“What are you doing Baby?” Clara asked me as we sat together on the couch. “I am writing a memoir for blog.” She smiled indulgently, my writing is one part of my complex life.
I have filled out the online application for SSDI. I filled out the forms they sent me and attached a packet of about forty pages of documents. I have since then sent the Social Security people two more packages of amil and documents. I have napped more and spent more time with Clara, cooked more and been working on plants and other issues and assets in the yard. I donate plasma twice a week and we have been keeping a better Lent than usual with more time for religious devotions. It is however, a time when I am very busy trying to work through the process of praying to be declared disabled when I spent a lot of my life trying not to be disabled. Life has been a hard journey of missionary work, freelance writing, subbing, caregiving, microbusinesses and lawn work among other things. I am now back to wondering how to survive a very difficult situation and hope for a decent outcome. I still write and cut grass but that has changed as well as not teaching any more.
I have given the lawnmower and string trimmer that I sued for years to my youngest brother. I was unable to crank the motors anymore by pulling the cords on either one. I had already replaced the use of these devices with a motorless reel lawnmower and a a large set of scissor-like hedge clippers. I called him and said, “If you had a thousand guesses you would not guess why I am calling.” In the end I got around to offering him the lawnmower and string trimmer and he accepted it. “Thanks for the gift, Brother.” He said as he drove off with the equipment.
Is it useful to know what experiences other human beings have had outside the public eye? Is it useful to understand the private moments of others which have formed them but cannot be clearly shown to have impacted history or the common stream of ideas and actions that people share in our society today?
If it is not useful then that is one more good reason not to keep reading this D- memoir. It is better to read only the A level autobiographies about famous people doing famous things. This D- memoir will make much of my private memories and experiences. Those experiences go back to my early childhood and connect tot the present day in which this book is being written.
On March 6, 2024, Clara and I joined a good number of other parishioners for the third session of a four session School of Prayer at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church in the little chapel. The first session focused on the teachings on mental prayer and the prayer practices of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The second session last week focused on the teaching o prayer and prayer practices of Saint Bruno. The session on March 6 focused on the teaching on prayer and prayer practices of Saint Theresa of Avila – the Doctor of Prayer among the Saints who are titled Doctors of the Church. I am not trying to write this memoir exclusively to Catholics or even exclusively to those who believe in God or practice a defined spiritual path. But I am a Catholic Christian myself and this book is about me. So, I want to discuss one thing that distinguishes spirituality in a way that connects to the rest of this chapter. That connection is the secret element of spiritual life. I would imagine that those who have driven a good bit on the highways of the United States over the last few decades have at least once seen a bumper sticker that says, “I do what the voices in my head tell me to do.” There are a few variants of this. That and “the flying spaghetti monster” cultic groups simply want to make it clear that religious quests are fundamentally silly. The idea (as old as Aristotle) That all knowledge enters the mind through the senses is behind most of materialist positivist thinking that defines so much of the world of planning, funding and regulating science, engineering and even the thinking elites that typify our times. But no all of science is on the side of the belief that there is no secret world, Jung’s collective unconscious, Plato’s archetypes and the inner life of CHristianity and other religions may relate to brain biology that developed in evolution in various ways but may operate for each of us as a link to a kind of inborn system of knowing that is not public and shared. Likewise the astrophysicists who recognize that dark matter and dark energy pint to a flaw in our thinking and suggest a holographic and information system related universe may very well be on th way to showing a proof of an underlying reality that people and perhaps other non human beings may access that is real and impactful on the world we perceive with our senses but is not the same as that world. That is the subject of ordinary physical examination. This is a complicated subject and will not be much dealt with here. I am writing a chapter about secrets but things less secret than the inner life itself. But it bears reminding that I follow the faith founded by Jesus who taught: “ But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”Matthew 6:6 (English Standard Version).
