Introduction: Reframing the American Revolution Through Acadian Experience
The American Revolution is often narrated as a revolt of the Thirteen Colonies along the eastern seaboard. Yet recent scholarship insists that the Revolution was a hemispheric struggle, shaped by shifting alliances, imperial contests, global commerce, and the movements of peoples far beyond New England and Virginia. Among those peoples were the Acadians—descendants of seventeenth-century French settlers of maritime Canada—whose forced dispersal beginning in 1755 positioned them across North America and the Caribbean in ways that profoundly shaped the revolutionary era. Their experiences under British rule, their strategic resettlement in French and Spanish territories, their militia service, their cultural networks, and their role in trans-imperial diplomacy made Acadians vital—though often invisible—participants in the American quest for independence.
This essay argues that Acadians played a crucial role in shaping the American Revolution by weakening British imperial cohesion, strengthening Franco-Spanish military capacity, and enabling decisive campaigns in the Gulf South that directly facilitated American victory. Drawing upon the works of John Mack Faragher, Dudley LeBlanc, Michael Leech, Kathleen DuVal, John Garrigus, Warren Perrin, Carl Brasseaux, and the collective scholarship in Acadie Then and Now, this study situates Acadian contributions within a larger Atlantic framework and shows that the Revolution cannot be fully understood without accounting for their influence.
I. The Grand Dérangement as a Catalyst of Anti-British Consciousness
A. British Imperial Overreach and the Seeds of Revolutionary Rebellion
In A Great and Noble Scheme, Faragher offers the definitive scholarly account of the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians—known as Le Grand Dérangement. He reveals the deportation as an act of extreme imperial coercion, motivated by British desires to neutralize a francophone Catholic population considered politically unreliable. Faragher demonstrates that the Acadian expulsion was not merely a tragic episode of colonial history; it was a precursor to the very logic of imperial overreach that the American colonists would later resist. The forced removal of thousands of Acadians foreshadowed British heavy-handedness in the 1760s and 1770s and exposed the tensions inherent in managing diverse populations within a centralized empire.
This brutality cultivated among surviving Acadians a profound memory of injustice and a collective orientation against British authority—one that would shape their choices during the American Revolution. In this sense, the diaspora itself became a form of anti-imperial resistance.
B. The Formation of a Transnational Acadian Network
Carl Brasseaux’s Founding of New Acadia chronicles how many Acadians eventually resettled in Louisiana—then a sparsely populated outpost of the French and later the Spanish empire. This relocation was not random. Acadians possessed agricultural expertise, strong communal bonds, and a willingness to occupy frontier lands that imperial authorities considered valuable. By the early 1770s, Acadian villages were well established along the Mississippi River and the bayous of south Louisiana, forming a strategic demographic presence on the imperial borderlands.
Their new settlements placed Acadians at the very center of geopolitical tensions during the Revolution. Their population became a resource that could—and did—shift the balance of power in the Gulf South.
C. Identity, Memory, and the Will to Resist
Dudley LeBlanc’s two works, The True Story of the Acadians and The Acadian Miracle, although more hagiographic than analytical, illuminate the emotional and cultural dimension through which Acadians interpreted their history. LeBlanc depicts the Acadian experience as a saga of resilience, faith, and cultural fidelity in the face of overwhelming oppression. This sense of collective survival fostered an identity predisposed toward anti-British sentiment and sympathetic to other struggles against imperial domination—setting the stage for the significant Acadian role in the Revolution.
II. Pre-Revolutionary Louisiana: Conflict, Power, and Opportunity
A. The Louisiana Frontier and the Roots of Acadian Political Agency
Michael Leech’s Roots of Conflict explores the political and social complexity of pre-Revolutionary Louisiana, revealing a region in which multiple groups—French Creoles, Acadians, Native nations, free people of color, Spanish officials—negotiated power and identity. Acadians proved especially adept at navigating this environment. Their prior experience with displacement enabled them to cultivate autonomy, self-governance, and militia skills valued by both French and Spanish authorities.
These patterns of frontier adaptability helped shape a population ready to contribute meaningfully to wartime efforts.
B. Strategic Settlement Under Spanish Rule
When Spain acquired Louisiana in 1763, it inherited thousands of Acadians. Their presence strengthened Spanish claims in the Gulf South at a crucial time. Spanish governors recognized the Acadians’ military potential and integrated them into local militias, granting them land and permitting relative cultural independence. As Leech and Brasseaux note, Acadians became “middle peoples”—cultural brokers who connected French traditions, Spanish administrative power, and Indigenous presence.
This position made Acadians key to Spanish wartime strategy when conflict with Britain erupted during the American Revolution.
III. Acadians in the American Revolution: A Strategic Population
A. The Gulf Coast as a Decisive Theater of War
Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost reframes the Revolution as a multinational conflict that extended far beyond the Thirteen Colonies. She highlights the significance of the Gulf South, where Spain—an American ally—engaged Britain directly. Acadians, living under Spanish rule, became instrumental to Spain’s military success in the region.
B. Acadian Participation in Gálvez’s Campaigns
When Spanish Governor Bernardo de Gálvez launched a lightning campaign against British West Florida in 1779, Acadians formed a significant component of his forces. Their roles included:
Militia infantry in the battles of Manchac, Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola
Guides and scouts with unparalleled knowledge of marshlands and bayous
Boatmen and logistical operators essential to transporting supplies
Local intelligence gatherers among frontier communities
Gálvez’s victories—made possible in part by Acadian manpower and expertise—eliminated British control on the Gulf Coast. This deprived Britain of crucial access to the Mississippi River, prevented coordination with Southeastern Loyalists, and undermined the broader southern strategy.
Without these victories, DuVal argues, American independence would have been far more difficult. Spain’s triumphs in the Gulf forced Britain to divert resources and weakened British influence across the South.
C. Acadians as Political Actors in Wartime Louisiana
Acadian village leaders played decisive roles in ensuring continued cooperation with Spanish authorities. Their willingness to serve in campaigns—motivated by loyalty to France, gratitude to Spain, and hostility to Britain—helped maintain stability in Louisiana, allowing Gálvez to operate without fear of internal rebellion.
These actions were not passive; they were deliberate choices rooted in communal memory of British oppression and in hopes of securing their own future autonomy.
IV. Acadians in the Wider Atlantic Revolution
A. The Acadian Diaspora Beyond Louisiana
The collected scholarship in Acadie Then and Now reveals that the Acadian diaspora extended across the Americas, from Québec to France to the Caribbean. In each region, Acadians influenced the Revolutionary struggle indirectly:
In France, Acadian refugees contributed to naval and maritime operations that challenged British control of the Atlantic.
In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Acadian settlements complicated British efforts to maintain total regional control.
In the Caribbean, Acadian exiles sometimes aligned with French or Spanish forces in actions that hindered British logistics.
This global diaspora created pressure points across the empire—undermining Britain’s capacity to suppress the rebellion fully.
B. Acadians, Free People of Color, and the Francophone Atlantic
John Garrigus’s I Alone highlights the role of free people of color within the broader French Atlantic, particularly the complex social fabric of communities shaped by French colonialism. Acadians lived alongside such communities in Louisiana and elsewhere, forming a trans-racial Francophone sphere often aligned against British interests. These alliances broadened the anti-British coalition from Massachusetts to Martinique and from the Acadian parishes of Louisiana to the streets of New Orleans.
V. Legacy, Memory, and the Post-Revolutionary Influence of the Acadians
A. The Aftermath: Cultural and Political Contributions to the Early United States
Warren Perrin’s Acadian Redemption traces the long legal and cultural journey toward recognition of Acadian suffering and resilience. He argues that Acadian memory became part of the broader American narrative of liberty and resistance to tyranny. Their integration into the American South contributed to the region’s distinct cultural identity, shaping its legal traditions, its cultural tapestry, and its sense of historical purpose.
B. The Acadian Narrative as an American Narrative
Works by LeBlanc and the contributors to Acadie Then and Now show how Acadian culture—rooted in survival and communal identity—helped shape Louisiana’s distinct blend of American, French, and Spanish influences. By maintaining their heritage, Acadians provided a crucial foundation for the multicultural identity of early America, especially in the Gulf South.
C. The Long Memory of the Revolution
Acadian participation in the Revolution was remembered in community traditions, parish histories, and military rolls. This memory became part of the collective identity of the Cajuns in Louisiana, contributing to their pride in the region’s foundational role in the nation’s fight for independence.
Conclusion: Re-centering Acadians in Revolutionary History
The American Revolution was not solely the achievement of colonial patriots from Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. It was a hemispheric struggle whose outcome hinged upon the actions of peoples across North America and the Caribbean. Among these were the Acadians—deported, dispersed, and resettled, yet unbroken in their cultural identity.
Acadians shaped the Revolution by:
Weakening British imperial cohesion through their earlier resistance and forced removal.
Strengthening Spanish Louisiana’s military capacity at precisely the moment the American cause needed allies.
Serving as essential fighters, guides, and logistical supporters in Gálvez’s Gulf Coast campaigns.
Influencing French and Spanish decisions to challenge British supremacy, thereby aiding the nascent United States.
Preserving a cultural continuity that enriched the post-Revolutionary American Republic.
Their role was not marginal but pivotal. Without the defeat of Britain in West Florida—made possible in part by Acadian participation—Britain might have maintained strategic dominance in the South. The American Revolution might have unfolded differently or even faltered.
Life has brought me back to some places more than once and to others only once. It seems a better and more effective way to write a memoir to go evenly from ur time in Cuernavaca and IDeal and tell how we followed the trip medical progress of my uncle Jed as we connected with the Justicia and Alabanza community and Dad began working with Will Rodriguez an evangelist in the Mega-city that was Mexico City in 1978. But I think of a time a little later when we would come back for the visit for Pope John Paul’s visit in 1979 when millions came to see the Pope at several venues. By then we would have Susanna Maria SUmmers born in Colombia on September 20, 1978. Sarah still had some memories of Cuchilla del Tesoro and we had come down in a vehicle and parked in front of what had been our apartment building in 1978. It was a somewhat refurbished and livable vehicle. It was simply a stop on the way to our longer and more eventful mission in San Pedro Atzcapotzaltongo (or Villa Nicolas Romero) near Mexico City. We were drawn back there and had many reunions with friends and prayer groups near the busy airport. I remember tacking a man coming out of the shadow of our van in panic after returning after midnight from a prayer group.He seemed to be very much caught in the act of doing something he was afraid to be held accountable for but he would not really fight me or confess before he left the area and I did not see him again.
