This chapter is primarily about the days between April 4th and September 1 1977. That was a summer after my seventh grade year, having found my way back to the life of my class in my old school of Mount Carmel Elementary – from my not-quite-girlfriend’s birthday to the days when I was settling into eighth grade.
I was writing the main draft of this chapter on the days of the second week of the Catholic Easter Season. One of these days was special because there was a solar eclipse with a path of totality across the middle of the United States. Clara and I thought about going to Dallas where I have a sister and she has a brother and we both have friends. But we could not make it work. So we held hands and looked through eclipse glasses that came with two Black Out Slushes from Sonic. We really enjoy Sonic Diet Cherry Limeades and so it is cool to have a pair of Sonic branded mementoes of this occasion. If God wanted to send a special message to the people of this planet, the total eclipse would be a good way to do it. For the magnificent life giving sun has is four hundred times larger than the Moon and is also 400 times as far away. That is a sort of permanent miracle. The partial eclipses Clara and I saw might likely be seen on any planet that has eyes to see and a moon but the total eclipse is something else. We were able to feel the temperature drop a bit and when we got close to our most intense eclipse of 90% of the sun blocked by the Moon – the streetlights in Abbeville were triggered because their photo sensors were able to detect nightfall. I was joyful and blessed to be with the woman I love. Joyously we were making memories almost three years after we met up again after not seeing each other for forty-five years. I wondered, as I often have since we got together, if things might have been different for both of us if we had gone to high school together. I don’t know but It doesn’t seem likely we would have found a way into a relationship as high school sweethearts because I was so far from comfortable and so close to high school. I feel sad that I did not become part of her story in that way but I was just really trying to survive at the school we both attended last time we were in school together.
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On April 10, 2021 I saw Clara Duhon for the first time in 45 years. I had a lot of strong positive memories of her from the otherwise very unhappy middle school years, even though we were not close at that time. I got her number after we flirted somewhat inappropriately while helping my best friend in town and her best friend in town (who are brother and sister) to plan their father’s funeral. Jude and Jackie were supportive friends in our early relationship. We are still good friends, Jackie was in that same middle school class. Clara and I got engaged on December 10. 2021. We got married on November 19, 2022. There were really no times before running into her that I thought I would end up married to one of my classmates from Mount Carmel Elementary School.
Abbeville is the town Clara and I would both claim as our hometown. Our hometown was built and planned by a priest named Pere Antoine Desire Megret bought the land for the town (160 arpents ) from my ancestors Joseph Leblanc and Isabelle Broussard on July 25, 1843.The couple seems to have had three houses and the house on the land he bought was used as the first St.Mary Magdalen Parish Church at the heart of the town he called La Chapelle. He had many practical aspects of the city plan he created with principles of gravity for future plumbing, social cohesion, convenient transit and raising money with subdivisions and creating a rational administrative and taxable geography. That was the part of him that was part of the life of the progressive journalist he had been in France when the newspaper he was associated with fell afoul of the powerful of the Catholic Church.But the part that came from the devout priest and fervent missionary that he still was is apparent in the names he chose for the streets. The central artery of the town’s original plan is Charity Street (Rue de la Charité ) which is named for the greatest Christian virtue. This mainstreet of our town was sort of separated from the Styx by one and a half blocks of a more respectable neighborhood. Some very fine homes (by Abbeville standards stood along the street along with banks and large stores on the main street called Charity. My great grandmother’s house and her complex of garden, studio, apartments and rental houses was in that band between the Styx and Charity Street. Clara grew up on the other side of Charity in what was mostly white,mostly working class and lower middle class neighborhood. Her family had land in the country too but not much and around their house thay had a lot with a garden, a few fig, pear and shade trees. All the four children went to Mount Carmel Elementary and Vermilion Catholic High School. All four got university degrees two of them earned more than one degree. Whether we could have been friends outside of school when were really young I do not know. But we never achieved that status. She never had people throw birthday parties for her as a child and did not come to my swimming birthday parties when I invited the whole class because she did not know how to swim.