On March 5, 2024, my wife Clara and I went to the funeral of a 34-year-old woman named Morgan “Maggie” Mckethan. She was a producer for a show on Fox 26 in Houston, Texas. She was a producer on a daily news show called the Factor Uncensored. That show paid a tribute to her passing. However, we did not go for that reason we don’t get Houston’s Fox 26. My wife Clara was in the same suite with Maggie’s aunt Margaret at the now defunct Saint Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans. Margaret’s mother married Lydia’s father and they grew up as sisters. Margaret sent us Her mother Lydia who remarried after Maggie, her only daughter was born. She grew up devoted to both her mother and the man she grew up calling Papa. We had invited Margaret to our wedding, Clara had been a reader at Margaret’s wedding mass. SHe sent a lovely gift but could not make it to Louisiana from Switzerland, where she works for a pharmaceutical firm. The funeral at St. Mary Mother of the Church Catholic Church and the reception at the Petroleum Club were each poignant, beautiful and sad. These events were well attended and after the rosary and before the Mass the deceased’s godparents delivered the eulogy. In the heartfelt delivery they made the point that some people gathered for the funeral knew her family but not her friends or work while others knew her friends but not family or work and still others knew her from work but not her friends or family. A memoir is supposed to enjoy the vantage point of the person whose life is described. Reading a biography may cover some things but an autobiography ought at least to be informed by all the major influences and connections in the subject’s life. I am aspiring to do that in my D- memoir. I hope that I give the reader a chance to really understand all the parts of me that might illuminate the human condition, have some significance in the sweep of history or even be legitimately entertaining.
My readers will readily recognize that so far there has not been much in terms of personal revelations in this memoir. When I settle into the part of the memoir that travels across events in a series from birth to the present then I will surely come across some memories that are relatively revealing but I have decided to discuss the whole concept of revelations and confessional literature first. This weekend as I wait to see the outcome of my Social Security Disability Income application I am typing a draft of this chapter after coming back from mass at my home Church of Saint Mary Magdalen in Abbeville, Louisiana. The Deacon who preached the sermon which mostly focused on a fairly typical Examination of Conscience used before the Sacrament of Confession or Penance and the Rites of Reconciliation. The deacon tied the gospel reading telling the story of Jesus’s overturning the money changers tables and trying to cleanse the temple, he focused on the way that our sins can be like money changers in the Temple of our soul, preventing us from drawing close to God.
I also have been looking over the first-mailed-to-my-home-Weekend-Edition of the Abbeville Meridional. That is the newspaper where I held a number of roles over decades. In the life of a newspaper and even a low level newspaperman there are secrets that one remembers among everything else that has to be dealt with in the stream of those memories that flows through one’s mind as one looks back over the years. The church in which the deacon was preaching has a pulpit right up and to the left from the congregation’s left and the the celebrant’s right from the sacramental altar. On both sides of the transept of the cruciform church building are large sound proof confessionals. Catholic Christianity is, in part, about the idea that Christians fall short of the call of God and the promises of Baptism and there is a Sacrament to save them (us) from their sins and the inner spiritual consequences of that falling short. There is a lot of scripture supporting this theology and some that can be quoted to dispute this understanding but the point here is that this is the milieu in which I live.
However, nobody much believes that one receives absolution for writing a few confessional passages in a memoir. We have all read those passages if we have read a lot of memoirs but they are written for other reasons. I am not really writing this story to convince people to come to Jesus and be saved, although I think that would be great if it happened. I also am not trying to sell a few more stories to newspapers or even to deal with my grief over the decline of print journalism in America. So, if I get to self revelation it has to be for reasons that are more or less unrelated to the great themes of the power of journalistic sunlight or Christian confession. I will have little revelations sprinkled across the remainder of the book, but this chapter is devoted to the subject of such revelations.
I have only been married to Clara since the 19th of November of in 2022 and I am writing this chapter draft in early March of 2024. We only met again on April 10th of 2021 after not seeing each other for 45 years. It seems like there is some risk in a book that will treat openly and honestly in the retelling of old love affairs, some of which lasted longer than our love affair has so far. Yet Clara and I have a relationship built on a lot of honesty and I am not sure we are very vulnerable to such revelations. In addition, Clara and I did not meet in 2022, we met again. Our first getting to know each other happened in 1970. We continued to get to know each other in school until about 1977. The chapters in this book are thematic and this deals with the theme of secrets but it does focus on the first period of my life – from conception, life in utero and birth through the time when I was nine years old and my parents had a profound religious conversion and we became a family of Catholic lay missionaries (starting off in the Polynesian Kingdom of the Tonga Islands of the South Pacific) those years were years in which my bride and I got to know each other. One of the reasons that we made it through early courtship and got together was our mutual knowledge of the childhood secrets of those years.