I had grown and filled out a bit compared to when we arrived only with Sarah the first time. During the Pope’s visit I also hung out with three siblings. It was another lesson in life’s road. I had feelings for one sister and she did not much care for me but her sister did have feelings for me. I remember her fondly but I was aware at the time that there was something about the cruelty of the situation that had nothing to do with the fact that we were all too young to have much of the relationships we were dreaming about and trying to discuss. It was all pretty innocent but also pretty genuinely sad. I came to visit Mexico City a number of times. Once or twice a group of people came up to give me booklets in Spanish on social and religious theories. One of them explained a history of what would be known as the Theology of Liberation. ANother was about how Jesus had a separate tradition from the Christian Churches that also came from him – a line of sacred prostitutes and knights. All of it was hard to process and it was coming at a time when I was learning about Alcoholics Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Guerreros Cristeros who had fought against repression of the Church in Mexico in the 20’s and also revolutionaries of the likes of Pancho VIlla. With all these things and others I will return to in a later chapter on San Pedro I went alone to Cuchilla on a visit and stayed with the Rodriguez family in their home.on March 14, 1979. I slept in their home full of troubled dreams. While I slept the rest of the family left the building and sirens filled the streets and the ceiling and roof cracked above me and my bed moved twenty feet from inside a bedroom looking out at the morning sky. There had been a large earthquake and I had never woken up. But in the night I slept to the shock of everyone and emerged unscathed. I had dreams which have stayed with me all my life and are more prominent than any of my waking experiences in that place. For me, the Cuchilla will always be a place where earth split and the sky was laid bare to my waking eyes. But that was long enough after we first arrived there for it to really be a different story.
I was working on this chapter as April wrapped up and May drew near in 2024 in Abbeville, Louisiana. Whatever it was that occupied me in this period that ran from my wife’s 60th birthday on Saturday the 20th of April. It was a special party and like almost everything in this memoir, I am holding back something about it because it seems to make life even more ridiculous to expose the hurt and pain of life for so little consequence. I am unpaid for this and have so very few readers. It is important to me to note that on the 27th of April I worked as an election commissioner for the Precinct that I live in for an election in which our precinct only had two local tax renewals on our ballots. I also voted there. Clara supported me wonderfully, bringing me a Sonic diet cherry limeade. There was a very low turnout and I made sarcastic remarks about it. I also got paid $200 for my 13 hours on the clock. I was plenty tired afterwards. But the system is built for the heavy turnout elections and from a system point of view these small elections are easier and function as a valid election but also a rehearsal to keep all the systems in good shape, including the performance of commissioners like myself. It is both sad that less than ten percent of the voters in my precinct showed up to vote for something that matters AND ALSO it was a proof of the great expense that is laid out for Americans to express themselves politically. Because I knew that I was going to be writing about this period in my life I could not help could but compare all of this to life in the forming Colonia (not yet fully a colonia) San Lazaro where my father and sometimes I ministered when we lived in Colonia Cuchilla del Tesoro in Mexico CIty in 1978. Unlike the people of my precinct in 2024 who were not willing to vote on the infrastructure issues on their ballot, the people of San Lazaro came to the prayer meetings that we had and besides the prayers, Bible study and shared snacks they had a very big infrastructure issue. Waste water and sewage pooled in their neighborhood and the synch was sickening. Germs and disease were prevalent and there was contamination of the water they had access to for drinking and washing. But the people had petitioned for the public plumbing, grading and paving at the heart of their community to be done. That public infrastructure was the focus of the prayers and my father was happy to report it as God’s blessing when the city came and started working on their problems. I was happy to praise God because it seemed I might go to most of those prayer meetings and not get sick. However, from a point of view of how exactly God may have heard the prayers of his people in San Lazaro, there are some facts. It is not hard to believe that there were in fact people in the city who investigated the situation and found that a foreigner whose father was on the highest court of the US State of Louisiana and who was a lawyer educated in law schools in New Orleans, New York and London was visiting these people. It was not a matter of hatred for the people of San Lazaro that would have kept them in the desperate situation. They responded to the potential risks of the village being healed or being neglected. WHile the village thanked God for the change they also thanked the government, they continued to work hard and with less sickness and misery they improved their houses and developed small businesses more quickly and people paid their taxes. It was a good outcome. This would be a pattern of the SUmmers family ministry in the days before Family Missions Company. A number of time we were able to direct and redirect new attention to a variety of needs, problems and resources and things changed for the better. Often the vehicle was a prayer meeting. I had little doubt then and still believe now that God heard the prayers of the people gathered to pray. It was a very powerful moment in our lives and there would be others.
This chapter has seen some time pass in getting it out to the miniscule readership and slightly larger potential readership that could be said to await this chapter, Like most of the chapters of this memoir, this one starts with a look at the recent days and then ties back to a time and place in the past. The time and place in the past was the time when we first lived in the Colonia Cuchilla del Tesoro near the large international airport in Mexico City . I will discuss it a bit more in my usual rambling way. But it was in those days the city was also the Distrito Federal, like our District of Columbia plays a unique role in the United States, this federal district played a special role in the constitution of the United Mexican States. The city had its roots in the Aztec capitol city of Tenochtitlan. It was a city of causeways, a few highlands and many man-made floating islands. There was even a system for causing the natural salts to be pooled separately from the freshwater used for drinking and agriculture. A center of governance, military administration, religion and human sacrifice that supported large scale cannibalism. Then there was SPanish conquest and Catholic evangelization. It was on these foundations that the modern megacity of Mexico City had risen.
It was the largest city in the world and from its streets, I often watched the jets come and go from the airport. In other places in the city I looked at the little bit of snow caps on the mountains. Snow was among the things that did not occur any closer to the equator than this. We knew that we were South of Louisiana and deeper into the more tropical latitudes. But you could drive or ride a car for a few minutes for a really good view of the snow in the winter. You could also expect plenty of relatively cold winter days in Mexico CIty itself. It was yet another part of my education in my overall immersive understanding of geography.
With jets, snow caps and the interest I had in the stars, I found Mexico CIty a place to look up. I still look up. In recent days (April 24, 2024) I received an email in response to the message I had sent to the White House about space. I have attached the test of the message in the body of this chapter. I am a part of the lunatic fringe of people who are really very serious about colonizing the Moon and Mars. We do not all agree and yet we all agree in the space colonizing community that the stakes of getting it right are pretty high.
The real story of that part of my life is for a much later chapter. But I do remember that there was a great deal of talk about space among a few of the people I knew and almost no talk of space among most people I knew. But there was another factor, it was a matter of language. In the English spoken around me in my childhood, Heaven was where God reigned over the angels and where the souls of the Blessed went when they died. Sky was where the clouds formed and the stars and sun shone down upon the Earth. But, in Spanish “CIelo” covered the meaning of SKy and Heaven in the English of my childhood.
There are many things from my life that are not easy to recount. Some things are hard to fit into the records I am able to find. I am pretty sure of a storm, earthquake or public event of some magnitude and it is still not easy to figure out which one it was some times. Writing down one’s own history is much more challenging than some people might think. I was in a significant earthquake in Cuchilla del Tesoro. I was sleeping at the home of WIll Rodriguez the evangelist and my friend Benito who was his brother- in- law. WIll was a Rodriguez who had married another Rodriguez. That must have been on a visit to the Colonia not during the period described in this chapter. I have not been back in many, many years but I did visit it on a number of occasions.
The White HouseDear Mr. Summers,Thank you for writing to me about the wonders of space. Our Nation’s space program has always blazed trails into the deep unknown—from landing the first humans on the Moon to launching the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs and developing the climate-monitoring Earth System Observatory. And we’re just getting started. Recently, NASA launched the world’s newest and most powerful deep-space telescope to peer back in time to the origin of the Universe. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, we can now see light from the oldest galaxies over 13 billion years ago, a testament to the power of American ingenuity and collaboration. We will continue to invest in science and technology in order to accomplish great things. Importantly, in collaboration with commercial and international partners, NASA will lead a triumphant return to the Moon with the Artemis program. This innovative and sustainable program will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, establish a long-term presence on the Moon, and learn about living and working farther away from Earth than ever before in preparation to send the first astronauts to Mars. Thank you again for sharing your enthusiasm for space and what lies beyond the cosmos. Together we will continue to show the world that our Nation can do big things, and that there is nothing beyond our capabilities. America is defined by possibilities, and the endless possibilities of space exploration are within our reach.Sincerely,Joe Biden
Each phase in my life and each place I have lived has left a mark upon me. My awareness of the way that Colonia la Cuchilla del Tesoro impacted me has developed over time. I was feeling aware of the world in different ways when we got to Mexico City. My friends and I used to watch the jets come and go and sometimes we talked about where they were coming from and where they were going. I don’t remember meeting anyone in the neighborhood besides myself and my parents who had ever flown on a jet. Furthermore, there were very few people who worked at any of the many jobs a large airport creates. I never saw mechanics, custodians, pilots or vendors from the airport in the neighborhood. It was like a huge portal to the wide world bursting with resources, noise and complexity that was divided from another huge world bursting with resources, noise and complexity. The two worlds were divided by a fence and in most places by a trench that ran at the end of our block. The biggest difference was that I knew the people in the airport and the jets could mostly ignore the colonia but in the colonia we were frequently interrupted by the almost deafening roar of the jets. I have flown out of a lot of airports including several in Mexico during the 59 years of my life – but even now I don’t recall even having a layover in the big airport in Mexico City. I suppose it is meaningful to me that a few things have not changed from when I first looked through the fence at the airport.
It was hard to accept all that was different about lives on each side of the fence. But I thought about it quite a bit. WHat were those differences and why did they matter.
Monday, April 22, 2024: I had a meeting with an experienced and successful insurance agent. I enjoyed what he had to say. However, I was aware of the general decline of the petty professionals like independent insurance agents based in small town America, freelance writers and untenured teachers. I do the best I can and I legitimately like the company that I am working for now. I feel like the work I do is pretty important and I am hoping that with some effort and a little of what we call luck I might be able to do it for a living while I donate plasma and work as an election commissioner. I am probably not busy enough to make a living and that gives me time to tend plants, cut grass, do some more cooking and laundry etc. I am pretty sure that the down time not spent on the clock is something that appeals to me. I am not a person who falls into the middle of a lot of averages and hangs out in the middle of a lot of bell curves. But of course there are some exceptions. I have tried to answer the test called the Political Compass Test honestly over the years and I have moved sound a bit. However, although the exact position has varied I have always been placed much closer to the center than either the authoritarian or libertarian extremes. I have also always gotten a result nearer to the center than to the right or left extremes of the test. That used to surprise me more than it does nowadays.
