March 31, 2024 was Easter Sunday. When I worked on this draft for a while on that morning I thought back on the gloriously beautiful Easter Vigil Mass at St. Mary Magdalen that Clara and I attended, along with a mostly full church building. I also remembered the four people received into the Church through the Sacraments of initiation. Often there are Baptisms at Easter VIgil Mass. But because the people entering the Catholic Church in our parish were already all Baptized CHristians there was only a Blessing of the Baptismal waters during that part of the Mass. Then all of them received the second Sacrament of Initiation, Confirmation. Father Louis laid hands on them and prayed for them to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Then he anointed their heads with oil in the sign of the cross and all were able to applaud.The only Sacrament of Initiation that Catholics repeat is the the third Sacrament of the Eucharist. The newly confirmed Catholic Christians were able to receive Holy Communion “under both species” as we say it, from the cup and the bread. They did this before the rest of the congregation received communion. “This was a beautiful service. I am glad we came early.” Clara said after the service.
“I am glad we went too.” I replied, “it means a lot to me.”
“The Triduum takes a lot out of anyone.” Clara began as we drove off in her (or our) blue Subaru Outback. “But I think it is worth it..”
My Dad is gone for over a year now and my mother will be going to mass on Easter Sunday morning. That had been their custom in recent years almost without exception. But I remembered the magnificent vigil masses at the Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Saltillo, Coahuila , Mexico that Mom and Dad and Sarah and Susanna and I attended. The magnificent blessing of the fire, the spreading of candles lit from the central paschal candle and the reading of all the readings (in Spanish of course) without using any of the permitted shorter forms – those were all beautiful parts of those liturgies in Mexico. But while those things were less in our parish last night the music was truly beautiful, ending with the Hallelujah Chorus in the choir loft was absolutely splendid. Clara and I got a drive through treat from McDonald’s and then headed back home for me to finish prepping and start roasting the turkey that II had offered to bring to a family Easter gathering. Although there was beauty in the worship service, the season and the Gospel story – there was also a sense of the way my life has shaped up. In the congregation there were many people associated with the Family Missions Company founded by my parents. Some were seated very near to Clara and I in the church. Later on in the family SIgnal chat, my brother Joseph would show pictures of his little family in Indian clothing celebrating Easter in their home in Goa. My sister Sarah showed her family playing in left over snow in Colorado. She is with her husband Kevin and her children with him, her second husband, Isaac, Isabel, Jonah and Esme were all rejoicing in the snow.
Because I was working on this memoir, my mind turned to a different church experience. Our time attending St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church on the University of Virginia Campus in Charlottesville, Virginia. Halloween 1976, October 31 was the day the time changed back an hour. Mom and Dad and Sarah and I were back in my uncle Jim and aunt Kathy’s house in Brown’s Cove alone after having left for a while to visit Ann Arbor’s Word of God Covenant Community for the first time. But for whatever reason, they were not in their house on the river. The previous night we had dinner at the house of John Finley. John was a Protestant Christian who had given his life to Jesus in a strong personal way and committed himself to serving in his Protestant Christian Church after being led to a conversion experience, through the ministry of the Catholic family (ours) that he picked up as hitchhikers. We were also distracted by some news that came to us when Mom called her Dad (my Pops) to wish him a happy birthday while we were at John FInley’s house because Jim and Kathy’s remote home did not have a phone
and there were few cellular phones in those days and although we did not have one, a cell phone would not have worked deep in that “holler” (the word for a hollow in the mountains where a neighborhood of small farms and such has developed).John FInley was one of several exceptional people. Not only did he return to the faith he had growing up in an Evangelical Christian home and make an adult decision to follow Jesus – which was huge for us as a family. His parents were administrators for the World Health Organization in Brazil and John had lived in Africa at some point. He was good company and good fellowship for us.
The news was about the starting of what would become Open Door Community in Abbeville. So we had a good bit on our mind. For whatever reason Jim and Kathy were out of the house that night when we got back and we knew we could not borrow the car or get a ride with them to get to Sunday mass. We were supposed to set our clocks back that tonight but we put them forward instead. We had to set our alarms early enough to make sure that we could get to church by the unreliable method of hitchhiking. It was slow and dangerous work. Most people did not stop for us. However, we did not set our clocks back, we set them forward. In addition we got a fairly quick ride into town. So we had most of our half our margin for error when we arrived at church. In addition because we set our clocks forward we were there an hour before the time our Mass would have started the previous weekend. However, we were not living in the previous weekend. We were in the weekend of the time change. The mass was starting an hour later. Therefore we were at the church two and a half hours early. It was very difficult to be there as a little family of four outside the locked church. It was very much a time when I felt afraid for my future.