When one lives in a small town there are lots of things that have a special meaning invisible to outsiders. Whether in the hit song “Small Town” by John Cougar Mellencamp or in te name of the Country band Little Big Town one finds that lots of Americans have had a small town identity all during my lifetime. In small towns we all have our inner maps of what that town’s sites and landmarks mean just as big city dwellers and the true denizens of the country and wilderness weave their identities into the marks on their own home landscape. Life is lived out on a map of shared values and another map of personal meaning is imposed upon it. For me part of that meaning which illustrates the mental complexity of what is in many ways a simple town, there is the story of El Camino. El Camino’s name caught my eye when it opened. Camino is just an older Spanish word for road and there are many roads named caminos around the Spanish Speaking World. A Camino Real is a royal road and a current hotel chain,big in Mexico when I was young. These were the best roads of the Spanish Empire as well. In the English Bibles we translate Jesus’ words, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Way there means road not method, as in the Appian Way in Italy and a very few other road names compared to the ones named road or highway or route. The first El Camino restaurant in Abbeville was founded in the building that had once housed the well known Midway Restaurant where Concord Street (Rue de La Concorde) reaches the streets around the town square that is the middle square on the original city plan between the Vermilion Parish Courthouse Square and the Church Square, that has been occupied by the Church and its other buildings for along time. The Mexican restaurant with some Cajun and standard American accents was originally founded by a family with toots in the AMerican State of Michigan and the Mexican state of Michoacan. My cousin Joshua Broussard whom I have mentioned in this memoir and my ex wife both waited on tables at that place. The building has been through quite a few owners since and it is now used by Tito’s La Casa owned by another out of towner from far away. Clara and I have eaten there and we had lunch there with my mother just a couple of weeks ago. Rue del Concorde symbolizes the peace between the State represented by the Courthouse and the town square and church representing the people beyond their role in the state – under the meaning of Megret’s plan. It is the same plan line as Charity Street. The central artery line as Charity Street runs to the Courthouse square which is almost entirely occupied by the massive courthouse since the current A Hays Towne designed building was built on the square Megret designed. The bulk of the town is built off of Charity Street heading East toward the town of Erath and most of the town runs off those streets that intersect with Charity. Then the Concord Street section runs one block to the town square. The last block of that line runs to the bridge over the river by passing in front of the church. So the Church Square is on a different line. That last block is Pere Megret Street now but originally was bounced between two other names and a continuation of the Concord Street name. In modern automotive times a bypass highway was built from a new bridge over the Vermilion River to the highway leading to Erath. One of the businesses to build on the Bypass was the Pitt Stop. The chain of locations typically had two elements: a Pitt Stop gas station and 24 hour convenience store and a Pitt Grill which was a 24 hour diner. Both businesses or gone now, but the Grill went first, it became a pool hall and then was sold to El Camino which relocated there largely in search of better visibility and parking, although both spots are visible and have parking. The original family sold El Camino to the Friths whom I have done business with all my life including at the old incarnation of Mickey’s. Drive Inn and at other eateries thay own. Trent Frith played football with my cousins, one of whom was one of two priests to witness Clara and I being wed in the ceremony they concelebrated at St. Mary Magdalen. All of that connection to small town history is different from connecting to landmarks in a city that everyone knows from movies and TV. This is my world. But the reason that El Camino’s name always caught my notice is because the restaurant came to town after I had lived with my family in El Camino community in Colombia, South America. That is a connection that I am going to begin to develop in this chapter about the summer of 1977. That will follow one more connection with the Abbeville El Camino.
On March 6, 2024 after the Anticipated Mass for Divine Mercy Sunday at St. Mary Magdalen Church, my mother took Clara and I and my brother Simon out to eat at El Camino Restaurant. I believe that we all enjoyed the meal together. My father died on September 11, 2022 and thus missed my wedding to Clara on November 19, 2022. This week she has started having official and formal dates with a man that she was friends with many decades ago when the man who took her dancing was married to a woman who worked in my father’s office when he was the Assistant District Attorney. As couples they once moved in the same crowd.