Clara and I attended the rite of Confirmation within the Mass for my niece and her first cousin who were confirmed at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Lafayette, Louisiana on Sunday, April 21, 2024. We then went to a reception at my sister Mary Hindelang’s in-laws home where there was cake, a soft drinks bar, a spread of snacks and appetizers and decorations for the occasion. Earlier that day Clara and I had picked up the shrimp dinners she had ordered from the Knights of Columbus and we had eaten those dinners at home. We then stopped at Costco where we did a small amount of shopping. Once that was done we headed home. Later in the evening we had leftovers fro supper that remained from the party the night before.
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On Saturday April 20, 2024 we celebrated Clara’s birthday in our home. We had a cake and buffet (to which some guests contributed potluck dishes) , an open soft drink bar and an open bar of the other kind. Decorations announced the occasion and in some decorations there were stacks of photographs taken throughout Clara’s life that people could look through. We also had a gift table and after the cake was served to everyone, Clara opened gifts. We had sent our two dogs Abby and Bella to the dogsitter. Besides Clara and I we had her sister G—- and nephew Z_____ but hubby D_____ could not come. Among the first to arrive were Freddy and Sandy Dubois, the couple that led our marriage preparation classes. Clara’s godfather R______ and his wife C______ came from New Iberia as did her cousins P— and D—– P. & D. are the couple from whom she adopted our two dogs over two separate litters. We had her brother Father Edward. We also had my sister Sarah, her husband Kevin and their children I—b–, J— and E—but I—-a- could not come because he had another party he had to attend that evening. My sister Mary was there with her husband C—- and two of their five children N— and J—-. Our good friends in whose presence we started our adult relationship J–c– M— and her brother J—d- M— were there as well as J—c–’s son S—- J—-. In addition two mre of Jackie’s dear friends M— L—- T— R— and A– M— E— were there, along with this J–c– M— and Clara herself these two other ladies were the four woman majority of a tight group of female friends called the YO YOs.
The party was not overly complex but it was very nice, I think. I cooked a large beef brisket, a homemade chicken rice-a-roni style dish, chicken soup dumplings, several kinds of rice and gravy as well as setting out a bowl of fruit. Guests who chose to bring something combined to provide: a guacamole dip, rice dressing, potato salad, spaghetti and cheese as well as an additional cookie cake to compliment the birthday cake. Nobody seemed to be doing without.
When we first moved to Mexico City I had memories of having lived in two modern megacities, New York and London. They had left their impact on my life, character and perspectives. Each of these two cities was very different. In Soho in London there was a mix of graduate students, artists, small businesses and sex workers among the flats, and walkup townhouses that dominated the area. New York CIty had a block association that ran a small park and we all knew about it . Our building had a buzz-in foyer and a set of elevators that almost always worked. There were professionals in the lawyer and doctor class but the general demographic was much the same. Cuchilla del Tesoro had lots of private homes with small gardens in their atria. They were two or three stories in many cases and in a culture with limited financing they were mostly being built or added on to by the people living in them. But there were businesses and shops of many kinds. There were a few apartment complexes and one of them was the one we rented. It had clotheslines built into a structure on the roof and a washtub, concrete washboard which had running water and a good set of drains under the stairs. Like most buildings in the area and much of Mexico the wall of the building was right flush with the sidewalk. In our case there were no windows on the lower level facing the street. A utility room and a gate for the whole complex made a solid wall. Our apartment had windows that looked out onto the atrium’ s lower level, across an empty but painted wall and a staircase. There were no apartments on the other side of the courtyard, so it was not a true atrium but meant to feel like one. My memory is growing dim on odd things, I am really not sure if there were two or four apartments in our complex but I believe we had four. Two rented to families that lived there and two to business people who were almost never there. There was one other tiny studio on the same floor and it was rented to some business person who was almost never there. The upper floor was occupied by two apartments. There were two little girls, Blanca and Adriana who became good friends of Sarah’s. There was another studio rented to a business person almost always out of town.The apartment was very near the airport. Our block bordered on the outer fence of the airport but the fence extended around a lot of open space between our block and the buildings and runways. Nonetheless there were many times during the day when the planes taking off and landing created noise that was truly deafening in our home.
We faced a class in becoming habituated to the interruptions until we did not notice them. We occasionally made simple tapes to send home in those days or even to a very few potential benefactors. We were operating in a position where I was not in school and my parents were doing a variety of things. But the central assignment we had as a missionary unit was to work with WIll Rodriguez. He lived in the same fairly large house with his wife and some of her family including her brother, his brother- in- law who was not more than 20 years old at the time. He and I would become friends. I valued his help in teaching me to improve my Spanish and we sometimes met to try and discuss the Bible. My father was invited to go with WIll and he assisted with music, learned the basic memorized prayers and some of the most used Bible verses – not very well at all. But he did learn and with some translations from leaders in the Justicia y Alabanza community, Dad and Will got to know each other, in the flow of things WIll began to tell the story of Dad’s spiritual journey with Christ. That is called a “testimony”.
. It was with Will that Dad had begun the ministry to San Lazaro that was discussed in the first paragraphs of this chapter. I wished to be clear that this was my father’s ministry although we all did our part to support it. I did take up a small job teaching a shopkeeper English. He was able to tutor me a little form a math book in Spanish and paid me a differential of a bag of groceries and a few pesos. However, he only found this arrangement worthwhile for about twelve lessons. We met three times each week. I also took advantage of study and an occasional hourly job from the social services ministry in the local church parish. But there was nothing like full-time school, full-time ministry or full time work. My life was a hodgepodge of activity
I wrote this seventeenth chapter of my online memoir during one of the weeks of the Easter Season with spring in force. Our fig tree, potatoes, onions, begonia, hibiscus, onions, green onion tops, ferns, swamp lilies and Kalanchoe are prospering and the weeds are also thriving that gained ground when our lawn was damaged by the drought that is well over now but lasted for months. I cut the grass and work on the lawn often, but with s motorless reel style mower and frequent rains it can be a challenge for me to keep it presentable. But the effort helps me to keep a number of things together – it provides me with exercise and helps me to stay aware of things that need to be tended to. I am very much aware of the Season in every sense. I am also aware that my wife is celebrating her 60th birthday on the 20th of April. In 1977 my mother turned 34 on a Sunday on November 13. I made her a card and bought her a simple gift. Dad did not do much it seemed tome but I may be forgetting something. We had a big Abbeville Thanksgiving with both sides of the family in 1976, but in 1977 I am pretty sure we were just arriving in Mexico from the United States and we were moving from a country that celebrated tis very AMerican holiday to one that did not… But again my records are very limited and my memory could be flawed. I do remember Christmas and New Year’s Eve in December of 1977. That was in Cuernavaca a city in a state not far from what was in those days the Distrito Federal in which Mexico CIty – the largest city in the world at that time – was located. I have a lot of memories to sort through. But they are never going to be fully resolved into any particular synthesis. But I do spend more than I can afford on seeing a therapist online to help me deal with feelings and memories among other things. On April 13, after going to anticipated Mass, Clara and I ate supper and watched the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on one of our streaming platforms. The biopic of Fred Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) is the story of the host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and a journalist who was impacted in his own family and life by his encounter with Rogers. Rogers was presbyterian minister and other things besides a television icon. The journalist whose story ended up being on the cover of Esquire Magazine was able to connect to the deeper, spiritual power of Fred Rogers in a very personal way. I admire the film and the story behind it, but Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were things I watched sometimes as a child, but his take on the world always seemed like it came from a different place than any I had ever lived in….
What we were living in 1977 with my baby sister, Sarah, was an adventure not in healing our feelings and learning to find a well adjusted life. It was wholly a life of insecurity. But it was also a life of beauty and new sights and learning. For me it was a time that I would go back to over and over again in memory and reference…
On April 10, 2024 Clara and I had supper at Jalisco’s in Abbeville. That is the same Mexican Restaurant where we reconnected 3 years ago on the same day of the same month after not seeing each other for about 45 years. I have an online therapy session every two weeks and that one ran from three to four that afternoon. That is not my usual day and time for this appointment but due to a technical glitch we had to reschedule the session. Thursday, I donated plasma and got paid, I got home and did some things along with picking up a takeout lunch and then had an insurance sales seminar online at 1:00. Afterwards Clara and I took a nap together and when I woke up I had received my paycheck for my work as a Commissioner in the last election, I drove to the bank to deposit the check because the money gets to my account quicker than if I deposit it digitally in my app. I woke Clara at the time we had agreed and then we went to the health club where we regularly engage in various forms of exercise. I paid our dues for the month. We changed there and went to the free concert series in our hometown’s main square that is called “Sounds on the Square”. The band playing this concert included three generations of the Leblanc family of musicians and others playing drums, several kinds of strings and brass instrumentalists as well as a number of vocalists of both sexes. The group was called the Bad Boys. Clara and I danced several times as well as listening to the music. My mother showed up and I danced with her as well and Clara captured our dance on video. Because I was working on this draft of this chapter, that dance reminded me of all that my mother and I have been through together. I thought of the dances we had shared over the years and the dances I had seen her do with my father. I also thought of how the dance I described at Mount Carmel in a recent chapter of this memoir came at a time when she and Dad rarely danced except on the rare occasions hen simple expressive dances were included in the worship gatherings of the Charismatic celebrations we attended. In some ways, our time in Cuernavaca was a low point in the romantic aspect of my parents’ lives. It was one of several low points – but their lives had a number of high points in their romance as well. So many things have happened since then but it is to those times that our story now turns.
On the next day, Friday the twelfth, my wife and I had coffee together, then I went to the post office to check my mail, then to the dump to bring our recycling. Because our city does not offer recycling pick up. I thought about the fact that although there were many beautiful and picturesque parts of Cuernavaca — which did impress me as well – I was deeply and unfavorably impressed by the midden beside a major street where people from our neighborhood came and dumped their garbage into a natural ravine. Once again waste management was very prominent in my view of society. I longed to see pollution diminished throughout the world, that feeling went through all my years of life as a recurring theme.