I will be talking about the secrets of sexual activity but I want to be clear that I had no sexual life of erotic practice and expression in my early childhood. If I was sexually abused I don’t remember it although other people were whom I knew. I choose to take the risk to discuss sex because not doing so makes the rest of my life a lie on paper or screen. But I do not pretend this is a tell all. It is a tell most. I also wonder if the fact that I could disclose some of the facts about my journey through life could impact the things I will have to do to get a decent award for disability. I don’t think it should matter, but I don’t tend to think that most things work out the way that they should. So any kind of expression carries some risk that may be the easiest way to explain my destruction, if and when I am destroyed. Self revelation is always a risk. .
In the previous chapters, I have discussed a great deal the context of a life. I suppose it makes sense for me to not write about much of anything. But if I am to attempt to tell the tale of my life then it makes sense to me to do a good deal of contextualizing. But if I am to write a meaningful memoir or autobiography then it has to lift the veil to some life which is beyond a rearrangement of the public record and the entries one would find in my curriculum vitae and my genealogy.
On the other hand any juicy secrets generally involve one of the following activities:
- They may well involve violating the confidences and exposing damaging secrets of others who are either innocent or perhaps less than innocent but for whom one has a fiduciary or other responsibility to protect their secrets.
- The secret may well expose one to criminal liability and possibly result in one’s prosecution.’
- The secrets may also expose oneself or others to civil liability.
- The secrets may simply be very far out of sync with one’s general character and reputation so that one’s standing in any number of associations and communities.
- The secrets may well expose dangerous criminals or corrupt office holders who have the resources to punish those who expose them.
- The secrets may hurt the feeling and damage the reputation of former or current lovers, spouses and confidants.
- The secrets may be so disturbing or controversial that they simply coerce society to respond with its reflexes of ridicule and other forces up to and including psychiatric commitment.
There may be secrets in all of these categories. The practice of twisting a fact here or changing a name there may limit some of the damage and yet there will surely be a risk of doing some harm. That is more relevant in a D- memoir where there is very little chance of doing any good. Yet I feel some sense of obligation to record my perceptions of the world and that means recording the perceiving of it that makes up my life. I have a great number of secrets crowding in behind my eyes and trembling along the halls of memory just waiting to be released by the rhythmic tapping on a keyboard. I have decided that dealing with the story of my life which is true to its dates and places does not mean exactly following a timeline. I did not grow up in the sheltering folds of a childhood consumed by childish pursuits and a set of overprotective parents. I remember feeling out of place in school more often than not, failing to achieve success and recognition in team sports and also being around marijuana, drunk driving, stolen goods, sexually illicit behavior, drunk people with guns and many other aspects of a world that seemed at odds with the environment that one seemed to be supposed to associate with childhood.
I would divide the secrets in my memory into five categories. Each of the five categories has something to do with the truth of my life and perceptions – whatever that may be about and why ever it may matter.
The first category is related to all things regarding my own sexual, romantic and relational history. That matters because the sexual journey is very significant in any life, no matter what the sex or the life are like.
The second category is related to the criminal activities of people that I have known and cared about in my life. That has meaning because I am not at all sure what my life would have been like without it surrounding me and shaping my development at countless points.
The third category is made up of organizational secrets to which I have become privy over the course of my life.The most important of these are related to Acadian ethnic institutions and to a particular circle of people once drawn together by a unique trauma.
The fourth category is about things I have done at great risk to achieve certain goals that were worthwhile but, which could still possibly hurt me if I revealed them now. So I am possibly going to be driven to write something which will take away whatever I gained at great risk and great cost. It is odd that they may happen, yet it might work out that way.
The fifth and final category could be divided into lots of subcategories. I suppose that is true of the other categories too. But this final category is made up of memories that I cannot fully vouch for or entirely process myself – memories that might be dreams, fantasies and hallucinations or the impact of such things on repressed secrets.
I don’t have any way to explain how it feels to be looking back on life this way and to see some of the darkside and some of the bright – but so much that seems relatively void. Yet also so much that was rich and beautiful and good in countless ways. My life was lived with a sense of focus and presence at the very least, I did gamble on some unlikely outcomes and I did some plodding along as well. But there is also the real possibility that my life is deeply impacted by delusions and dealing with these is part of any true story that I could tell. ..