“So how did it go?” I asked over the hot Queso Camino as I indulged in holding Clara’s hand at various moments. “You told me, when we spoke yesterday on the phone, that you had a date yesterday evening.”
“Well I suppose it was a date. D_______ invited me to go and hear the live music and dance with him at Kelvin’s. He picked me up at five o’clock but the band did not actually start until eight o’clock and he goes to sleep at eight o’clock. “ She played with her expression very well, leaving it to us to see how she might feel about all this before she continued. “ It worked out well. We simply talked with each other for about an hour and a half. He seemed to need the time for us to converse alone because he seems intimidated by me.”
“Have you known each other a long time?” Clara asked.
“You mean D____, has he known me long before this?” My mother asked her.
“Yes.” Clara affirmed that was what she meant.
“Yes D______ and his wife E_________ as well as Louise and Albert, I______ and C______ and Frank and I were all in the same crowd years ago. But we have never spoken much since I became a missionary.”
“So, he was intimidated because he knows who you really are.” Clara explained her line of conversation.
“Intimidated by me? Why?”My mother queried.
“Because you have lived a big life.” Clara asserted.
“I have lived a big life” My mother agreed.
I have maintained a pretty close relationship with my mother, even though there have been plenty of times of strain and sorrow. Mostly we have enjoyed each other’s company, but there have been days and weeks when there was nothing easy about it. That allows for some standard by which to assess the text I cite below. In my mother’s second book about our lives, published in 2012 she writes:
“Beau entered Mount Carmel Elementary in Seventh Grade. Beau was persecuted at school. The other kids teased him for professing boldly that he believed in Jesus. Recently visited with a woman who was a year behind Beau in school. Tears streamed down my face as she related the suffering he had endured from those who teased him at Mount Carmel Elementary. Part of his difficulty stemmed from changing his position as one of the more financially and socially privileged to one of the least privileged and the poorest. – a hard transition in a small community.”(Summers, Acts page 14).
This was the experience I spelled out in my last chapter. I had a life outside of school, but that next summer I would see that there were a lot of pressures in that life that were in conflict with one another as well. I was going to begin to feel more than before that there might not be much hope of me rising above a state of crisis. I was starting to see that I was feeling checkmated in all directions and I certainly knew a good number of people in the Styx who lived lives of very little hope. But there was a government housing project subsidized for “the poor on one edge of the Styx, that was also not the styx. Rabbit Hill was a poorer and more troubled neighborhood. Mostly the only people “on the dole’ in a big way in The Styx were the increasing number of mentally ill people who were no longer in institutions or groups homes. They came to the neighborhood for low rents, to access the charity of bread and some soup at the Christian Service Center, The St. VIncent De Paul Center (eventually) absorbed by the Christian Service Center and the charitable kitchen at Open Door Community. Some were “shell shocked” veterans with PTSD and honorable discharges, other mentally ill people were hard working oilfield folks who had sustained head injuries. The neighborhood had a city councilman who made the papers and got things done. Prostitutes and pot dealers provided services people wanted and got paid for them. People operated stores of various kinds without signage or licenses but sold real good at reasonable prices from veggies, to auto parts to desserts. A few people rented rooms and some repaired motors or tools. A few had significant gardens and one had a large and substantial lily farm on several lots because Abbeville was not zoned. Gangsters were generally under a truce in The Styx in those days. They went out of the neighborhood to fight. My not- quite- girlfriend’s grandmother being beaten almost to death was not typical. It shocked the baddest men I knew. “Whores” sometimes escaped from the lock down brothels outside the neighborhood and sometimes found shelter under local pimps who helped them find their way to better places and sometimes got bus tickets, modest clothes and a Bible from religious workers. The Christian Service center helped people fill out forms for Medicaid, for Food Stamps, for job applications, for legal aid and for lots of other things but only if people asked. Otherwise it tended to fit the profile of the neighborhood. Privacy, private charity and private enterprise providing short or long term jobs were the norm. My girlfriend lived near the Christian Service Center as well and I gave her a nice present on her April 4th birthday. She had plan with girls and was turning fourteen and a boyfriend not yet 13 was not very cool. But we still were not dating anyone else and we still were trying to see if we could figure it all out. I was trying to finish the school year and so was she at her school and we both did…
