I Was Called Here. He Arrived.
Cooper watching the Mississippi River that his ancestors traveled from the new Governor Nicholls Street park.
May 2026A mother reflects on raising a child in the city that captivated her heart – with a growing sense that she was always meant to be there.
– by Elisa Cool Murphy
– photos by Elisa Cool Murphy
French Quarter Fest 2025, at the Abita Stage
Cooper has been to two French Quarter Fests.
The first time, my son rode home in a sling on my hip. We left from the Abita stage and made our way along the French Market, down the asphalt, through the heat and the music and the slow-moving crowd. He tapped his toes to Bonerama and smiled big at everything. Somewhere along the way, he fell asleep against me.
This year, we showed up differently.
Eighteen months old, he slumped the way bros slump, water bottle in hand like a daiquiri, his brand-new fedora from the French Market tipped low over one eye. I thought he’d like a hat — he’s very into lids right now. Toddlers tend to be. But he was using this one as a sun shield, a distraction from the stroller top, looking one part jazz dad and one part smooth criminal.
Rolling along the new Goldring/Woldenberg Park extension like it had always been there for him, he boogied to Dawn Richard. He snacked on boudin egg rolls with pepper jack cheese. We ducked into an LCMC nursing van to cool down – not because anything was wrong, just because that’s what you do.
French Quarter Fest 2026
The new playground he loves so much at Woldenberg was alive in a different way — a playground for all during festival days, not just children.
He has experienced French Quarter Fest twice now and he has only been alive for eighteen months. Yet, already, he belongs here in a way that I never shall.
That realization doesn’t land softly. It brings a pang — not a sting, something blunter — and also a tremendous opportunity.
Because the stretch of river he’s learning to walk along, literally — the same one that will take on new meaning as he grows — is the one my great-great-great-grandfather traveled to get dry goods.
Before bridges. Before interstates. Before Airline Highway had a name.
Back when there were boat slips as far as anyone could see, when the Mississippi functioned as an eight-lane interstate — because it was one.
That same highway, more than a century later, is where my grandmother met my grandfather on Mardi Gras Day during World War II, when her friends in the telephone company drove their car into a ditch on the way back to Baton Rouge.
But that’s another story.
Here I am. The narrator. Dual citizen.
Born in the UK. Daughter of a fighter pilot and a teacher. Raised moving constantly — England, Germany, Alaska, Texas, Florida, New York City — the kind of life where you learn how to walk into a room quickly and read it immediately, where you don’t expect to belong anywhere long enough to call it yours, and you treat everywhere you land like an adventure.
I didn’t think I needed roots. I didn’t think I was built that way.
And then something happened.
The closest I’ve come to explaining it is this: As I was attending a final walkthrough for a house I was in contract to buy in the Marigny, I felt a doorknob crackle. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally.
Physically.
The house with the crackling door knob
I felt a vacuum, like the way the air moves just before a lightning strike. Not static. Not pressure. Not something others could see.
I felt seen, understood. It wasn’t déjà vu. It wasn’t a past life. It wasn’t a foreshadowing. It was a future memory.
A kind of gravity — a tractor beam —was gently wooshing me into a place I hadn’t lived yet. It felt foreign and familiar at the same time. I felt like something found.
If you know, you know.
The magic that is New Orleans saw me that day and said, you belong here with other magic people.
I just wasn’t born here.
What I understand now is that I leaned into it. I closed on that house with the crackling doorknob. Three months later, I met my husband. Three years later, I got my real estate license. I built a business. I built a life.
And then one week after Mardi Gras 2024, when I couldn’t get my energy back and didn’t understand why, I found out I was pregnant. The biggest shift of all was already on the way. I thought, let’s choose to be excited about this. And then I was.
I’m raising a child within it now. One who will never feel the pull because he's born within it. A part of it in him and him in it. Not reclaimed, not found, just organic. The way titles are inherited or bricks are formed from the mud up.
And I’ve found myself, over nearly ten years as a New Orleans resident, asking questions I didn’t know I’d ever care about:
Do I belong?
Have I been called here?
Have I been called back?
Why?
To what end?
Is this home?
I’ve never had a hometown. But the day Cooper arrived, he did. While I may never know if New Orleans is my hometown, it will always be his. It’s where he’s from. It’s where his first cry, his first giggle, his first steps, and his first day of school have taken place. It’s where his mom and them are.
Mardi Gras 2025
Mardi Gras 2026
My first ancestors came here a couple of generations after New Orleans was placed on a map, exploring Louisiana as home after serving in the Revolutionary War. That meant something then. It means just as much now.
My family now lives ten blocks from the Quarter, driving through it as part of our daily weekday commute from the Marigny to the Lower Garden District.
Cooper and I move through the same ground my family once traveled without knowing that I would one day exist, much less return to it, more than a century later. And driving through the Quarter with my Early Partners student, the streets feel familiar to me in a way that doesn’t make sense after living most of my life elsewhere.
I’m also the owner of a local business, helping other people become New Orleans residents. When I opened that company, Cool Murphy Real Estate, in late 2023, I thought it would be “my baby.” Little did I know that “business baby” would be eclipsed, expanded, and enriched from the arrival of an actual child – and so would I.
Because somehow, after living across the globe – literally all the four corners of the country except in New Orleans itself – being here now feels like I’m back home. And I’m building a home for an exceptional little guy who won’t have to wonder if or where he belongs.
Because he already does.
My husband and I are raising Cooper Cool Murphy — our New Orleans native.