At the DIsciples of the Lord Jesus Christ community on the Damascus Ranch in Channing, Texas near Amarillo we had prayed the entire DIvine Office (or Liturgy of the Hours) except for the Office of Readings and almost all of it as a group. We worked hard and had some time to play as well but we had what in current English vernacular were called not Matin, Lauds and Vespers but rather Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer and Night Prayer. It was a life soaked in so much Scripture. The traditional Roman Catholic system of Liturgy when it includes the mass and the Liturgy of the hours is an enormous amount of scripture. Read, reflected upon, chanted, sung and prayed Scripture as well as some poems and prayers produced by recent editors living the faith at that time. I did love all of that. Any understanding of my life at that time is woefully inadequate if it does not take into account that I had what mystics call “Consolations”. I prayed and I felt that God was deeply present to me and my fellow believers. These feelings affected my imagination, body, intellect and will. There is no doubt that such a sense of the DIvine was the greatest payoff in my life.
When we were in El Paso I rejoiced in the prayers of the people there that fully expressed the Charismatic Gifts, expressions and traditions in connection with the liturgy. Sometimes I wondered if I shared a particular sense of how things should be prioritized and how they should be understood. I did not believe that I was necessarily in harmony with all aspects of each Christian community we fellowshipped with – nobody could have been in harmony with each. But I did believe that we were all involved in living Communion with God in Christ.
An image showing the basis of all this Christmas celebration.
But I had a sense that lf I had a destiny it was in the Presence of God that was going to take in larger parameters in the world. When I was in prayer one or two nights before we left El Paso, it was a prayer time before I fell asleep, I had a sense of Christ as though I were seeing him in an almost causal way as he had been in his earthly ministry before his crucifixion, death and resurrection. I felt his greatness as a great man, somehow different than any image or story I had heard before. I sensed that some of the men I saw were his apostles and they were all speaking in a language I did not speak or understand. I felt the holiness of the moment and then it passed and I fell asleep and in the days to come I pondered it but did not speak of it much if at all, I had no words to share how it differed from other experiences of visual and imaginative prayer. Life meanwhile was somewhat distracting from my mystical and inner life. Our family was invited to appear on a Christian television show and we were all to be interviewed together with a little interview for each of us, including little Sarah. The interview was set for the day before our train left Juarez for Mexico City. Sarah mysteriously hurt her hand and Mom stayed with her while Dad and I did the interview. After the interview the man in charge gave me a hand powered device that could play a recording of scripture on a sort of record.
In the next few days we were brought across the border and to the train station. We set off on our journey to Mexico CIty. On the way we listened to the Spanish spoken around us, detecting the few words and phrases we knew and trying to put them to use. When we were back in the sears, the four of us gathered after any foray to fins food or restrooms or views, we would try to use a few Spanish words in our family prayer and conversation. The net result of all this was really to make it clear that we spoke almost no Spanish and struggled even with the simplest signs and announcements on the train and in stations. It was a new world that was opening up as we looked forward to reading, speaking and interacting in a different monolingual society. There were bilingual French and English elements in the life and community we lived and experienced in Louisiana. Tonga had been bilingual as well. We had toured Europe as well in areas where we spoke nothing of the local tongue. But we felt the difference, a few people spoke to us in English but most people did not speak any English outside of their English classes in elementary school. We were not tourists or tied to a university with a large English speaking population. We were diving into a society right beside the United States in an effort to be part of the life there and to grow as the missionaries that perhaps God had called us to be. Yet, it was still very much a question what we were possibly called to do. I loved my parents but I deeply pondered and intently wondered if God had perhaps a connection with our moving into a world of new possibilities while we had still so little to define our path in a way that might lead to some kind of career security. But I did think that we were doing something very different and that we were living a life in which our whole family shared a life and a purpose which was admirable in itself. Yet there were a variety of themes and contours in the shape and fabric of our lives and our belief that a mission in Colombia was the direction we should be heading in once we learned some Spanish. .
Sister Antoinette who had been Mother John Marie’s main contact for us was the driving force and organizing power behind our first stays in Mexico CIty and whatever welcome was available But there was another figure who played a very large role in making our way in the city. That was Father Carlos Talavera RIvera. Among the contacts in the Archdiocese was Father Carlos Talavera Ramirez who was the head of the Comunidad Justicia y Alabanza, Justice and Praise Community. Father Talavera had been ordained in 1948 for the Archdiocese but his ministry now focused on the Charismatic Renewal in Mexico and the service of that popular Christian movement to the poor. In a few years in 1980 he would be ordained and consecrated as an auxiliary Bishop in the Federal District’s super diocese. My parents, with my younger siblings, would serve under Talavera many years later when he was bishop of Coatzacoalcos, but I was doing another thing at that time. We would stay with Father Talavera’s wealthy family members in relative comfort approaching luxury for a little while. In Mexico CIty, we somehow had the invitations to interact with many aspects of the Justicia y Alabanza Community gathering and ministries. We had a volunteer translator who was a very intelligent German engineer married to a Mexican woman who was very fluent in English, German and Spanish and possibly other languages as well.Capable and distinguished in so many ways, he was very possibly the least capable and most inadequate interpreter I ever encountered – and in my life I encountered many interpreters and translators.
Joseph was somehow not aware that instead of hearing Spanish and then saying the equivalent in English, he would hear the Spanish speaking people speak to us in Spanish and then tell us the same thing in Spanish. He would then hear what we said in English and repeat the English words to the audiences and people around us in English. It was staggeringly weird and funny. People would try to clue him in and he could not grasp what he was doing. People with much less command of the languages involved would repeatedly have to jump in and fulfill the duties of interpreter but he continued to attempt to do the thing he seemed incapable of doing..
His efforts only went on for a few days, but the memories of those days have remained among the most metaphorically charged after all my life. I remember working with Elsa, the very attractive girl I met with her family on an English assignment for her classes and learning a few more words in Spanish. The Climate in Mexico City was much cooler than in El Paso/Juarez because the elevation was 7, 349 feet. It was nice to be cooler as fall and winter seasons were approaching and there were many new foods to try. I was aware that we were also meeting not only the poor and middle class but some rich people as well. However, we never built on those relationships over the years. Although our family would work and fellowship with some very wealthy people in the course of our lives. I am pretty sure that none of those original contacts in Mexico City were part of that network.
. While we had begun to make inquiries about the Language school we now went there. Cuernavaca was at 4, 954 feet and the climate was warmer than Mexico CIty but still much more moderate and cool than that areas at that latitude at sea level. It was greener and more lush as we rode the bus toward Cuernavaca. At that time and for many years afterwards, Mexico had many classes of bus tickets for many routes – it may still, but I am out of touch. At the lowest levels there could be live chickens tied together in small bunches for transport, no cushions on the seats and small holes in the floor. . At the higher levels there could be immaculate conditions, on board restrooms, baggage handlers and an attendant or two serving drinks on board. There were probably five classes of bus from Mexico City to Cuernavaca in those days and this was probably the second from the top – why I am not sure. The ticket may have been a gift from someone in Mexico City. My mother was to stay home with Sarah while Dad and I were able to attend the courses at IDEAL. In addition to the classes we had lunches served to us which were typical of the region or some other region with the details of the pertinent region’s cuisine explained, I remember sopapillas, various tacos and churros.. Our instructors often met with Dad and I alone. Our homework was to read a conversation or two set in a particular environment written in English and Spanish. Then we would start with repeating those exact conversations without instructors. We would try to learn all we could about glottal stops, tongue placements, aspirations and the finer points of emphasis and pronunciation. After that, we would create ad lib permutations of the text. We also worked on pronunciation drills. Every two or three days there would be a lecture on history and culture and during a couple of breaks a day we socialized with some of the diverse students attending the school. It was in an elegant building with an enclosed garden. While I was attending the school someone there taught me to make pottery ( I had previously taken a class at Notre Dame de La Bayou Dominican Convent in Abbeville, that Dominican Convent building now belongs to Family Missions Company which is a non profit that my parent later founded). I formed, fired and glazed three Christmas presents for each of my family members which long ago disappeared like almost everything I have ever owned or made – but not everything.
My mother was with Sarah across the street in a very different environment. Our family rented a single room for my cot, my parents double bed and a tiny crib of sorts for Sarah. The woman who ran it was cantankerous and spoke no English. Her income came from occasional room rentals and from some tiny pension she got from either from her husband and father who had died a few years earlier or by being a survivor of someone or something else – but it was not a full pension. Her very attractive young daughter of between 19 and 22 years of age, as I recalled with her in their modest but not poor home. I had seen a good bit of prostitution and wondered when I saw her devotion and displays of affection to a married man in the home if she was perhaps such a woman as I had seen doing these things before. But the one man I saw with her was the only man who came to see her and although there was a professional tone to their connections it was different than what I had seen before. He however did bring food and money and wine into the house and Christmas decorations. They were very physical without being x rated in their affections. On weekends he went home to his family. I decided in my own mind without being able to talk to anyone about anything that she was his mistress. He slept in her room, not the other way around. In those days there was no phone of any kind in the house and so I never had to wonder what his communication with his wife and kids from there would be like if he was not with his mistress. When he went to work or business he may have called home from an office or a payphone. I barely got to know either of these people. But I could see they wer ein dealy earned about surviving and keeping their home. The mother seemed to be harassing my mother when she prayed or sang because she had given up all religious practice in the hard times since her husband’s death.
The family also had a young thirteen year-old daughter whom I occasionally helped with her English classes in return for her helping to show me what schools in Mexico were teaching. But the girl stayed busy at home helping her cantankerous mother to keep house and she seemed worried about her sister. Somehow my mother converted the mean and angry woman who ran the home to enough Christianity to take out her Christmas decorations and that included a large and very nice manger scene. The 13 year old, Anita I believe, got me to help decorate and it was a holy time. The illicit couple in the house were also moved in a number of ways too complicated for me to do justice to in this chapter. We shared a christmas feast with the mother and two daughters and we sang badly in Spanish hymns and carols of the season.Our family sang a few songs in English too.