When I think about secrets and confessional stories I am drawn to a few moments in my life. All secrets do have a way of eating at the people who keep them in different ways. That is perhaps even more true if someone is a storyteller and a communicator who has done enough of it to get paid and to do it for thousands at various times. I suppose that for me the walls of secrets divide people in all sorts of ways. They become the walls and fences and levees.that outline the boundaries and territorial claims of various human communities.
Priests consider the seal of the confessional to be their most sacred defining obligation. Lawyers take an oath to keep their clients secrets. Freemasons and Knights of Columbus are among the groups joined by values, activities, organizational structures and a PROMISE OF SECRECY taken by every member. I think that among my most significant experiences with secrets were those kept by others for many years. Whatever the reason, my mother gave her first child up for adoption. I was an only child for over a decade and then I became the older brother to three sisters and three brothers. In all those years I never got any indication that there was another brother. I fully cemented my identity in the role of an eldest brother and had a wedding featuring my childlike younger siblings playing up in their roles in the wedding. Then while I was at LSU in graduate school, my mother reconnected with her son whom she thought of by the name she had given him – but whom we would know as he was legally named as Paul Nicholas Jordan. He was part of our lives after that in complicated ways, the relationship between he and I was as complicated as any relationship could be, but I felt some comfort and positivity in being able to comfort him when he came to stay with us as he was dying of AIDS in the years following my divorce from my first wife Michelle after I returned from teaching in China and recovering from the injuries I received during Hurricane Rita. It was an episode that lasted for over a decade but our connection was always shaped by the fact that he was a person that I had been connected to whose existence was hidden by the secret of a closed adoption. My mother had gone off to a home for unwed mothers to give birth to a child she had never expected to see again.
I have some other secrets too. I have some that would perhaps prove the adage that Hell hat no fury like a woman scorned. But I rarely felt that I had scorned a woman when I did not have sex with her after a hard pass. I am someone with a great deal of trouble trusting anyone and the number of possible paths that have for me to end up having sex with a woman. Not that there were other paths for me to havesex with men or children. Sex was always problematic for me and having women rub their breasts on my heads, show me their vaginas or directly ask me to have sex was not always enough to make me feel sure even if it was not about a moral issue at the time, I was attracted to them and I was feeling lusty. Perhaps my anxieties that have impacted my work life were pretty much the same forces inside of me that have limited my sex life. I have often craved sex without a loving, fairly committed relationship. I am not saying that I never valued chastity. I lost my virginity pretty late and while I was at times fully eager to lose it to some particular girl and at other times pretty eager to lose it to anyone – I also was willing to consider a perpetually celibate life without any sexual activity at all and also was willing to consider the possibility that abstinence would deepen a spiritual walk that was very important to me. Beyond that, I never behaved like my main priority was to wait for marriage but intellectually I remained committed to the idea that I would lose my virginity on my wedding night. That is not at all how things worked out. The first time that my first wife and I had sexual coitus, we had spent a lot of time involved in heavy petting, II gave her a promise ring and a dozen roses and reserved a special venue, one that was very private and that could not be observed. We had sex and both claimed it was the first time for us. IN her case I don’t know all the details of the previous times but for me it had been years and there had been only a few times in my life – each in very different and extraordinary circumstances. We were to be married about a year later, we never lived together but were sharing a bed more nights than not. I actually always felt out of sync with the generally sexually permissive ideology of society around me and with the Christian ideology of chastity in many of the associations and communities in which I moved as a teenager and young adult. Sometimes, in literature and history I found sexual norms and mores that were more in harmony with my own inner sensibilities..
So, as for most people, sex was pretty complicated when I was young. I am happy to own up to actually spending many years seeking to find some kind of sexual purity along the lines of the Christian ideal. But, more often than not, in the many years that I was alone and needing sexual companionship and not trying to moralize too much I was almost never able to handle the advances of a woman just honestly looking for sex who was not already someone I was seeing romantically. So although I am not super attractive I have quite a few memories of awkwardly fumbled moments with women who thought I was flirting with them because I was and who just could not know the depths of my trust issues and made me nervous. I am happily married now and will keep my sexual relations with my wife between us, but sex has remained somewhat complicated all my life so far.
