

I was looking forward to this trip as the second installment of what I hope to be a yearly Christmastime adventure with John. I think both of us were eager to show the other our favorite places. He wanted to show me fondly remembered eateries, and I wanted to take him to a photo gallery on Chartres that I tripped upon some years back. They had actual prints by Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson. We both wanted to indulge ourselves with freshly shucked OYSTERS.

It was probably close to three on our second day there when we headed to Acme Oyster House, a time when we both thought the lunch crowd’s plates should have been cleared away. But the line went a half block out the door. We estimated the wait to be close to an hour. They had NO ROOM. Then we went to Felix’s, a long narrow diner with a lot of local history. The chief oyster shucker could spit out colorful gossip as he poured Abita Ambers, but – and this was hard for us to believe – Felix’s had NO OYSTERS. No fresh oysters. Shuck-uh Khan, as the man behind the marble top liked to refer to himself, explained that they were under new management and might get a delivery around five, but he couldn’t guarantee any fresh oysters would arrive that day. During our Christmas vacation of 2012, we heard no several other times, too.

We could not get a dinner reservation at famous chef Emeril’s restaurant although we were flexible on times. We could not take a tour of the Gibson guitar factory in Memphis because the production line was down for a holiday break. We could not afford to buy the expensive and kitschy artwork that would have made great souvenirs of the trip.

In each instance, when we were confronted by the unavailability of something we planned on, we just made another choice. We had a beer at Felix’s then walked to The Royal House and had Bloody Mary’s and a dozen bi-valves. When we couldn’t get a table at Emeril’s on our last night in town, we dined at Pascal’s Manale, a somewhat lower brow yet quintessentially local spot, and enjoyed our meal. While we didn’t send any art home in a shipping box, we bought a wonderful coffee table book featuring Herman Leonard photographs of famous jazzmen and bought a five dollar laminated card of Saint Fiacre from a street artist working Jackson Square. (The whimsical tarot card like rendering of the patron saint of taxi cab drivers and hemorrhoid sufferers was hard to resist).

We understood ourselves to be lucky; lucky to be able to afford a vacation, lucky to be in a country and a city where being told No to first choices simply meant saying Yes to alternatives. We found a lot of joy in this attitude. We could have chosen to be disappointed whenever a plan was not realized, but we chose to use each detour to make new discoveries. There is such a feeling of abundance in simply refusing to focus on what didn’t happen or what you didn’t get.

Living with a lack of lack is no small thing.