The family had some kind of lapsed connection to the theater and in a kind of half basement below there was a large collection of props in various states of disrepair as well as a number of almost surrealist. Statues. There were times when I sat down there and worked on my school work for IDEAL just to get out of the strange house. My mother had a notepad and a pencil on her person all the time and was busy learning all she could each day from Lucha and her daughter. In addition, a few times she and I went over my lessons. In Abbeville, after leaving El Paso, we had all worked on a Berlitz course in Spanish and bought a simple Spanish- English dictionary. Mom found a little time each day to work with the materials in the dictionary and Berlitz course to systematize what she had written in her notes. Dad and I were both learning Spanish much more rapidly than ever before but I was learning a lot faster and eventually we ended up in different streams. One of my teachers was a very pretty young woman and there were never more than three students in a class. This seemed to upset my mother who was worried about the sexual aspects of everything in my life always and always according to her own particular point of view. Before I had the pretty girl Dad and I were in a class where one man told us every greeting used in Mexico in his experience. These varied from the formalities of the remaining traditional haciendados in the anterooms of their villas who when greeting a fellow aristocrat new to their home used words that might translate as “Welcome Your Grace, You are in your home and on the land my family holds from God.” But he also ran through the run of the mill greetings until he reached the ruffians of a particular neighborhood in a particular seaport town who, he assured us, greeted one another with the words translating as “Have a good day fucking your mother!” I made a comment about something my mother had said about sexual norms in the school, I parroted back words I really did not understand and another American woman, a student who was actually renting rooms from the school itself and had an apartment, a microbusiness and a somewhat difficult reputation in town did not react well. She walked over and remonstrated with my mother in front of the uncomprehending cantankerous landlady. But that was before Christmas. We went to some beautiful Catholic Churches and that was part of our weekend touring. We also went to Protestant church which was virulently anti-Catholic and very unpleasant in a number of ways because a friend invited us Slowly, the life in the house across from the school got better and I did not feel I had to hide in the basement to do my homework. After Christmas, I could speak some Spanish well enough to understand and they began to tell stories about the days before their husband and father died. They put out a few photos and knick-knacks from happier times. Anita walked with me to a little chapel she had wanted to visit, we did this just once but seemed near tears. We learned that the family had never had a celebration from the time their father died till the Christmas we shared. No saints Day feasts, no birthday parties, no secular national holidays and no Christmas nor Easter. Anita felt some hope that hey might have a life again.
Dad stayed on in school after me to catch up and I did some shopping for Mom and touring for myself. We also were invited to dine with the owners of the school and it was very nice, later we ate with a friend we met at their home. He was an older wealthy man but he took time to get to know me and talked told me in Spanish and English mix that I could follow. He claimed to be a nonbeliever but he had a sort of shrine in his house very much of his own design. It had a monument to Jesus Christ in the Place of honor. Then he had other great men, I remember Beethoven, Simon Bolivar, Napoleon, George Washington, Adam Smith, Benito Jaurez and Albert Einstein. I also remember him saying that the world I lived in was divided between three Jews: Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. “It is from the minds of one of these three Jews that most of the forces driving the world forward draw their power.” It was one of many rich cultural experiences in Cuernavaca where I felt somewhat privileged and fostered in my intellectual development. He gave me a copy of Hundred Years of Solitude in ENglish and another in Spanish/ He also gave me a book by Octavio Paz in Spanish with some handwritten and typed notes in English. I read them all pretty quickly.
The most memorable physical feature of life in Cuernavaca was going to church at Santa Catalina de Siena. It was indoor and outdoor, modern contemporary art and architecture and classic tradition. The church was very Mexican, yet generally Latin American and fully international.
When we finished our studies I was by far the best reader but Mom could speak Spanish best of all us, I was second and Dad was third. The opposite of the amount of time we had spent in the very good school to which we had come. In our last days we were corresponding with the ministries in Mexico and we found a place to be in ministry as a family in a poor neighborhood in Mexico city called Cuchilla Del Tesoro, “Wedge of Treasure” near the airport. We would be heading back to Mexico City as missionarieswho knew something about the language and culture of the place we lived.
Before we left I got sick and so did others but I was the sickest and it was hard to find my way to a restroom or lavatory, hard to get a bucket or medical care. I vomited on myself, my cot and the wall. In my fevered dreams I had visions of the mysterious orb of heaven and hell. I would never fully recover from whatever I had. My digestive health would suffer for the rest of my life in some new ways that I will not detail here. I felt somewhat weaker as we prepared to return to Mexico City. I also knew that I would not be enrolling in any school accessible from the poor neighborhood that we were moving into together. I also doubted that I could make much money for myself in a country where I spoke so little of the language still. But although I was worried, I was determined to make the best of things and still find the courage to hope for a good life for myself. In the meanwhile, I also believed that the power of Jesus was driving the world to better places. I believed the path of brining the Gospel was a valid call on my life.
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.
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.”
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.
When I think back on the brief time in New Mexico I think back on the relatively few days and hours I spent in Hogans and ruins and traditional compounds. I think of the native jewelry in silver and turquoise and the two items I managed to buy and keep for a number of years. I also think of weavings and the Ojo de Dios objects which combined weaving and a woodwork design in geometric shapes. Ojo de DIos was a Spanish phrase, not a Navajo word. I didn’t speak Spanish at that time. I also remember the variety of license plates I saw from various Native AMerican or Indian Nations and the ones that said New Mexico “Land of Enchantment.” I remember the skies in the dry clear mountain air far from city light pollution that could be so full of stars. I remember talking to my friends the Bordelons about the skies in Tonga that had different stars which included parts of what was the Southern sky including the Southern Cross of the flags New Zealand and Australia and parts of the sky that were part of the northern sky that were slightly visible in the North. I explained how it had been a non event when we crossed the equator in almost every way but still it was different. It was about half as far South of the equator as New Zealand, the last place I would live in the Southern Hemisphere. But it had great sky views in those days and I think it still does. So did New Mexico.
I cannot look back on the time in New Mexico after leaving American Samoa without thinking about all it has come to mean to me since then. That includes the time I spent in Las Cruces when we lived in El Paso Texas and it includes talking to a friend I made even later in life who was from Roswell and talked to me about the culture of UFOlogy there and the UFO tourism in the town.that was her home town. I was aware when I stayed among the NAvajo that I was there both to witness the Gospel and invite people into the Catholic Church on the one hand and also was very eager to understand what traditional Navajo religion was all about. When my family toured Europe we had lived on a farm in the Swiss Alps for a while. But really, this was one of my longest states in Mountains up to that point in my life.I was reading the Bible a lot and I was very aware of Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor and the unnamed mountains such as that of the Sermon on the Mount where God had drawn close to humanity. Mount Rainmaker in Samoa created its own clouds in the midst of the ocean, but the Mountains of New Mexico raised us up above much of the atmosphere to the star crowded skies.
We boarded that plane in American Samoa on December 22. So our arrival in the cold of Albuquerque was a Christmas thing. Like most snowy states, first snowfall means the first snow of a tenth of an inch or more that persists. Albuquerque has plenty of White Chritmasses even by that standard. However a lower standard than the records would allow bits of snow on the rocks in mountain passes – I am not sure what the records will show. but whenever legal snowfall documents may state – l I clearly remember our headlights picking up the glint and shine of bits of snow as we moved through the mountains towards Thoreau and Blue Lake New Mexico where the Bordelons lived. However, It was not a landscape wrapped in snow. Like almost everything in my life I have no confidence that the records will back up what I know to be the truth of the past. Of course any snow was a big deal compared to the South Pacific. The Bordelon’s home was decorated for Christmas and they had a fireplace and a wood burning stove as well as other heat. It seemed like a great place to land for Christmas.
The big news that we shared was not only the Good News of the Gospel reminding us that on Christmas we remembered the birth of Jesus Christ. In Bethlehem. The other good news for the prolific Bordelons was evident as Mom and Diane charred the joy of her expecting the baby that was going to be known and named as my oldest sister Sarah. Barry and Dad had some rejoicing about the fact that our families were becoming more alike. The Bordelon kids were interested in how I was transitioning from being an online child to expecting a sibling. Overall, I was pretty happy about it.
The reunion with the Bordelons, who were working for the Checkerboard Missions and serving in Saint Bonaventure Catholic Church Parish in Thoreau New Mexico brought together two families from Abbeville, Louisiana who had already been changed to some significant degree by their time in the missions. It was difficult to know exactly how to be with my friends and to chart the social and emotional distance between the way we had been together in a different time past in Abbeville, Forked Island and other parts of Louisiana. then and the way we were supposed to be now. We talked about home and who had kept in touch and who had not. We tried to sense the differences and similarities between the ways that each of us had bought into the religious vocation of our respected families and the degree to which we were resisting it in favor of more normalcy.
We talked about the Navajo. Went to Church and met the priest, the school that was not currently in much use for some reason. Before we left my parents and I would spend at least some nights in that school building, it was the first but not the last time we would live in an underutilized or abandoned church school building. While there we would tour the Navajo cultural and historical exhibits and museums in Crown Point, New Mexico. For was while it seemed that I would enroll in the school that the Bordelon children went to – I was scared that I was not going to be evaluated fairly or well in a way that would assess my placement and I was nervous about the new school in an environment that I did not know. But I am not sure that any of these were significant factors in me not going to school there. Some of my memories have become blurry and confused and the timeline of our lives in those days would be practically impossible to retrace in any effort short of a very well funded book with many months of research for some weeks of our lives. However, it is possible to tell true facts and avoid falsehoods. It is also possible to capture a specific general tone and set of qualities that connected that time to my larger subject – in this text that larger subject is my own life.
I had a very bad experience in my time there but I don’t remember where exactly it fit into the timeline of our stay there. It involved a rather clumsy effort to entrap, shame and humiliate me by the creation of an incident and the misreporting of it. That kind of thing had happened before and many far worse things that I have not reported in this text. The pain of such events and the damage done to me and my long-term mental health were real.Here the betrayal involved one of the Bordelon kids and their father. But the general pattern for me was that among other things as a child observant and aware of people and the misbehavior of adults I was particularly vulnerable to malice and retribution. If I was very decisively an influential lesson in my life. If I was much more powerful and respectable and immune from ordinary harms then I would probably write a very different memoir, I would name names and describe details in some numbers and have research done to corroborate such things. But as things stand in this version I am still telling less than many memoirs. This is very far from a tell-all. I don’t know what impact the secrets I carry from my life have had on the trajectory of my life. But there has never been a time when I did not have in my memory a good number of really bad incidents that I could attribute to other people.
Although I can emphatically state that I never engaged in anything that could be construed as sexual behavior when I was a kid there were incidents that involved seeing people naked or in various sec acts. Some of these incidents were accidental and innocent and really not situations in which anyone had done anything very malicious or evil. However, others were elaborate forms of harm – some directed at me and some directed at others but witnessed by me. I also had come to know that people used sex, the shame of sex and the criminal penalties related to sex to pressure and blackmail people into other bad or criminal behavior – or if they were very vulnerable to sexual shame they might even pressure them into suicide or at least poverty and bankruptcy.
I was alienated in some significant way by may parents choices, alienated as a kid not in school, alienated by the malice of so much of the human race, alienated by the fact of being a white guy in Navajoland and alienated because my friends among the Bordelon boys knew how to split firewood for the fireplaces and to cut logs into firewood size lengths and many other things related to living close to the land in New Mexico that I did not know. They were not big on teaching when it required a lot of speaking in the cold. So I did not make much progress in learning those skills.
