Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
The Red Bull in the Back Pasture
What attracted me to 1968 this morning is that it is a time before this suffocating pandemic (before I knew what that word even meant) and before all the heartbreak and complicated love that comes with growing up. Or it could have been because I woke feeling like dancing around the house in my socks (just mopped the hard wood floors and they look great). No matter—here we are and as I remember, there was nothing too special about that year. It was a year after I almost got kicked out of school for the first time and a year before I first kissed a girl. But it was the summer I (for the first time alone) spent with my paternal Grandmother on the bayou in Chauvin, Louisiana. Also, I finished the third grade (Miss Boudreaux) and started fourth (Miss Chamapigne). I committed no major felonies that year, but I do distinctly remember getting my butt spanked on a fairly regular basis. It was also the year my Parish finally began (“with all deliberate speed”) the process of integrating completely segregated schools.
I wasn’t a “good” kid by any stretch: at least not by any measure below those few that got shipped off to juvy. I wasn’t that bad, either. At least that’s how I remember that year and—this is the best part—the more time passes, the more authoritative my memory becomes. Not many people still here to challenge my heroics (of which there were many) or document my failures (there were few and getting fewer). Despite all that was going on out there, in my small bend of the road it was a time of slow transition and gradual evolution. By that age, I had begun to think of myself as a young man and my dreams began to divorce themselves from the parochial and wend their way toward the worldly. But I was still semi-quarantined on the coast of Louisiana.
It was the year I began to collect maps (mostly those that came in National Geographic Magazine that my spinster neighbor, Miss Nell, would give me) and memorize other places that were mere dots along rivers with hash-marked roads. It was the year the horned red bull was released into my Grandmother’s back pasture where the dozen and a half cattle previously lived in idyll peace. It was the year I first saw the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest and Carlsbad Caverns. I learned—with some facility—how to prepare fresh snap beans for canning, gut and scale fish, and dress small animals. I got my first Barlow pocket knife (two bladed), my first gun (a beautiful lever action Buck model Daisy BB gun), and my fist deep dive into Rock and Roll (James Brown and Aretha Franklin, The Yardbirds and Cream).
My favorite shirt that year was a red and blue and green striped & checked short-sleeved shirt that I wore as often as I could. My favorite shoes were white, lace-up Keds. My favorite place to hide was under whatever house was closest at hand. It was the year I had my first real fist fight—behind the picnic area at the Shady Oak Park. I won. Just like I never stepped on a crack in the sidewalk, either, which my mother would vouch for if she were still around. It was the last year my hair was all blond; and I got to let it grow out until the summer when my father shaved it off.
That year—1968—also marks my first taste of the idea of cutting the mooring line on the docked skiffs~drifting with the tides and currents until I landed in an unfamiliar place. It was the year I started climbing under my older sisters’ beds to read the books they had hidden there: the year I fell in love with language and poetry and music and the year I discovered the idea that numbers need not be real. It was the year, I know now, that I became somehow dissatisfied with who I was becoming. It was the year I learned that whit could be honed but could also draw blood. I learned that no matter the nature of our intentions they can be thwarted by the evil of a few and that not all fights are worth fighting. That year marked my transition from precocious to insufferable, from my fascination with the life cycle of the green bean to the brutality of the red bull that roamed the fields behind my Grandmother’s house and frightened me. That was the year I learned that not all people are good, not all tales are linear, and not all power is beneficent.
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Friday’s Lagniappe
This week’s highlight from The Bitter Southerner is a story from my own back yard: “Lâche pas les Langues de la Louisiane”by Jonathan Olivier | Photographs by Rory Doyle.
“Decades ago, state laws and socio-economic pressures almost eradicated the heritage languages of Louisiana French and Creole, known in south Louisiana parishes as Kouri-Vini. But today, through education, art, music, and food, locals are working to keep the languages alive and nurture a new generation of local French and Kouri-Vini speakers. Jonathan Olivier, a journalist who grew up there and now works the land as a farmer, ponders what’s in store for his culturally distinct region of the South.”
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?