I have read enough biographies, memoirs and personal letters to know that sex is the great school of secrecy for many people. I was no exception, though I am far from having lived a life with an extremely notorious number of relationships, much less a vast number of secret ones. But there were some secret and private and mysterious moments in every relationship that I ever had. But while sex may have been the school of secrecy it was not the only place in my life where secrets would come to play a part in defining who I was.
While there are child stars such as Shirley Temple, Drew Barrymore and Jodie Foster who remained well known as adults and were well known as children they are unusual. Most children are not well known in the world and if they are well known as children people do not necessarily remain well known as adults. Prince William of Wales and his family are among the great exceptions. In the Gospels, Jesus is given a genealogy and a historical context as well as angels and miracles and an exile from conception to somewhere in early childhood. Then in the boyhood phase of what is now known as the preteen years Jesus taught in the Temple. Then he has a ministry as a very much grown-up man and will return to teach and preach in the same temple. There is something fitting in the idea that our childhood is our secret history, a well of information not available to everyone as we venture out to make our way in the world. But I think that in a modern memoir – even a D- memoir – the reader ought at least to see behind the curtain to much of the backstage. Of course because I am not really very well known this secret part of my life is not much less well known than the public part. But the principles that divide my secrets from my public persona have some application to all human beings.
One part of this secret life was the life of childhood. A childhood tradition that was a big part of American culture when I was a child that boys in neighborhoods and suburbs and sometimes on farms.had clubhouses where outsiders and girls were not allowed. These might be in a treehouse or an old shed or perhaps an abandoned building or a hole in a hedge. Girls with some resources often had playhouses and invited their friends over for tea parties and if they had a bit more resources they had nice tea sets. AMong their resources they might have special toys and dolls and sometimes to use easy bake ovens and cook with the heat of an ordinary incandescent light bulb using special baking supplies and an insulated oven that got hot enough. I had a horse, real guns and ammunition and dogs and my family had a farm, mostly let out to tenant farmers but with some hunting camps and duck blinds and corrals left for family use. It was mostly on the farm that I found my secrets. It was there that I caught fish, caught frogs and sometimes worms and crickets to make bait when I ran out of the cheaper frozen bait shrimp made from lower quality shrimp from the nearby seafood packing houses as they sorted the abundant catch brought in by Louisiana’s shrimping fleet. Small fish also made bait and sometimes live small crawfish. The drive for bait was such a well known phenomenon among boys my age in my circles that there was a lot of passing around of a story of a group of boy scouts that had tried to use small venomous snakes for bait and had died of snake bite. We could almost all remember having the fish biting and feeling a desperate feeling about not having any more bait and being unable to drive to the bait stores and country stores where we could get more. I found the story especially meaningful because on the Fourth of July, while watching the Independence Day fireworks at the Abbeville Country Club I had jumped out of a tree and been bitten by a snake and with tourniquets and my dad and uncle cutting my bites and sucking the blood and venom out and spitting it out while the other cleared the huge parking jam I had gotten to the hospital and gotten anti venom. But my leg became hugely swollen. I was very sick and unable to walk for a while. There would be permanent damage to the function of my foot which never went away and would mask the onset of gout in decades still distant in time. But, although I built a clubhouse or two. I did not have the secret of exclusion and secret organizations as the main secrets of my childhood. There were the secrets of the best fishing spots and rabbit runs and places to catch bait. We rarely used artificial lures and everything was very centered around killing and eating with the extra level of killing for the fish to eat. They always got away with some of the bait on strikes we didn’t land. I fished and hunted with my Dad a lot and with some cousins and rarely with an uncle – But I hunted, fished and trained dogs largely alone. I had no siblings till I was twelve and no first cousins my age and I was a loner in many ways. I found the world a scary and dangerous place and before being old enough to go to the freedoms of the lands and waters of the farms on my own, I remember hours in my very early childhood hiding under beds or in large closets in the large houses of my grandparents and playing with little simple toys I made myself, reading or drawing. I would venture out and sometimes be the center of attention and called a chatterbox by some, but then I would retreat for hours to the loneliest places I could find. Unlike sexual secrets or the clubhouses of some of my peers, this was a secret world not protected by lies, subterfuge or exclusivity. It was a secret world of real places and later real hunting and fishing secret – sometimes friends from school or cousins were happy to benefit from the real knowledge I had gained about hunting and fishing spots. Sometimes adults were proud of the catches and kills that I learned