Somewhere in those weeks, I found myself alone with the adults when the Bordelon kids went to school. I set up a sort of school schedule mostly on my own. I read an entire encyclopedia of wildlife and a number of books on Navajo culture and a book or two on the liturgical reforms in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Sunday Mass was better attended but daily Mass was bothe very poorly attended and beautiful and exciting to me, The priest led a mass that demonstrated a degree of the experimentation at the time and I was thrilled by both its freshness and the ancient and scriptural elements of the Eucharist and the study of the Sacred Scriptures. Once a week we had a prayer meeting with guest speakers and some were protestants from small churches not so far away who would normally have been pretty anti-Catholic – but these speakers were generally respectful of the place where they were speaking. The greatest oddity of the Church was that the altar, tabernacle, pulpits, baptismal font and other sacred spaces were placed close enough together so that they could be closed off from the rest of the space. The seating was removed from the rest of the church. The large part that might be called the nave was used as a skating rink for several evenings each week and the funds raised were used to help support the church and its ministries. In addition, Navajo teenagers who came to skate might not come tot the missions for any other reason and there was an effort to share the gospel and invite them to participate in the life of the church. I had long conversations with a few Navajo Christians about the connection between their Christian lives and traditional Navajo religious culture. I tried even then to figure out how this related to the struggle of Polynesian Christians to integrate their faith with Polynesian religious heritage. I also was aware that South Louisiana had religious traditions that either complemented and enhanced or else defiled the practice of Christianity in the region I would always call home.
A few days before typing the major draft of this chapter I was talking about how I had lived through some exotic encounters with North Koreans when I was in China. “I have lived a very unusual life. I am sure that it is hard to believe some of my stories. That is why I don’t tell some of them very often.”
“I like this kind of conversation.” My sister-in-law responded.
Overall the conversations of this past weekend of Saint Patrick’s Day 2024 were about the CHristian, Faith, Catholic Sacraments and family traditions. My wife has been doing volunteer work improving Church records at our home church. I find a lot of interest in all her research and when she sends me a picture of a record related to my family it gives me a thrill and almost as much when it is one of her ancestors. My same sister-in-law also has a strong interest in these records, genealogies and family histories.
I really enjoy a lot of what goes on in the ordinary and not so ordinary flow of life. I also find a lot of interest in and expend a lot of energy on understanding the things I don’t like in ordinary life. But I still do care about some things in the realm of the mystical, mysterious and unexplained. I will return to those areas again in this narrative but will not be able to fully do it justice in this book. My mother’s book, Go You are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith treats the whole period of this visit to New Mexico along with some other things in the chapter titled Navajos to La Cueva. She spends fewer words on this period than I do but she is more careful to confine herself to recounting those events. My tone here is to talk about my own life and formation as we go. Just since I began writing this online memoir, I have received word that I am probably eligible to at least be seriously considered for the Medicare portion of disability. I am fully vested in DIsability retirement since I earned the minimum of forty valid quarters years ago and I will get something if I live to retire. The minimum retirement age is 62. It won’t be a lot but if I take it then I will get a retirement income. I will get a bit more at 67 and the maximum at 70. For disability the general but not absolute rule is not the forty valid Social Security quarters but rather 20 valid Social Security quarters in the last 10 years and 20 valid Medicare quarters in the last ten years. I have the Medicare quarters and therefore qualify for early Medicare, if I am deemed disabled enough. But I don’t have the Social Security quarters, some of my paychecks paid into the Louisiana State Teachers Retirement Fund and some went into a special public service FICA replacement retirement fund. Someone from a Social Security office suggested that I apply to one of these funds for disability pay. I am still not sure how it will play out but I may not qualify to get the monetary benefit under Social Security and if that is the case I may be much nearer the end of my life’s journey than otherwise. It is with that sense of retrospection that I am accounting for this period. .
When I think of the time in New Mexico I think of having just left Polynesia and thinking how people were seeking to preserve family and tradition in the modern world and how Christianity fit into all of this. I still care about all of those things and they still all factor into the way that I actually spend my time. This past weekend illustrates that I am still preoccupied with many of the same concerns.
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On March 17, 2024 Clara and I celebrated the First Communion of her nephew and godson Zacharie in a small rural Catholic Church in Iberia Parish here in South Louisiana. Her brother Clenes and his wife Lori stayed with us for a Saturday and Sunday night as they came in from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to attend. .Zacharie is the child of her sister Gigi and her husband. Her youngest brother – who is the priest who presided over our Wedding – was there as well. It was a beautiful celebration. Clara got him a rosary with his name engraved on the sterling silver cross. This rosary was like the silver rosary with her name engraved on it that her godfather had given her from the same retailer and sometimes manufacturer of rosaries and other religious items when she was a little girl making her First Communion..
Today I tended to plants in our lawn and garden area and I cut the front lawn with a motorless push (reel style) lawnmower. I am a homebody when I can be, in a way that seems not so different from what I remember of both the Samoans and the Navajo at that time. But we did not stay in either place very long. However, our stay in New Mexico was much shorter than our stay in American Samoa. My mother writes of our time there in these words;
The ancient, noble way of life on the reservation inspired us. We were drawn deeply to the privilege that it would be to know them better. We knew that the more that they embraced Christ the keener would be their ability to preach his Word. How beautiful that word would be coming from such a rich heritage.
The Bordelons left New Mexico for a visit to Abbeville in late January and early February. We stayed behind on Mission with Father Doug. Living in the Mountains gave us a chance to be alone as a family. Barry had been right in his description of the mountains of New Mexico. They were beautiful in a spiritual way. God was near to us there.” (Summers, page 182)..
In those weeks that we were alone I used to ride the hard plastic toboggan like sleds and disks the Bordelons had for the snow. I often did this alone and sometimes even at night alone.Racing down the little slopes lit by star and moonlight was a great thrill. I loved physical activity and adventure and knew that I rarely made an impression on others that would make me feel better about myself or the activities that I was involved in every chance I got. So doing things alone was always an option that I was ready to consider, the pure love of solitary sports was already a theme in my life.
In the night sky I would watch the shooting stars and the glow of the Milky Way and I tried to find some of the many stars I saw on an old star map I had managed to acquire and hold on to for a while. In the sky I watched as often as I could, I saw some things I could not explain. That had not been the first time and would not be the last but I had enough things on this planet to occupy my interest until we left New Mexico to join up with Father Rick Thomas and his ministries centered around Our Lady’s Youth Center and The Lord’s Ranch near El Paso, Texas. When we did leave, I wondered if I would ever again return to Navajoland. So far I have not.
“My uncle William Charles Summers has died. Survived by his mother, 3 brothers, 2 sisters and my generation as well as by his wife Brenda his 2 stepdaughters and their husbands and children. Will was a musician, farmer, surfer, sailor, skipper, Bible reader, hunter, fisherman, horseman, outlaw and coach. His journey began and ended in the Catholic faith with deep spiritual searching elsewhere. May he rest in peace.” Such are the character limits on the status line in Facebook. However, shorter is possibly better here. I hope to do a longer post of both eulogy and complete obituary.
Will was the youngest of my father’s brothers. One of his sisters was also older and only one sister was younger. Will died the day they got the oil flow stopped in the gulf disaster for the first time since it started. I know that was something he cared about. Life was complicated for Will and Will could complicate it for others. He was a tall dark man with blue eyes and a whole lot of fight in him almost all his life. I will write some more about him later. I hope his passing is marked well in the meanwhile. I believe that Vincent’s Funeral Home in Abbeville, Louisiana will be handling the arrangements.
I am planning to buy a ticket to my alma mater’s homecoming football game more or less as soon as I get finished with my blog post. I will be buyuing it with my mother’s credit card. I sometimes do this and pay her back with cash but in this case she is giving it to me as a gift. I feel a sense of obligation to be there and I have often been to Homecoming games over the years. But I have not gotten an invitation to anything except those sent out to all University students and have not had the resources to initiate much organization although I did start a Facebook group for my classmates nobody joined it. Nonetheless, it discharged another sense of obligation. I do love my school and watching football. However, I certainly am not proud or happy to be going alone and in many other ways in the situation I am currently in at this time.
The bulk of this post is a Facebook note I wrote a while back. I had a really miserable time copying it in here (a process which is often very easy). That means I had more of a chance to correct spelling, mechanical and minor factual errors than usual because I spent longer reworking it. However, I know from experience that there may be a gross error of continuity from pasting parts together and have lots of irritating glitches. I hope not. If you read it and wish to comment I will try to address errors and questions.
Approaching 20 years since my Bachelor’s Degree
Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 10:58pm
I graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in May of 1989 with a degree in English and the honor of a latin phrase after the designation of a bachelors degree. There have been many days since mid May of 1989. Each of them was a bit different from the others. Suddenly I am coming up on 20 years. Sooner or later it had to happen. Actually it had to happen exactly 20 years after I graduated unless I died. It was always likely to make me feel that my life was not exactly where I had hoped it would be. Twenty years ago was a rather high mark in my life. But not a perfect time at all.
In the years since then there have been opportunities to do things that I had not done. Perhaps I resemble some huge portion of the human species in that I would define the last twenty years as having been much better and much worse than I would have predicted. However as a generalization I would describe my last twenty years as being profoundly different from any plan I could have made or discussed in those days. First of all the most important person in my life in those days was Michelle Denise Broussard Summers and I have not seen or spoken with her since about 1995. We had gotten married in December of 1987 while still in college. I graduated in May of 1989 and she graduated in December of 1989.
I think both that we always had our problems and that when I graduated our best years were still ahead of us. But the time of my graduation was a more difficult time than most of our time together up to that point. In those days I still had high hopes for many things that no longer draw forth that response from me. What Michelle’s hopes were becomes less clear to me with each passing day and month and year. I do know that we were very much together at that time. Her support meant a great deal to me. On the day of the Blue Key reception for the Outstanding Graduate award for their colleges and were nominated for the overall award only one person had no guests for company — I was that nominee. I did win the award however. That of course makes the approach of the 20th year anniversary even more ominous somehow. It is harder to measure up to expectations announced in those days. Of course, no matter what I had that happy summer when I had been so honored and before a life I would often categorize as horrible reverted more to the norm and became fairly horrible again. In the years since there have been lots of good and bad times. I have ended up with more self-respect than I would have ever imagined possible and very little else in many ways. Yet also blessed to have lots of people in my life and memory who have meant something to me. The journey has had its surprising joys. Instead of only following a chronology only I wanted to kind of set this up as journey story — because it is.
