Be Where Your Feet Are: A Tribute to Pableaux Johnson

This essay originally appeared on Common Edge.

I lost my Mac guru. I mean, he died. A sudden heart attack while doing one of the things Pableaux Johnson loved best: taking photographs at a Second Line parade in New Orleans. To begin to gauge my sense of loss, consider that the day after his memorial service, my 1password app, which he had installed, stopped working. Kind of like losing your bitcoin password, without all the zeros.

But a better gauge, perhaps, is that his memorial service was attended by 500 people, standing room only, who arrived from all over the country. Or that obits appeared in The Economist and The New York Times. “Pableaux Johnson, the Heart of New Orleans Hospitality, Dies at 59” was the Times headline. The outpouring of grief first found vent on an Ever Loved email thread that included dozens of voices who contributed photos and stories and Pableaux-isms. Many red bean dinners in his memory by those who couldn’t fly in were reported across the land.

Read the rest of “Be Where Your Feet Are” over at Randy’s Substack.