The low that day in Charlottesville was 42 degrees. SO it was not freezing but it was chilly and would only rise to 54 degrees. The Church where we waited had a striking modern art statue of Saint Thomas Aquinas commissioned in 1967. The Dominican Friars, also known as the Order of Preachers, celebrated their great scholar and theologian in their ministry to the students at the University of Virginia. That statue was what my uncle called the Squatting Robot. We sat under his odd but somehow protective eye in our bizarre penitential isolation.
While Jim called the statue “Squatting Robot” and the church Squatting Robot Church, it is apparent that some people at least called it Bumper Buddha. Wat follows is an excerpt from a 2017 article about the statue being moved. 😊
“Drive past St. Thomas Aquinas Church on Alderman Road and you’ll notice something different—a Charlottesville icon has disappeared. The UVA student-dubbed “Bumper Buddha,” a statue of the church’s namesake welded out of chrome car bumpers, was moved to IX Art Park on May 2.
…
The Reverend William Stickle commissioned the statue from Indiana sculptor Hank Mascotte in 1967.
…
When asked if IX is going to become home to other homeless statues —an island of misfit toys—Wimer said, “I think it’s a strong possibility as people are shifting monuments around this town. We are happy recipients of all sorts of pieces of art. Please, let the donations begin.”
Like the General Robert E. Lee statue? Wimer laughs. “That would entail some very long discussions.”
https://www.c-ville.com/bumper-buddhas-big-move . . . .
When Clara and I visited Jim and Kathy the summer before we got married (while we were on a road trip) we saw the site of the no longer existing Robert E. Lee staue mentioned in the article. That statue had been the site of the Unite The RIght Rally with Louisiana’s David Duke and others arrayed against Antifa and protestors against Confederate Statuary. There was violence and at least one person was killed directly due to the conflict. The Robert E. Lee statue has been melted down to be made into statuary representing African American achievement or CivilRIghts or freedom – I am not sure what the final work was. But in those days Charlottesvill was not famous for that violent rally. Many things have changed since 1976 and some stay the same. One change is that I and almost everyone I deal with have cell or mobile phones of some kind. Jim and I communicate on those phones fairly often, though not as much as a few years ago.
“Hey Jim, this is Beau. Call me when you can.” That could be any of a number of messages I have left on my Uncle Clay James Summers email in the last few years. “Hey Beau, I saw you had called and I am trying to chat. I wonder if this is about the thing with your Uncle Pres? Call me when you can and if you don’t I will call you back.” That could be any of a number of call back and resembles even more. ” Hey Jim, this is Beau. I guess we will keep playing phone tag for a while.” I call Clay James Summers my Dad’s brother younger than Pres, and Susan and older than Will and Missy “Jim” not Uncle Jim. I called all my aunts and uncles by their first name when I was very young. I sometimes introduced them as Aunt Missy or Uncle Pres but called them Missy and Pres. Both of my parent were the oldest of their families and the youngest of their siblings were not much older than I. I had no first cousins who could speak until I had been speaking for a long time. In addition I grew up in era of rapidly diminishing formality. For all these reasons I grew up calling all my aunts and uncles by their first names. I had few real playmates in my life as a small child and my youngest aunts and uncles were as close to being my regular playmates as anyone else. It seemed unfair for me to be the only person in my world to call their older brothers and sisters Aunt and Uncle. I am a person inclined to use correct or approximate titles and not no title at all. But as fate would have it I denied these people I cared about a basic title and as I look back no other path ever seemed possible.
In my own daily life, virtually everyone calls me either Beau, Frank, Mr. Frank or Mr. Summers. One person calls me parrain, (godfather in French) and a few people call me other things.I have lived places where anyone with a bachelor’s degree is addressed as “Licensiado” by strangers. I have also lived or stayed in places where anyone doing what I did were called “preacher” but that did not happen for me. The list of times and places where I was not distinguished by a title commonly used is a long list. But perhaps all of these slights are simple justice for my own slighting of Uncle Pres, Aunt Susan, Uncle Jim, Uncle WIll and Aunt Missy on my mother’s side and on my mother’s side Uncle Bruce, Uncle Brian, Uncle Jed and Aunt Rachel. I am including a list of some of my honors in life for a theoretical reader to keep in mind as they read about my time in Brown’s Cove. For the preteen there was the same person who received those honors in the list starting in 1983.
My Own Honors that are not secret and can be substantiated.