Mary graduates from UL L as I did. A young mom who does not make time for Facebook yet.
Watching one brother Joseph and one sister Mary graduate with higher Latin honors than I earned from my college alma mater has been a joy and a blessing. It has been a joy to see another sister Sarah graduate with a perfect GPA from Louisiana State University where I got my masters degree. It has been a joy to have my middle sister Susanna graduate with honors from the Franciscan University of Steubenville where I won one of two Sophomore Class Awards (one for men and one for women) in 1985. I look forward to having my youngest brother graduate from UL-L which is my renamed alma mater this May. My handicapped brother Simon received his certificate of Academic completion of merit from Abbeville High School when I was working for the school board in which they are located and which administers them. All of those were joyous milestones. But Michelle was not around for any of those events. After my Bachelor’s ceremonies, hers and my Master of Arts Degree graduation we were not to be together much longer.
Michelle and I lived in Abbeville, Lafayette, Kenner, New Orleans and Baton Rouge all in Louisiana when we were married. We traveled to Mexico but otherwise never left the country together. We did make trips to Arizona, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois. But all though we were not absolute cave-dwellers we traveled less together than has been typical of my life. In this post I have included pictures of places I have been since. I had many pictures of Michelle and I together and would put some up but they have been among the many casualties of my trips and dislocations. I do not have access to a single image of her and I together or of her as I type this.
The picture below is of the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology in Yantai. The SDIBT was the China Coal College a few years before I was there.Set on the Shandong Peninsula where Confucius and Mencius began Classical Chinese scholarship the Campus overlooked the glorious Yellow Sea.
These are some of my students and advisees graduating two years after I left.
Front page of an article I wrote about my journey to China and time there. The top photograph is of English Corner which was largely organized and facilitated by Lu Ting ting who is on my Friends List although her name appears in characters I cannot reproduce.
However, China is not the only place that I have been. There were journeys to Micronesia, Mexico (on numerous occasions) as well as to Nova Scotia/ Acadie. All these trips were since my divorce . Each of these journeys has added to the long route across and just above the surface of this planet which I have had other distinct good things and times. My trip to China ranks near the top of these life enhancing events one recalls at a time like this. I have posted the link to the university level institution where I taught.
The theme of of travel in my story is rather huge and important. It can be minimized and still seem drawn out in my life. Prior to graduation the Philippines, Europe, Colombia, Mexico, Tonga, Samoa and New Zealand were among the places that I had visited long enough to feel that I had lived there. It bears repeating yet again that extensivetravel has been a very large part of my education and personal development both before and after my undergraduate studies.
Soren, Alyse and Anika in Zacatecas, Mexico in the center of town.
Alyse in the mines which were the source of wealth for Zacatecas as a Spanish Colonial City and in the precolumbian days as well.
I have also been a bit below the surface of the planet a few times. Mammoth Caves is one of my favorite US National parks and I have enjoyed visiting mines like those in the beautiful Mexican city of Zacatecas. Michelle was not a great outdoors woman and now I seldom participate in the outdoors in Louisiana which were such a huge part of my life before because I have had a lot of bad experiences and am not very happy here in any way but Michelle and I once camped at Mammoth Caves in a very happy exception to the rule of our time together.
What I know is that my life has been a journey in a very literal sense. When I graduated from UL I went to work that summer for the law Firm of Mangham, Hardy, Rolfs and Abadie in the offices near the top of the First National Bank Tower in downtown Lafayette. It was as close as I have ever come to feeling like my life was on a smooth and established track and not a trek through dangerous places. I was headed off to Tulane Law School in the fall. A lot of people in my life who have always behaved badly toward me when they were around chose not to that summer. I had been on television and in the newspapers a great deal when I won the Outstanding Graduate award and it seemed like I would be given some space to do things one step at a time in a way that I have never really known at any other time.
My time at Tulane Law School that first run was one of the worst times of my life. That is from my point of view saying a great deal. We lived next to a family who were in charge of our floor in student housing and screamed and roared many hours every day. Michelle never found any job of significance which wrecked our financial plan, I got hit in a horrible traffic situation and got the ticket, I was chronically sick, we had several family crises. Someone who owed me a substantial amount of money skipped out on payment and it was an informal exchange without legal recourse. Those patterns were established early on and then there were a lot of other bad things. Michelle told me she was pregnant fifteen minutes before my first moot court competition and that she was not (either never was or had lost the pregnancy) just in the middle of my real examination preparation. Then my relationships already included a lot of people who were the opposite of supportive. Despite being a harsh, grim and critical man my grandfather Frank W. Summers I came across as a major source of counsel, social and financial support. He and I had been close of years and this put a strain on our rebuilding relationship but it was a time when he really shone in several ways. When Michelle and I left Tulane after a semester and a bit then in almost every way the life I had sought to graduate into was dead. The journey since then has been an entirely different journey.
When I left Tulane we engaged in that activity my associates in life often refer to as “licking one’s wounds”. That took a few weeks. Then I was working in seafood sales and brokering as I had done many times before including even during my time at Tulane Law. I went down with the owner and chief sales manager of the privately held company that was my employer on a buying trip to Merida. This was typical of a lot of things about my seafood crowd. The owner paid for four tickets, four registration packages, four hotel and food packages and in me provided one of the two or three best interpreters on the trip. However, the trip was supposed to be a sales trip sponsored by the US Department of Commerce and we were there buying. While that exact event was unique it somehow encapsulates all of my considerable experiences in the fishmongering world. While there Lieutenant Governor Paul Hardy presented me with the honor of Honorary Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. He gave me a very large and beautiful certificate that I was proud to display as I was to mention the honor on my resume.
When I got back I set up those purchases and set up a series of chain and institutional sales for catfish and catfish products of sizes which were not in the main stream of demand and commerce. That was about all I did before quitting my job and going to work for St. Thomas More High School. I knew it would annoy him but I left my employer with a proposal for changes needed in the company. From a distance over the years I watched many of them take place. (Since I wrote this note however the company has closed because it imported much Mexican labor after the ties established on this trip and has had trouble gettibg the paperwork in order in recent years according to one of the former owners).
My story must return to the subject of St. Thomas More High School. My Mom had helped me hear about and get an interview for the job at STM and I took Sarah to school there as I commuted to work. Michelle soon found a job in Lafayette in a career field she would follow in for a good while. I added a part-time job as youth minister at St. Mary’s Parish and then we moved from Mom and Dad’s neighborhood in a rental house to an apartment in Lafayette. Mom and Dad soon moved to house only a few miles away. My sister Susanna was registered to go with Sarah to STM the next year. However, by that time I would be a Board of Regents Fellow at Louisiana State University. Michelle had a good job in Baton Rouge with the same company she had worked for in Lafayette and I had the fellowship money and some other sporadic income. We were pretty happy and pretty successful as far as living in a rental townhouse can be considered successful in America. We had two new vehicles we had bought new and although I was getting really fat for the first time since early adolescence we were more in love and happy than at any time since just after our wedding. So if Law school was really brutally bad then graduate school was pretty good. I was tired and stressed but not as alienated as I have often been. It was a time for maintenance and restorations. Then two things did happen when I was in Grad school at LSU that had a big impact on my life between the two of them. One was that my half-brother Paul Nicolas Jordan came into my life. The other was that my grandfather Frank W. Summers I died. These things and earning my Masters really defined those years.
Paul came into my life as a huge surprise since I had been assured of his impossibility. I had devoted a huge portion of whatever positive focus of energy there had been in my life to being the oldest sibling of seven and an older brother. I had become involved in a whole web of transgenerational things on all sides of the family to pass them on to another generation. When Paul came many of relatives who have always perhaps been happy to make me uncomfortable liked to point out that he was both older and my sibling. All the ways this was done I will not get into here. It so happened that my grandfather Summers was not related to Paul by blood, marriage or memory and was busy dying. I had worked for him, lived with him when in from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, bore his name, had discussed genealogies, family traditions and acts and orders of chivalry. He had brought me into some secret and other semi-secret groups and other groups with tasks that were not entirely clear to me and I had tried to humor him even when it was tough. So at this time we drew closer together. His mind, body and poise were all failing but they all were a noble ruin. Old men I had never met came and began to ask me questions about him and some of our activities and talks together. Many of those men I never saw again.
I undertook a research task or two in Acadiana at the time to deal with these odd meetings and with my dying grandfather. I had often been angry with and resentful of “PauPau” as I called him.When he did die I had seen him dying only a day before and the pain was raw and shocked me in its intensity. There were reasons for that which I will not go into here but the biggest reason was personal loss. I was the only primary pall-bearer with streaming tears and shaking sobs as we gave that last shove of his coffin into the elevated stone mini mausoleum where his remains rest. Typical of he and my grandmother there was a space beside him with her name on it and four other spaces for some (but not any dead) who might need a resting place in our extended family. My grandmother was there and many others and my wife. But I felt a loneliness I had not known before, it may not have been my loneliest moment but it was a very lonely one. I pulled through that semester, took my general examinations and went through commencement. I thought I might go to LSU Law school but I would work in large scale food sales again before returning to Tulane Law School. My marriage was almost suddenly falling apart in real earnest.
During the year I worked we still had some good times but by the summer before Law school we were seldom together as I worked in a law office in Lafayette and she lived in Baton Rouge. Then we moved into a town house in Kenner where we last lived together. This time at Tulane things were smoother in some ways but smoothly bad. My first time at Tulane I had organized a petition and a protest along with other woes and distractions and I am quite certain some faculty there still had it in for me. My relationship with my nuclear family was strained, I missed my grandfather, he had promised me several keepsakes when he died all unsolicited by me and I got none of them just as had happened before when his mother died. My marriage was for the first time cold. It is unacceptable to talk about sex between married couples but our sex life had always been very good by all standards that can be quantified or verified. Now it was not. We were sentimental about splitting. We seldom discussed it and when we did it was usually over a nice dinner calmly. We knew it was coming and I began to seek treatment for depression. We both sort of moved from not quite newlyweds to forty years of marriage in our frank awareness of the opposite sex. It was clear that we would not be happy together and we had tried Marriage Encounter, made Engaged Encounter before exchanging vows and read books as well as making a couples retreat. We had no kids or prospects of having kids soon. I had some concerns my grandfather had entrusted me with that we could never really discuss. My relationship with her parents got pretty bad and hers with mine was not good. None of this was all that obvious or even serious in a certain sense.