When the seventh grade year ended we celebrated Sarah’s first birthday and I was working enough to get her a present but also volunteering a good bit at the Christian Service Center. In addition, my little group of guys started to get lawns referred to us by the Christian Service Center people who would pay our lower rates but could not afford the normal rate. I bought a second mower and a retiree gave us a third for four good mowings and trims. We learned to tug the mowers behind our bikes and on far more distant trips we hired a young man who had just finished high school and owned a very battered pickup truck. WHen he worked he dropped off a load of boys a mower, a trimmer and a bike. Then he came back and picked up the other kid and two mowers. He manned the other mower and they had a trimmer. I paid him double what the other kids got. I started bringing home food for the family and gifts for the community. I treated my little not-quite-girlfriend to treats and bought Sarah a nice birthday present. I saved what I could. We still had the lawns from our list the last few months who were mostly connections from the days when Mom and DId had lived in the more prosperous part of town.
My birthday was on June 15 as it is every year. I had a number of different celebrations. My parents helped to put on a swimming party far my friends at my mother’s parents’s pool. I did not invite friends from school but from the neighborhood mostly with perhaps one or two exceptions. Totally out of character for everything, in almost every way, my Dad’s mother took me and my not-quite-girlfriend to dinner together. We rode back to our neighborhood in the back of my grandmother’s luxury car. “Thank You Gammy!” I said. Somehow. I knew that if things went a certain way, I could end up falling in love with my almost 14 year old girlfriend, losing my virginity to her and marrying her. But I also knew that there were many reasons why that might not happen. I was careful to try to support my parent’s ministry and community ties, I was careful to flatter them as well and in addition I truly believed in many of their ideal and values and I definitely believed in Jesus. But I was also very much trying to make some money, woo a girl while I was thirteen and find some way to matter in the community. My girlfriend and I barely kissed after that dinner and it would be one of the very last times we had any uncomplicated affection. But we have mutually acknowledged memories, that is different than some women I have since known with whom there is no recognition of any connection.
Not long after my birthday, I was trying to spend more time with the volunteers at the service center. I tried to combine unpaid prayer and service with the opportunities to acquire new lawns for my group which somehow seemed to happen. I felt that Dad had mixed feelings about my little business. “Praise God! I am glad that you are doing these things, I heard from Pres that there is a chance for you to cut at the family law office.”
“That suits me.” I answered, “We have two lawns in the same neighborhood. I will call him shortly. ”
“Great but what will you do if we go on a trip this summer?” Dad asked.
“I have arrangements with Donald to lead the group. I have left a little money in advance at the repair and sharpening shop. He will set aside three dollars a lean as my cut. But of course it is a problem. I hope to get back in time to solve. If we are going back overseas then I might be able to accept that more easily. You know that I am not very happy at school. But I am trying.”
“Mom and I got a letter from Father Jim Mitchell that we wrote to at El Camino community in Columbia. You can read the letter when we get home and we will talk about it . But he is going to be in Ann Arbor and we are thinking of going back to the Word of God Community to see him when he arrives there.”
“It will be hard to risk a lot on the changes but I do like traveling and I would feel like we were living as missionaries if we went to live and work in Columbia. I find it hard to explain to people that we are missionaries who were called by God to be missionaries and we live here in our hometown.” . .