2024 Panel Coordinator and Presenter Gulf South History and Humanities Conference, Natchez Mississippi. Topic Roundtable Discussion: Culturally Responsive and Activist Pedagogy Meets Academic History: South Louisiana Cases and Reflections. Panelist with Nicole Guhon-Crowell
April 20, 2023 received medallion at UL Honors Convocation for Spring 2023.
2022 to 2023 Geaux Teach Scholar
2023 Admitted to Kappa Delta Pi Educational Honors Society
2019 Presenter Panel Louisiana Historical Association Annual Meeting Lafayette Louisiana Corinne Broussard Project on Evangeline Girls with Warren Perrin and Bary Ancelet.
2017 Presenter Gulf South History and Humanities Conference, Pensacola. Blood Feud: Acadian Ethnicity and the Killing of Huey P. Long. Why Mic Mac genes and arrogance killed the Kingfish
2016 Gulf South History and Humanities Conference, Mobile. Emerging Views: The Reemergence of American Identity in Postwar Acadiana and the SONJ Documentary Projects .
2012 Grand Prize Winner Lord Norton’s Quiz—House of Lords
2004 Honored Presenter College Lecture; “The Idea of the University”. SDIBT, College of Foreign Studies. Yantai ,China
1993 first academic publication: Academic Publications: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television; 1993, Review – FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts.
1992 LSU Research Grant – Ekstrom Photographic Archives, University of
Louisville – Louisville, Kentucky.
1992 Admitted to Mensa.
1991-1993 Board of Regents Fellow
1990 Honorary Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana.
1989 Outstanding Graduate, Alumni Association Honoree, Spring Commencement, USL.
1989 Outstanding Graduate of the College of Arts, Humanities, USL.
1989 Outstanding Graduate of the Department of English, USL.
1987 Admitted to Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society.
1985 Sophomore Class Award, Franciscan University of Steubenville
1983 first admitted to the Honors Program at USL (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette).
In addition, because I am not famous or very successful it is not always obvious that in recounting the adversities of my youth in terms of formal education and employment, I was going to at least study and work to some substantial degree later in life. Here are some of the evidences of my success in study later on in life. It was not the case that the kid in Brown’s Cove dropped off the face of the academic world forever. .
Degrees
Master of Arts, Louisiana State University, August 4, 1993. Cumulative G.P .A. 3.846
Bachelor of Arts, University of Southwestern Louisiana, ( now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), May 14, 1989. Cum Laude G.P A.: 3.686 (adjusted down to a 3.54 after decades due to new rules)
Teaching certification: UL Post-baccalaureate Alternative Certification. I completed courses in Teaching in a Diverse Society, Diverse Families, Secondary Social Studies Methods, Technology in Education and Teaching Literacy in the Content Areas, Foundations of Inclusion in Education and a course on Classroom assessment. I only lacked the course in Classroom management and the internship credits to compele the alternative certification. At this point I don’t see ever completing it. But I was a certified teacher under a practitioner’s license and I still am so licensed at the moment of preparing this chapter. .
Licenses and Certificates
Insurance Producer at the time of writing the main draft of this chapter I am appointed as a Career Agent with Physicians Mutual, Physicians Life and Physicians Mutual Select.
Restricted Radiotelephone Operator; Federal Communications Commission, January 31, 1986
Lay Evangelist, Diocese of Lafayette, Commissioned August 10, 1980.
Scriptural Exegete, 1982, Scripture Ventures Program, East Asian Pastoral Institute.
Catechist, Diocese of Lafayette, Certified February 23, 1991.
Catechist, Diocese of Baton Rouge, Certified March 29, 1993.
In 1976 we were leaving Augusta and coming into the school year and I had no prospects of going to school. We were leaving Alleluia Community as the kids were going back to their varied schools. WE were getting on a bus and headed to visit Jim and Kathy. They were, among other things, far enough out in the country that I would not be in the view of any truant officers and my parents could avoid responsibility for not doing anything to secure any accredited or formal education for me in the next starting year. SInce Tonga Side School I had a bit of study on Clavert’s Correspondence Course without the actual correspondence and some study in an accredited school. ALthough our ratio of teachers with some education training to students may have been among the highest in the world at the Lord’s School it had not been a fully accredited institution. l realized (although I never really verified whether the realization was fact or rumor) that some families involved in the experimental school were hedging their bets in trusting the experimental school. I heard from seemingly reliable sources towards the end of my time there that the millionaires in the group of parents had an hour each day for their kids with an additional tutor to make sure their children’s education met state standards. It was still a good school I had no doubt but I was aware that there was a juncture in the coming fall, I was moving into a new period of being out of school. I felt that the world was a dangerous place for me whether I tried to go to school or whetherI stayed out of it. I simultaneously believed my parents were dangerously skidding off the social rails and that they were doing a beautiful and inspired thing for the glory of God. I was not sure that they would do it well or that I would live to be an adult. I did feel a desire to support and protect Sarah in her start in life. My parents seemed different from one another. Each had their saintliness and their darkside in my eyes. It seemed to me that I could have honestly said they were bravely united in a holy adventure in a world that was in many ways a real mess and also that they were both struggling against each other’s best interest in destructive ways that I had to watch when I was with them so much. I could honestly say there was a beauty and richness in the life of travel, opportunism, ministry and family togetherness and that there was something dangerous and destructive about Dad not working for a living and me being out of school.
