I’ve sampled Carnival season and Mardi Gras across the Gulf Coast, from Joe Cain Day in Mobile to Fat Tuesday in the French Quarter as a student; with Wayne Toups in Lafayette (OK, he didn’t know I was there) to family-friendly Lake Charles.

Port Arthur — that was new to me.

But six weeks of too much King cake, too many beads leaves me stuffed, not merely sated, and ready for what comes next.

Ash Wednesday falls on this Wednesday, though, and in the big city folks are lamenting that some faiths, my Catholic faith among them, shun meat that day. And on Valentine’s Day, no less! The nerve! The bishops aren’t providing them any excuses — no meat means no meat.

In relaxed Lafayette, from where I’ve moved after five years, gator and frog make it under the bar for seafood on Ash Wednesday right through Good Friday. Po’ boys at Olde Tyme Grocery on West St. Mary, where they’ve boasted for years that no one does Lent like them, provide for those with low thresholds for fasting: Shrimp po’ boys, oyster loafs, lots of fried … if you need it. They sell T-shirts bragging about their over-the-top taste and volume — and it’s not meat. (Darrell’s in Lake Charles pales in every way to Ol’ Tyme, by comparison.)

But if Ash Wednesday and 40 days of Lent don’t leave you filled, they can leave you fulfilled, meat or no meat. Ashes mark you for what you are: a sinner but one cognizant of that dark fact.

That’s one way to look at Lent: As a sorrowful and suffering people, wailing and gnashing teeth for six weeks. Or …

Lent offers other, quietly happy aspects. These include daily Masses where I often try to hide in the back, Lenten readings and devotions, Stations of the Cross on Friday evenings. If you lay low you can come to appreciate those who share the pews with you. It’s always a diverse lot of people who, one might suppose, have no shortage of different but plausible reasons for being there and coming back, day after day. Me, I am usually searching.

I know well that for some people, among them many great friends and family, Fat Tuesday is the end of Carnival and that is that. Finis.

Ash Wednesday dawns as just another day. And wasn’t that a great party lo those many weeks? To feel that way is their perfect right.

For many people, though, in Southeast Texas and beyond, Lent enters with some quiet reverence, not with a morning-after, Mardi Gras regret but with realization that more has changed than a flip of the calendar, that more must change. It becomes — at least for me — the best time of the year.

It’s that way with brother and sister Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians and Anglicans and some Baptists, many of whom may observe this day and embrace what it offers us.

In his daily reflections on Lent, Pope Francis points to the prophet Joel: “Yet even now says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.”

With such a conversion of heart, the pope suggests, we seek grace. The King cake and the parades could only take us so far and superficially, too, toward happiness. In fact, it might have left us feeling a little bad. With a conversion of heart, we reverse our ways, and don’t change only a little. We change a lot, or why do it?

The prophet Joel makes an appeal, the pope says, “because something is not right with us, not right in society, in the Church, and we need to change… .” Is it different now than it was for Joel?

That change, for people who will troop into churches around Greater Port Arthur and into Mid County on Wednesday, starts with ashes, starts with solemn reflection, starts with the realization that something’s amiss, but — Good news spoiler alert — there is a different path.

Ken Stickney is editor of the Port Arthur News.