That conversation was unusually candid and honest on my part. Soon we were with Mom and little Sarah playing and talking about the trip. I suggested that we might borrow Gammie and Papa’s old farm truck. Mom suggested that we borrow the truck bed top camper shell from her parents that was just sitting abandoned outside. The trip was now a camping trip and somehow we still had some camping supplies that had survived some out dispossessions and we bought more supplies. We got in touch with my aunt Susan who had wanted us to visit her at her newish home in Truckee, California. We planned a trip to visit the old friends and ministries we had left behind in El Paso, A group of El Paso friends who had moved to Phoenix, a mission organization we had corresponded with in Oxnard, California and along the way to see national and state parks, this would bring us to Truckee for a long visit. Then we would similarly camp and drive to reach Ann Arbor, Michigan. After that we would visit Jim and Kathy in Brown’s Cove and Charlottesville, VIrginia. We might if we did that stop by Augusta Georgia and then come back home. We would cover most of the outer tiers of states if this was actually to be our route. I felt bad leaving my lawns and potential girlfriend, but I did feel an attraction to the romance of the road and the possible life in the missions in Columbia made more sense to me than our life in Abbeville.It was clear to me that I was going to struggle with a lot of different issues. But a lot of them would have to with money. I could put those worries on hold in the missions.
. . .
I was a teenager now, that was the term that had so much meaning in the United States of America. I knew that losing the cutting season of the summer would be a big setback in income, but I also knew that it could be more time to bond with Mom and Sarah. I had not been seeing them as much lately and I was very busy in ways that were not going to solve all our problems. I found the time I spent at the Christian Service Center rewarding, I hoped to see a more intense relationship with my girlfriend and I liked hanging with my guys as we cut grass. But I knew that I was a traveler and a missionary or else I was a confused kid fighting an impossible battle to find a place to be.someone I could feel comfortable with at all levels. .
The values of The Styx are not the only values that I bring with me. But when I think of AMerica and what it is and what it is not I think of that neighborhood often. I sense it was closer to the essence of America than many other places. I leave this thought as grounds for my own sense of why my time there mattered as much as it did.
“Yet, rather than regarding this diversity as grounds for despair, Madison took it as a source of his new republicanism. The task of government, he maintained, should not be to eliminate the causes of faction, as the ancient writers had argued, so much as to control their effects. The most obvious of these effects was diversity in property. A primary task of statesmanship in the modern commercial republic, then, would not be to impose equality of property, but to manage the differences between their different kinds.(Steven B.Smith “Learning from Publius”; National Affairs; number 54, winter 2023:page 99)
So it was with a troubled goodbye to my girl and my lawn guys that I set out with my family. “Thank God there is a little window that slides in this truck, we can all talk” I said to Mom as we reached the first stop to eat the meal she cooked up on our Coleman Camping Stove. “This is not very comfortable or elegant but it works a whole lot better than I would expect since the truck never had a camper before according to everyone I asked.”
“Yes, it is nice to camp because the campgrounds are beautiful often and so we pull up and we are in a beautiful place, no matter how we arrive.”.Mom replied.
“ I do love nature.” I assured her.
In El Paso things had changed, we had wonderful visits with friends but I got the impression that The Lords School might not be reopening the next year. There was a new regime at La Cueva and even Father Rick seemed to find it more awkward to be with us -although we were all still friends..
In Phoenix we met wonderful friends who had moved from El Paso and put us up in some comfort. They were all thrilled to meet Sarah. But there was a definite sense that we were just visiting. It was a common thing in those days in Abbeville and elsewhere that people asked us to pray for the sick. Many reported feeling better and some with desperate prognoses were healed very soon afterwards. We would hear stories about this sort of thing whenever we doubled back to meet people. There were people who faked such things I knew and those which could be easily explained. But this was a constant strand in my life and included my own prayers and a good people over the years from 9 to 22 years of age who told convincing stories that I had been given a gift of healing that God had used to set them right and make them well. It happened frequently in my parents’ ministry as well. My parents had their troubles and it was not always easy to live with the very human struggles they could get into. My mother truly and sincerely wanted to be a good wife and mother and then go to heaven after a long life. But she also wanted to go to heaven tomorrow whenever things got too bad. But I did enjoy bonding more with Mom and Sarah on the trip.