My uncle Jim picked us up at the bus station. We were four people and some luggage. My Dad had started receiving a small share of his family’s oil and gas money in monthly checks. He had the four of us to support and there was no way the small check could do that in the United States. Jim got the same size check. But he and Kathy both worked and although Jim’s career was not making him rich nor satisfying him entirely he and Dad were both graduates of Tulane Law School. Jim was doing legal research mostly and he and Kathy had the feeling of a little comfort in their lives. All of this was evident in snippets of conversation. But we were happy to house sit for them. No rent for us and security without a deposit or paying anyone for them. But before house sitting, we would visit for a week. I really liked Jim and Kathy. Jim had broken my arm in horseplay when I was young and for that and many other reasons I was reluctant to fully trust him. However I did like them and admired their own irreligious efforts to find a new path forward in the world. They were the hippest people in our family. .They had at one time cared about environmentalism when I was serving at the altar boy in the Earth Day Bayou Blessing and was a budding ecologist. My mother had supported the first African American woman for Mayor of Abbeville and they seemed sympathetic. They had spent their own money and time on travel and they seemed interested when I told them of places we had been over the years at family gatherings in my grandparents NewOrleans mansion. In our new statues as people not really dialed in to a path in the mainstream or anything else they seemed less likely to be judgemental than some of our other relatives would have been. The home Jim and Kathy had was a small one and a half to two storey house on a decent sized piece of land the front of which was on a small blacktop road and the rear of which was bounded by the Doyle River It was a small river that later in its course would flow through the Shenandoah National Park. The river has clear waters, smooth stone and pools and burbling falls a few inches .when the water was lower. It was largely shaded with trees and shrubs from its banks. Dad and Jim had parents whose house in Abbeville had a bank of the bayou at its rear. My mother’s family had the same Vermilion RIver or Bayou flowing on a long side of their home properties just outside Abbeville. A house on a river seemed like a good place for all of us.
Jim and Kathy had planted a garden full of vegetables that would mature during their absence. They had planted the garden not knowing that they would be leaving.I would tend the garden as best I could while we house sat and Dad and Mom did as well, but mostly we harvested the veggies.They were vital or we would not have had enough to eat. When there was bad weather we were truly isolated. Dad hitched into town to shop and I walked to the store a mile away for ingredients for cornbread mom taught me to make very well. Before Jim left, he showed me and Dad some local plants like “lamb chops’ an edible green, Queen Anne’s lace a wild carrot species, hackberries and sassafras for tea. We also looked through the Foxfire books he had and he said I could refer to them. During our housesitting we are all these things and sometimes in moderate amounts. I also tried to make acorn flour which was inedible and I made snare for rabbits that caught none and weirs for catching fish that caught none. I longed for a fishing pole but we never got one. I touched a fish twice in the water but never caught one by hand as I tried to do. This was as close to living off the land as we had gotten so far and we were not doing very well. But we had enough transportation and money to get enough groceries to survive.
Alone in the upstairs room for hours, I would read the Old Testament stories in Kings and Chronicles and Judges over and over. I read every part of the story of King David. I also read through the Gospels for the second time. I also looked up every cross reference in my Bible for the stories about David, read all the psalms and read everything relevant to those stories in the Jerome Biblical Commentary and Mckenzies DIctionary of the Bible.
I began writing a journal for the first time and a sort of dream journal separately. On the one big trip we made we stayed with a family that had children with cystic fibrosis. We became friends, their parents were members of the Word of God Community. At some point Jim and Kathy and another brother, my uncle WIll and his girlfriend were with us in the small house. I also tried to jog for the first time. It was not a good time. We made many memories. Mom retells the story of Dad praying a prayer of exorcism and seeing swarms of flies we had never seen around in any numbers coming out in response and then dying. She says we remembered the fact that Satan was called Beelzebub “Lord of the Flies”. I can attest that the facts of that story are substantially true. WHe also tells the story of a crazed man in a train station and how a mysterious black man appeared out of nowhere and rescued us and the young family of a soldier. The mysterious man drove us to a motel in his Cadillac and disappeared. That was also a true story.