I am adding this paragraph for no particular reason to the original note in my Facebook page. I was never sexually involved with anyone while married to Michelle. That is an absolute fact and in addition I did not pursue things that came up as that marriage ended. However, it is dishonest ( by my high standards of candor) to leave out the fact that I did meet a woman at Tulane the second time who made a big impression on me and she seemed to feel something too. We have never seen eachother since then and I really did stay with a miserable and hopeless marriage instead of a new and compelling relationship. I am not even the tiniest bit ashamed of her, my behavior, or of Michelle and I being old fuddy-duddies who tried to play things by the book.
Suddenly I was out of law school, legally separated and living with my parents in a two storey thatched building overlooking Micronesia’s Truk Lagoon as the GIs knew it on the Island of Weno in the country of Chuuk. Another point of no return had been crossed. Another re-invention of a life and a future. Among the markers of that transition I had a truly horrific sunburn that almost defied description. I have been hospitalized twice for sunburn and none of those burns were in the same category as this. I think I could easily have died except that a clinic there sold my mother a few hundred dollars of Silvadene cream for a few dollars. The agonizing physical pain and baseball size blisters were oddly soothing to my shredded soul. I healed and snorkeled again as I had that first burning day. I ate Eggs Benedict overlooking the gorgeous lagoon, spent time with my brothers and sisters and found a job teaching at the local community college which I never undertook because I left before school started. I heard rumours that made me think a reconciliation might be possible and decided to come home and try. However, I have never seen Michelle since the day we were separated. I have never spoken to her on the phone or seen a convincing video of her. Except for third person testimony I have no reason to believe that she is not dead. I now reached a place in life where I was not to cut my hair or shave for about three and a half years.
When I was in graduate school at LSU I published one book review in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television as well as two note length letters to the editor — on in Time and one in Newsweek. I did a lot of writing during my marriage but what was most notable was how little publishing I did. I wrote novels, plays, short stories, book length rough drafts on international law, rocketry, ethnicity and theology. This was in addition to countless papers, exam essays, lesson plans at Saint Thomas More, tutoring materials and half of the catechetical materials Michelle and I used together to teach our faith in two dioceses and sales materials as well. But now, in the wandering in the desert phase of my life (involving very few deserts) I began to fill composition books titled as journals. With hair down to my waist almost and long journals to write Mom got me a chance to work out every day almost at Olympus health club in Nunez which is a small community with a gymnasium (in the old sense), a steak house, a gas station and a lot of houses and fields. I got into pretty good shape while not losing weight. In my journals I was able to deal with the absolute and enormous wrongness of nearly everything in the world of humanity from my point of view. It was amazingly soothing to say what was wrong and what might be done about it even though it would not change anything. In many ways life was more hellish than it had been in my worst nightmares but I could at least express that thought in an environment not entirely toxic. I might fell that I was living a nightmare but at least I could say so in peace. I do find the world to be a kind of nightmare made real as much as I find it to be anything else.
I acquired some land from my father after a few years and began a very small business. I did a wide variety of odd jobs and my parents donated mortgage payments on the land to me this was our symbiosis. When they were paid off it was about the year 2000. I also had started a small business subsidized by payment made for driving a few people back and forth from jails and hospitals and other government agencies. My little business was distributing books, cards, prints, jewelry and prints produced in Acadiana or by artists connected with Acadian in a surprisingly large number of the United States, countries and cities. But my income was not nearly (not even approaching nearly) enough to live on.In the year 2000 I returned to the Catholic sacraments after having been a regular mass goer who never received communion, I cut my hair and shaved my beard, I took out a $10,000 signature loan on the land and I applied for and got a substitute teaching job starting in the fall in the Vermilion Parish School board system. Most of this happened in May of 2000. Then I went up to New Haven Connecticut for my sister’s birthday and my brother in laws graduation from Yale Divinity School. I had a wonderful visit with Sarah, Jason, Alyse and Anika as well as others gathering there. However, I did sense before I left that there were serious problems still in their marriage which had been evident last time I had seen them. Some of these and other tensions spilled over into the latter part of a great visit. However, for me this would be a blessed renewal of a closeness with Sarah and her children which would be a large comfort of the following years and had always been there largely. I stopped in at EWTN headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama and at the home of the relative who owned the adjoining piece of land and lived in Virginia. Both these stops and a stop in New Orleans were on the route of my round trip Amtrak ticket and were a mix of business and pleasure.
For three following years I devoted myself to family affairs, kept my little intellectual properties distribution business going, built fences and acquired tenants for all the land while maintaining the mortgage. I also did a great deal of substitute teaching sometimes a week and a half for each week or even more after storms like Hurricane Lilli closed down facilities and caused schedules to be consolidated.
I also began to write again publishing sports pieces at the Daily Advertiser, sports and feature stories in the Abbeville Meridional and features and a column in the Bonnes Nouvelles (Vermilion). Meanwhile, I continued researching, filling composition books and writing a great deal on topics related to my first big efforts in doing my own thing when I left Tulane. About the end of that time a lady I liked ( and might still like) a whole lot and I really pronounced the death of a long term on again and off again relationship.
Towards the end of that period I considered and sort of attempted to return to graduate school in a different discipline. Then I traveled around to see my sister now living in Mexico and to look for a job. I also had applied for a teaching job in China. As it turned out I did teach there in 2004 and into 2005. It was a very powerful experience that deserves more space than I have here so I will skim over it. Having graded dozens of term papers, directed numerous student workshop dramas and advised hundreds of students I returned here because of paperwork problems. I saw many terrible problems in China and faced many but they did not oppress my spirit in the way that the woes of my homeland and of my life in this land have oppressed it.
I got back in time to settle in and then took a job caring for my brother Simon Peter in a home health agency. This went on as I also volunteered during hurricane Katrina but ended with hurricane Rita. I left badly injured to in California and to look for a job. When that failed I spent a very nice few months with Sarah, her children and the missionary team in Mexico. It was on that trip that we took the pictures in Zacatecas which I have included here. My last paycheck, an anonymous gift and some FEMA money went far in Mexico. They would have gone farther if I had not spent so much in California.
I got back healthy for Christmas and have not really been gainfully employed since then but have lived here at Big Woods. Nor is that the extreme underemployment the only lack in my life. But I have gone on with my life each day doing a variety of things. When I think back on the last twenty years since my graduation there are many events not mentioned in this note. Many blessings and joys as well as many horrors and woes. While I have used the skills and knowledge I gained in the university studies I completed twenty years ago many times this is not a career that sounds like a career.
Now I am coming up on twenty years since graduation. I feel very much the absence of many things. I have no legal marriage certainly, no net worth, no significant US credit or income profile or ownership of a car. My views of many institutions is very dark and my interpersonal relationships are perhaps possessed of some of the worst qualities of the modern and some of the worst qualities of the ancient. Yet there is some good in them as well. I have been to pretty many of my alma mater’s homecoming games but not to any organized class reunions. Despite advanced credits and generally good grades I had distractions and preoccupations which prevented me from graduating in four year and that lessened my ties to the people I actually graduated with although not my ties to the school. Now I wonder what the twenty year mark will bring.I doubt I could some these years up to my satisfaction in a single line or a one paragraph program entry. Yet I do note the occasion and find that it commands my attention. I am aware that twenty years as an alumnus only comes once and there is no guarantee that the multiples will come at all. So I look towards May’s anniversary and October’s homecoming week with a varied mix of emotions. Life does not delay so we can explain it well.
END OF FACEBOOK POST
Now, those who really know this blog will know that I correspond with some influential and privileged people and believe in leadership. However, there is a tone of resentment and profound unhappiness with the status quo that is hard to miss in much of what I write and say. First, I would remind people that although the Baron of Louth and I (for example) may correspond it does not mean we are really living in the same circle. Second, this tension (which some see as a contradiction) has been a part of me almost all my life. In an age where people who are unhappy with Bishops join a church with no bishops I choose to complain (when I have reason to) about the episcopacy. While I could have found a way to leave many ties of my youth behind I tend to stay and raise a little hell about the things I dislike. Those who know me best no that my self-concept is very distinct. I am far from perfect but not at all inclined to give up all that I am for some lie about equality and sameness which is not even understood by its advocates. So this is my thinking about this twenty year milestone.
This blog has over ninety pages of content at the time I registered the domain myself in 2014 after posting and working here for years, many of these pages are equivalent to many printed pages. I since then have been confronted with a higher level of premium that I have not accepted.
One of my concerns in this blog has been the overall set of issues related to intellectual honesty, transparency and also the need to provide access to sources. I will return to the issue of textual sources below but here I have another set of issues that relate to images to discuss first. The blog also has well over 650 posts, some are many pages long and some are brief. In this blog I reveal myself and my background and ideas and also deal with a variety of topical and current events. Many of the posts have images. Most of those are photographs I took or directed others to take. Some are from defunct source contracts and contacts I acquired. Some are from sources made into new art pieces by me. Starting on November 10, 2014 I have used Microsoft Office as a source of Royalty free clip art as well.
There are various features and functions by WordPress or others to help you figure out what is available here and to find what you would like to read or view. One part of the blog which you may find useful is the "Glossary of Terms Casually Defined" which can be found in the list of pages in the side column or by hovering your cursor over the "Acadian Forum Archive" in the list of words around and in the Header. Once the first glossary page drops down then hover over earlier glossary pages to unlock later ones. along with my blogroll there are many other embedded links in my post and these provide some insight into secondary sources that I have been reading, in addition any picture of me with someone or record of a formal meeting with a person will allow the reader to conjecture some sort of communication. But this is only a small approximation of scholarly notation. Assume that I pay dues when I can to the Catholic Church, every University I have attended and the Wikipedia and consult their online resources. Also assume that I consult the CIA World Factbook. Beyond that hope for the best. This is a publication on the edge by a person on the edge in many ways and does not reflect the careful annotation of a different medium.
There is an activist element in this blog which is extension of activity, prayer, evolution and planning in the rest of my own life and thought. You will find ideas such as Physical Geometry, my model constitutions and some other ideas and words I care about in the "Major Themes of this Blog" section of pages in the Header. So far some things like early chapters of my online novel are only available in posts and you can find these in the search function or the category cloud.
I am Frank Wynerth Summers III, There have been many other outlets for me to communicate with the world in the past but not so much lately. There is a cluster of links in the blogroll which you may find helpful in reaching the connections in which I live and I have a couple of pages of links and links in posts you may find over time. You can find out more about me in pages revealed when you over over my name in the header section or in those same pages as listed in the side column. Feel free to comment, only a very small percentage of people commented in the first four and a half years so I am usually able to respond to those who do in relatively timely fashion. This blog began on August 18, 2009.
Franksummers3ba's Blog 