I did emphasize that when I had traveled these roads with Gammie and PauPau we had seen a lot of sites and reminded them of another time we had seen a few. I really wanted to revisit the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, the painted Desert, The Petrified Forest and other places I loved. I know we visited a few and I was glad we did. But we passed a lot of great scenery at night partly because it was cooler to drive at night and we had very little air conditioning crossing the Southwest desert in the summer. We prayed with and shared food with a couple of people in the campsites. I began to feel like we were really on the edge of American society and that the religious lunatic fringe that one could find on the highways and campsites had just as many problems as the mainstream. At every site I bought a postcard with my dwindling money and mailed it home to either a grandparent or my girlfriend. I also bought my girlfriend a couple of nice presents.
When we reached the mission organization in Oxnard, I could not believe family I met were supporting missionaries but they were – i knew that to be true. My sense of scandal came not from their sins or behavior being immoral. I was scandalized because they wrapped all their furniture and carpets in plastic except for on special occasions. This was to make things last longer. I couldn’t fit together the openness to people around the world and the same family requiring all the people they actually knew to sit on uncomfortable sheets of cheap plastic to protect their possessions. But despite feeling uncomfortable. I made pretty good friends with their son. He seemed so relieved that I did not make him feel like his parents were crazy. I felt good about making him feel respected – but I did think his parents might be crazy.
When we got up to Truckee my aunt Susan was working two and a half part-time jobs, she was a waitress in an omelet restaurant, worked as some kind of clerk in a public utility and helped the mechanics with some things at the municipal airport garage. She had a great middle sized house on the Truckee RIver she was fixing up. We prayed with her friends who were not so religious, she was divorced from Don, her Mormon husband, they had split up and they had no children to keep them in close contact.. While we were there we went to see him as well and he gave us a tour of a water treatment system he helped to manage. Afterwards we had “a Catholic and Backsliding Mormon” prayer meeting according to Don. It was kind of sad, even though I loved hiking around Truckee. While I was there walking I saw one of the men who I had known to be associated with the old traditions in Abbeville and with several lines of families I was related to on my father’s side, Seeing him at any place other than South Louisiana was a revelation. The old man told me not to talk about him but he talked with me.. He said that he watched certain people now and then and my Aunt Susan was one of them. I kept my word and never talked of this encounter for many years. I was feeling like the odds of my life working out well were not good, yet I also truly believed in the power of a spiritual path and the one I was on in life with my parents.
Our time in Ann Arbor and Word of God Community reunited me with my friends who had cystic fibrosis. Our relationship was complicated by many factors I cannot discuss, comfortably even here. But my parents and I were there mostly because Fr. Jim Mitchell was there from the El Camino community in Colombia. They mostly met with him without me. But by that time I had an interest in the publishing and other businesses being run by the community and I got some great tours of some of those facilities. We also saw Ralph Martin again who was a very important figure in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.
We then went down from Ann Arbor to Brown’s Cove and Charlottesville to visit with Jim and Kathy. They put us up a little while and had a new garden. Jim distinctly remembers Sarah becoming fascinated with the tomatoes – plants and fruit and calling them ‘may-mays” She was a long way short of the two year norm for speaking but like me she was an early talker. We were not here very long before we were on the way back to Abbeville, to Open Door Community and we were only able to stop in and visit Faith VIllage for a brief visit.
When we got back to Abbeville, I was eager to bring my gifts to my girlfriend. She accepted them graciously but I could see things were never going to be the same. She was going to high school at a big public High School and was likely to make the cheer squad. My lawn business was barely limping along. But I felt like I was back to being someone I recognized. I was the traveler coming home from my travels to Abbeville with my family. Somehow, I would be going back to school as a missionary kid with no immediate plans to go into the missions. But I was hoping to find my way forward.
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