early to clean and dress on my own. Those were rare and happy times of camaraderie. I was not a well liked kid and generally did not have a lot of friends at school or anywhere else. I was a decent horseman and a little bit of a cowboy but not a prodigy and since all of these early years ended when my family went into the mission when I was nine years old I would have had to be truly extraordinary be able to be anything other than a very low level hand at eight or nine on cattle drives and roundups. Abusive and bad behavior was common among adults I knew as was generosity, providing for children and protectiveness. Nature, with guns, boats, horses, dogs, and fishing gear seemed safe and the alligators, snakes, wild dogs, coyotes and fast trucks on the roads seemed like challenges I could face more safely then most rooms full of people. When I wasn’t outside I was mostly unhappy. I did very badly at Biddy Basketball camp, but did acquire some basic skills. My mother hired a young man to be my friend (not babysitter) over one school break and he swam with me at my grandparents pool and we played horseshoes – both of which I knew how to do fairly well.But I was also exhausting him in that I knew he was hired and working and would put up with me. We threw and caught footballs over and over again until I moved from hopeless to inferior performance and the same with catching, pitching, throwing and hitting baseballs. I was a very slow runner – I often finished last or second to last in races run by all.the boys in the classes I was in and sometimes I ended deep in the pack of girls when most girls wouldn’t race hard against boys. Most of my childhood secrets that were like the fishing spots and rabbit holes I spotted have no application as secrets now. Mostly my secrets of childhood are really the things I experienced that very few people were aware of at the time and almost everyone.has forgotten since they happened. Of that kind of childhood secret I have a vast supply as would most people.I would like to hit a few of the high lights and lowlights. But before I do that, I want to set up a very basic understanding of the periods that define my life. I see the major periods as being:
- My early childhood from birth in and the years before we went into mission as a family when I was nine. – nine years to 1973.
- My years as a missionary kid and young missionary Until I started studying at the University in 1983 – – ten years.
- My undergraduate years including time not in school till 1989. 6 years
- An overlapping period of my first marriage – from 1987 to 1995 – 8 years.
- The years from 1995 till I went to China in 2004- nine years.
- The years from when I went to China until I moved into my grandparents house in 2016 –12 years.
- The years from when I moved into my grandparents house till I met Clara again in 2021- 5 years.
- The years from when I met Clara to the time when I filed for disability and started writing this memoir. That was about three years.
Each of the eight periods that I have lived is capable of forming many periods of time as well. But I am very certain that these periods define the structure of my life. I am very much committed to sharing a few lesser known illustrations and events from each of these stages
One notices that I divide my childhood at the age of nine. There were certainly real transformations and disruptions at nine, first when my parents “turned to the Lord” and then when we moved to Nukualofa, Tonga.I had to give up time on the farm I loved for a long time. But I had given up time on the farm when we lived in London and toured Britain and Europe while I was four and Dad was studying at the University of London. He was pursuing further studies in law that he had begun at Tulane University in New Orleans. I had lived there as well in the cottage behind my grandparents home at 1812 Palmer Avenue. I was a precocious kid in New Orleans, then attended a nursery school in Abbeville, then I was a kindergarten student in London. My mind was full of different cultures, museums, the Vatican, the Parthenon,the British changing of the guard and the sites and sounders of crossing the Atlantic on the great ocean liners. The QE2 and the Le France when I got back. We were not wealthy on a students’ living but we had a car when most people did not in Europe and we came back to Abbeville.In telling the stories of my travels I tended to emphasize the great sites and grand occasions and not the fact that we used a travel guide called Europe on Five Dollars a Day. That is $42 a day today and is still a very small number. We were not traveling like royalty most of the time. I had some nice tokens of our travels and I liked to show them off, but we had lived simply most of the time. I came back from Europe with delusions of grandeur to some degree. Pops, my maternals grandfather had made little books of cutouts and pictures and a few words and sent them to me in the mail. WHen I got back I was sure he really loved his oldest grandson, there was that and my aunt with Spina Bifida whom they cared for devotedly and the shrine to saint Jude.There was the pool and horseshoes and barbecue pits and there were many charities and businesses that gave poor people a chance in an unjust world. Their house had secret passages and chutes and trapdoors to the outside hidden in closets. It could be a wonderland when we stayed there as we did when we returned from England with their youngest living son who had gone. The other side was that there was a great deal of alcohol. Lots of guns and plenty of criminal activity that I choose not to reveal among the secrets of this book. But this was another place that contributed to my sense of being part of a secret world and knowing other things that people would not know about me and would not guess.
