I was born in the summer of 1969 in Baton Rouge, LA. My father had just finished his PhD and was teaching. T. Harry Williams was his major professor. My mother, well she worked for Edwin Edwards.
Ponder those last two sentences for a second.
We were Yankees from Illinois. Louisiana was just an adopted place for us. But a long ago adopted place. Started with my grandfather when he was learning to fly a plane in TX during WWII. He'd go to New Orleans anytime he could. Not a year passed in his life when he got back where he didn't go to New Orleans.
Even though my folks took me on a three week tour of potential grad schools, well that was just fun. There was never really any doubt. LSU. LSU. LSU, plus Tulane was really expensive :). I can't actually put into words how much I love the state of Louisiana.
If you are at my house there is about a 25% chance I got a ham hock and cooking red beans. We fry our turkey on Thanksgiving and stuff it with oysters. Just how we roll. There is one hotel we stay at since like the 50s. Pretty sure if I walked in at this very second I'd hear, "well hello Mr. Young, good to see you again."
My parents like to joke that my speech impediment I'd have later in my life was cause I spent too much time next door with "those Cajuns." I prefer to mention that those twin girls I spent so much time with later became LSU Cheerleaders and even at like 4 they were stepping all over my "game."
Did I mention I like Louisiana?
At this juncture you might be asking yourself, and your point?
Well as Katrina was headed toward New Orleans I told my boss I was taking off a couple weeks, to blog about it. Well Gulf Watchers get me thinking and I noticed I had not updated that blog, which I did close to religiously until a few weeks ago. Heck 776 posts.
Then I started reading through all the content, unable to sleep. You know there is some good stuff there. I'd like to share two posts with you. The first is a clipping a professor of mine from 1991 sent me. I'd link if I could but it isn't online. You know, it was written when literally the town was underwater.
Hello, America
Dear America, I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We’re South Louisiana.
We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we never were much for waiting around for invitations. We’re not much on formalities like that.
And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn’t ask for this and neither did we, so we’re just going to have to make the best of it.
First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals and everyone else who has come to our rescue.
We’re a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don’t cotton much to outside interference, but we’re not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.
Just don’t get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don’t try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters. We’re not going to listen. We’re stubborn that way.
You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.
We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk to much and laugh to loud and live to large, and frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t. But we’ll try not to judge you while we’re in your town.
Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love South Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.
Often we don’t make sense. You may wonder why, for instance, if we could only carry one small bag of belongings with us on our journey to your state, why in God’s name did we bring a pair of shrimp boots?
We can’t really explain that. It is what it is.
You’ve probably heard that many of us stayed behind. As bad as it is, many of us cannot fathom a life outside of our border, out in that place we call Elsewhere.
The only way you could understand that is if you have been there, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and bars and parades and music and architecture and all the hooey, the best things about where we come from is us.
We are what made this place a national treasure. We’re good people. And don’t be afraid to ask how we pronounce our names. It happens all the time.
When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.
But don’t pity us. We’re gonna made it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints for 35 years. That’s got to count for something.
OK, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.
But what the hell.
And one more thing: In our part of the country, we’re used to having visitors. It’s our way of life.
So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay to you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer to us in this season of despair. That is our promise. That is our faith!
Just some Louisiana music as a segway, the funky Meters, uptown rulers.
This is from Toni McGee Causey. She has not blogged since 2006. That is a shame cause I'd give my right arm to be able to write like this.
Where Grace Lives
I passed a man at a shelter the other day. He was tall and lanky and sunburned, dressed in cut-offs and a soaked blue t-shirt, with a grubby baseball cap shoved on top of muddy curls. There was something about his lean, sinewy body that made me think of the shrimpers I’ve seen down in Cocodrie — it’s a hard life and it makes for no-nonsense, self-sufficient men.
He was sitting in a metal folding chair, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, and the exhaustion in his shoulders made me ache. Between his feet was a medium sized box, and he was staring down into it. The box held some basic necessities: toiletries, canned goods, a pair of socks, and a pair of underwear. I realized, then, that he was barefoot — the grime around his ankles marked him as having abandoned his shoes somewhere along the way. His large feet were probably too big for any of the donated shoes stacked up at a one of the nearby tables.
When I looked back at that box, I wondered what he must be thinking. My first thought, without seeing his face, was that this wasn’t much to give a man after he’d lost everything. This wasn’t much to hold onto for a man like that, and maybe he was angry at having lost everything, or frustrated that this is what he’d been reduced to. I had no words that would be of use, no words which could do any good, and I began to turn away when he suddenly looked up and caught my eye.
He had tears on his cheeks. When I stood there, not sure what to do, he shrugged and said, "I can’t believe how generous people are. I can’t believe total strangers would go out of their way to help so much." I mumbled something about it being the least we could do, as neighbors, and I moved off into the crowd, feeling wholly inadequate and humbled in the face of such grace.
If you've read to this point I beg you just to note that there is much work left to be done. Much work. We might get into this political story of this day or that day, but our fellow citizens could, well hell they still need our help.