A Catholic priest friend of mine, persecuted by his religious order for his Catholic orthodoxy, was once asked by his superior why he stayed in the order despite being an ill fit for the militantly liberal community. His answer: “Just because your mother’s a whore doesn’t mean she stops being your mother, and doesn’t mean you don’t love her.”

This morning, I received e-mailed congratulations on our planned return from an old friend who is also a Louisiana expatriate, and with whom I have commiserated for many years over the woebegone condition of our home state. I told him, “She might be a whore, but she’s still our Mama.”

I mean, I know about all of Louisiana’s problems. I grew up thanking the good Lord for Mississippi so we could be 49th in everything, not 50th. I know about the poverty, the political corruption, the fatalism, the folly. It’s all true. It has a lot to do with why so many educated people leave every year. I remember the story about the New Orleans journalist who, upon resigning, explained that he could no longer raise his kids in a city that valued parades more than libraries. I get that.

But you know, life is short, and it needs more parades. A few years back, I was visiting with some old Louisiana friends at their home in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Their old house was beautiful, in a charming neighborhood (Garrison Keillor lived with walking distance), and they dwelled in a city and a state that was a model of Scandinavian efficiency compared to the Latin hot mess back home in Louisiana.

And they were miserable. Couldn’t wait to get back home. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more acute case of homesickness. They had gone north for a good job, but were so sick and tired of being displaced persons they were dying up there in the cold. They had libraries. Lord, did they have libraries! But they were perishing for want of a parade.

To be sure, there is something particular about south Louisiana that puts a hold on one’s affections in ways that you don’t often see elsewhere. As a Cajun told The New York Times once:

”Your average American kid grows up in Cleveland, marries a girl from Texas and settles in Kansas,” Mr. Vidallier said. ”Your average Cajun boy grows up in Crowley, marries a girl from Ville Platte and settles somewhere close to her mama. In Eunice. We tend not to stray so far.”

Why is that? For the Cajuns, a lot of it has to do with the fact that you can’t find what they have culturally anywhere else. I am not a Cajun, but I still come from south Louisiana (our part, the Florida Parishes, is sometimes called English Louisiana), and this same dynamic holds there, though probably not as strongly. Still, even though I’ve never been much of a football fan, I cannot here the first four notes of the LSU Tiger Band playing its famous Pregame Salute without getting chills. Oh, I love a parade — especially this parade (fast-forward to the 1:50 mark) — and I’m so glad that my children are going to grow up with this tradition, and so many others that I cherish from my home. Last night my seven year old boy answered a question by saying, “Yessir,” in the way we’re teaching them to do (which is countercultural in the North). It is hard to express how deeply happy it makes me that my kids are going to come up in a culture where all the children say “Yessir” and “Yes ma’am.” It’s a Southern thing, I guess.

A friend e-mailed yesterday her congratulations on our impending move:

Unfortunately, I grew up in one of those upwardly mobile families where we were all taught to move for the money. Hence, I have no home to go back to.

Upward mobility is no bad thing, surely, but a life worth living can’t be all libraries (or Lexuses) and no parades.