There I began first grade with Clara and my other classmates. I always liked Clara. I have almost no unpleasant memories of her but overall my time at Mount Carmel Elementary School would be difficult in the years before my parents’ conversion and much worse afterwards. Clara would always have the memories of my troubled childhood and few memories of my activities and life outside of school.
I was late to school almost every day and by the time I rode the bus once in a while in the morning, I was already established as the alienated kid who started every day late checking in with the principal’s office and bringing a late slip and trying to catch up with class. My paternal grandfather was a justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, they had thousands of acres of land and tenant farmers and ranchers who were deferential I had lived in EUrope before first grade where society was more stratified. My paternal grandmother had come into some of their land in a family line from a Spanish Royal land grant. I was sometimes insufferable as an an American who basically indicated that he considered himself an aristocrat in a small community school that did not formally distinguish such things and had other students whose parents at least were more affluent and more fashionable anyway. My parents also did not pray or got to church and although that was not unique there was generally a life of faith shared at school. In addition to all of these differences I had experienced my first infatuation and first kiss in London. And when her family came to visit us that year we were still infatuated with each other – it was bizarre, Further I had been little King of Mardi Gras at two Mardi Gras balls and ridden in a parade. At a Catholic school in Louisiana I could boast having seen the Pope in person. Two days after Clara’s birthday we celebrated the worlds first Earth Day and although several kids in my class knew how to serve at the altar I was invited to assist the priest on television as he blessed the Vermilion RIver. When one combines all these factors with being a hote -tempered inferior athlete who often had the messiest desk and cubby in his class, I was an easy kid not to like. I was among the best students in the class. After that year I wa smitten by the copperhead on the fourth of July and became slower and more impaired as a runner and never made it up.
The second grade year in New York followed Mom and Dad and I traveling up across the country in a generous meander staying at national and state parks. We fished, built fires took park tours, hiked and watched abear raid a neighbors supplies. We slept most nights in a tent. It was a wonderful time. In London and Europe we had my mother’s brother Jed with us. Uncle Jed andI had sometimes shared a bed but he went to boarding school in England. In those days we had bonded somewhat but the time alone with my parents in the wonders of nature was amazing.
Mom furnished our apartment with the vintage discount castoffs of the rich and fashionable. I went to St. HIlda and St. Hugh School of the Angican Episcopalian Holy Ghost sister. I published a poem in the school circular. I l also had a year of experience that had a black African classmate whose parents were also only in New York for a time. as a best friend at school and a very diverse set of friends in our block association part. I got beaten about the head and shoulders with an umbrella when I rang the wrong doorbell next door to go to art class. As in the case a t Mount Carmel I was drawn to the prayers, Christian Scriptures, stories about Jesusother aspects of chapel and religious life at school.