I am not as involved in the world of mystical and miraculous observation as I was when I was 12. But I can never say that I never found anything there. Even America itself seemed tied to the hand of God in those days. .
We were not deeply engrossed in politics as we came into the Virginia countryside. But we did talk about politics as we had just left Georgia and were deeply committed and fervent Christians. Jimmy Carter, who had just been Governor of Georgia not long ago, was a vocal follower of Jesus Christ. The huge smile of the man from Plains Georgia was caricatured and his lack of national connections appeared in the oft repeated question “Jimmy Who?”But since then he had won the nomination of the Democratic Party. Mom, Dad and I all remembered a couple of years earlier Ruth Carter Stapleton, Jimmy Carter’s sister, had spoken to the huge Catholic Charismatic Conference in Louisiana. “My brother feels like God is calling him to be President of the United States. Please pray for him and also remember that whatever God calls you to do he will give you the strength to do it.” That was a memorable sort of thing to hear. We did remember it and I wondered if he was really going to be President.”So God calls President too.” I said to Jim, trying to explain how our family was functioning in this new spiritual path. WE had been at this converted state for a while but there was a lot we had not fully shared with Jim and Kathy. Over the years to come our family would visit them again, in college I would visit them a number of times and my other siblings would take their families to visit them. In all those years, they would live near or in Charlottesville, VIrginia. But they would have a number of living arrangements. The summer before our November 19, 2022 wedding, Clara and I spent one night with them in their home now in the building Jim had used as his law office building for decades. This was a nice visit and we saw Jim in Louisiana at my Dad’s funeral in September of the same year and in our home with some of his friends when he was visiting Louisiana last summer. and then
The memories of that visit blur together but it was a full and packed visit to be sure. It was a time Jim and Kathy brought us to see Monticello for the first time and to tour around Charlottesville. There was no massive internet based mapping infrastructure but the adults all determined that there was no Catholic Church substantially closer to Browns Cove than St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish. “Sure, I will drive you around to see the Squatting Robot. That’s what I and my buddies called the Catholic Church on campus. It has this statue commissioned in the sixties that looks like it is made out of bumpers. Very much resembles a squatting robot.” We all laughed a bit nervously but when we saw the statue we thought the description seemed pretty reasonable. Jim and I had a conversation about St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Jefferson and about visions for human life found in the Declaration of Independence and the Summa Theologica. I talked to Jim about his time at UVa as well and wondered how I would get to college after the crazy circuitous route my education was taking.
But that visit with them for a week before they left on the trip for which we were housesitting was also a time for them to really see us as we had become. In my mother’s book Go You are Sent, in the chapter “Alleluia to Albemarle” on pages 207 to 208 she describes what we looked like from her point of view as it has survived a few edits over the years between her recording her memories and it being printed in 1995. This is how she remembers that we looked as we hitchhiked. After acknowledging that most people were not interested in stopping to give us a ride when we had to hitchhike from Browns Cove to Charlottesville”
“The Lord chose generous people. They had to have courage to make room in their car for a unique family, wearing crosses. Frank Dressed in Sears work clothes and sported a full beard. I carried four month old Sarah in a kangaroo-carry front pack., and, at that time, was still wearing the long dresses I had adopted in Tonga. Beau, a tow headed twelve- year-old dressed in old Levis was the only typical American in the group.”
In no way is my account of these events authorized by my mother or Jim. But I will say that Jim has stated that one of the breakthroughs in his work as a lawyer in Charlottesville came from one of the lawyers who picked us up hitching rides to church and then took us to eat and relax at his home that had television, a game room and other amenities. Somehow we became friends. WHen Jim and Kathy got back they also became friends and that connection led to greater opportunities in the legal community. In those days Mom, Dad and I all believed that we were called by God to our travels and therefore could believe he would bless those who housed us. I rarely think in those terms now, but Jim’s words about those who helped us as hitchhikers came across in conversation sincerely on more than one occasion. That story made me feel that perhaps there was something to that blessing on those who housed the one’s traveling in God’s name. . . . .
We would finally leave Browns Cove for good to go back to Abbeville and explore life in our town living among the more working class and poorer neighborhoods where we lived. I would go back to school at Mount Carmel Elementary School. I would end up back in my old class with the woman I am married to today. But although my grades would be OK we would travel in and out in the future and sometimes I would get picked up for truancy and other times we would leave in the middle of a grading period. How life went back home is another part of my story.
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