My Dad studied at Columbia and Mom brought me to museums, enrichment events, concerts and plays. I had really lived the culture of New York at a variety of levels when I got back to Abbeville and was with Clara and others in third grade. Third grade was a better year than first and some of the kids came to my swimming parties at my mother’s family pools and a few boys joined me on the farm to hunt and fish. But I was absent a lot with both health and family. I began to get in trouble and bond with some of the wealthier boys who rebelled in the neighborhood we lived in. Armed with slingshots and BB and pellet guns, we vandalized stole and caused trouble and thought we were a gang. The oldest boys were old enough to get in real trouble. How often we really did criminal things I am not sure but we did them and spoke about them When I was not on the farm I had more excuses for doing countercultural and antisocial things than I had before. When I visited my grandparents my aunts, uncles and older cousins amused themselves by letting me drink and smoke. I was late to school almost every day, I was messy and I was aware of problems in my parent marriage in a world where divorce was still fairly raire and frowned upon In fourth and fifth grade I began to get occasional grades that were not perfect and found I needed help with some things and had nobody to go to in order to get it. I still mostly had good grades and had a role in a play that was not very successful. I started to get in fights but I was out at the farm more. And was better at those skills. I was starting to ride the bus to my great grandmother’s house after school. My mother would pick me up after work and beside doing homework and watching her paintI found my first business. Peoplebegan to pay for glass Coke and other soda bottles returned for recycling. Although eventually the refunds were limited to bottles with a deposit mark it was not that way at first. At first any clean bootle would do. I scoured the area around my great grandmothers’ house and found hundred of bottles in ditches, culverts, bushes and small dumps that abounded. I cleaned them and returned them. I was suddenly not begging my parents for a bigger allowance but rather I was actually making enough money to buy frozen drinks and comic books every day from the store that paid me and also keep a little of my pay in saving for bigger things. This was a wonderful feeling, digging through filth and running my Momee’s unmetered hose to clean bottles and then hauling them to the nearby store. I felt the joy of income that was my own and I would always want it from then on whether I had it or not.
The fifth grade year Mom and Dad fought and drank enough to get known for it. Yelling at parties etc. Mom took me to visit my divorced godmother and her sons in Houston. She was practicing for divorce. When we got back, Dad had experienced a religious conversion and soon she did too. At first I was confused and skeptical. They went off for a second honeymoon and made a lot of progress in Faith, Hope and Love while I stayed with my Dad’s parents . They came back and we went to church regularly, attended the Catholic CHarismatic Payer Group in town, began to serve the poor in Christian outreaches. The big shock came when they heard the call to take literally the gospel;’s injunction to “Sell all you have and give alms to the poor.” The house and most of my possessions were sold and the proceeds put in a loaves and fishes account for charity. We moved to a camp on the farm while they decided what to deo nest. I was included in these decisions and prayers. I mostly hunted and fished when I was not in school.
It was not long before the prospect of going to Tonga as missionaries with the MArists would emerge. In the travels as a missionary much of my story up till the point of our lives as missionaries would not fit with the new context of life as we were trying to live it. I said goodby to my classmates with the religious fervor of a child believing he would go into the missions and maybe never come back. However, I would be with them again. I liked Clara and some others but we were not close. I was increasingly alienated and troubled. I believed that my faith in Jesus Christ would guide me to a better life by the time we left, and I wore a cross around my neck like my parents.
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It did not turn out that my life was going to be all religious zeal and fervor. AsS it turned out my life would have many twists and turns and there would be times when I would be closer to the not quite pretend gangster of my last years before the missionary years. I would connect with some of the same people. I have secrets borne of the life I have lived in and around the underworld. I will give an example of what I mean. It is not the most exciting or dangerous or anything. I remember driving a sports car to California in a caravan of cars with someone I thought was a little shifty. I remember being very careful to see that the car was legitimately registered and all of that. I took so much up front and got a bus ticket back from LA in advance. However, it turned out that two of the older vehicles were an SUV and an old pick up truck. We crossed the border into Mexico and the VIN numbers were rubbed off the vehicles and the plates were changed on the two old vehicles. There was a market for old American vehicles and I don;t think that hey were stolen. I am pretty sure no drugs were involved but we are hiding something from someone and I was nervous as I drove from New Mexico to California with one of the drivers in my custodial car. I made some money and it didn’t come back on me. The years that I spent driving around there were plenty of times that I gave rides to people who were illegal immigrants or were carrying some kind of illegal substance. That is not the basis of an exciting crime story but it is an indication of what my life could be like when I wasn’t working, teaching or reading. It was part of the story that made me who I am. I had secrets when I drove criminals back and forth between jail and halfway houses for their jobs. I had secret when I was involved in ministry in a conflict zone in the Philippines and ran into the CIA officers there and had to figure out what that meant.
But among the secrets of my life was always a sense that there was a world behind the curtain of the known and obvious events and facts of life. In this story I may get to tell the story of some of those secrets. Now that I am filing for disability, I am less concerned about people thinking I might be schizophrenic or delusional. Whether I am or not, some of the experiences of my life go very much beyond the range of what most people would be willing to believe. In time it may be more than potential readers can tolerate – but all people have secrets.
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