Today I learned from my sister that the home of one Francois Cousin in Bayou Lacomb, Louisiana, is being rescued.  The original part of the house was probably built between 1787 and 1789, but it has been added on to many times since then.  The house is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it was in the news recently because the Parish historical society is trying to raise it above flood levels in order to save it from future floods.  It’s on the bank of Bayou Liberty.  Evidently my brother (in-law) saw a story about it on TV, and that’s how I found out about it.

Francois Cousin is my grandfather, upteen generations removed, and he had a brick factory that made many of the bricks that rebuilt New Orleans after two devastating fires in the eighteenth century.  When Katrina hit that place in 2005, she washed away a lot of topsoil and uncovered a bunch of material related to the brick factory.  At one time, Francois Cousin had six schooners that took his bricks to New Orleans.  He was the guardian of one Adrian Rouquette, his nephew, and Rouquette was a poet, novelist, and the first native Louisiannian ordained to the Catholic priesthood.  Appropriately, the library at St. Joseph College Seminary of the Archdioceses of New Orleans (which is near Bayou Lacomb) is called the “Adrian Rouquette Library.”  Rouquette was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who actually visited him.

Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article about the Francois Cousin House, and it has some nice pictures: click here.  Here’s a link to another article about the house: click here.

This Francois Cousin was many generations ago, and we don’t have anything to do with that property today.  But it’s still kind of neat to know that stuff about your (long ago) family.

ED

You hear from time to time about people giving large gifts of money to colleges, but today I read in my quarterly high school alumni magazine that some alumnus gave $2.8 million dollars to my (and his) high school.  The donor was Mr. Thomas Bellinger, a 1939 graduate of the school.  The gift is supposed to be used as an endowment for instructional enhancements, including technology, audio visual materials, textbooks, faculty, and staff.  This is the largest gift this school has received in its 140 year history.

This is a big (about 1,500 students) private Catholic high school for boys, and it’s been around for, well, 140 years.  It has many prominent (and rich) alumni, and it just absolutely amazes me that alumni would donate the kind of money they do to that school.  It’s been 44 years since I graduated, and they still include me in that school family with almost daily e-mails, alumni news magazines, opportunities for retreats, opportunities to participate in golf tournaments, fishing tournaments, running events, opportunities to include the names of my faithth departed relatives and friends in their Masses in November, and a host of other things.  If I still lived in New Orleans, I might actually do some of that. 

The irony?  All of my teachers at that school were men, and all but two were Brothers of the Sacred Heart.  There was none of that famous Catholic guilt taught in that school, and those guys taught us what it meant to be Catholic MEN in service to others.  Salty language slipped from their mouths occasionally, as it does occasionally from mine today (and as it certainly did from the boys in that school when I was there).  But that kind of made them more human, and there were never any inappropriate sexual advances on kids.

There are only a handful of Brothers at that school today, and the Catholic boys there now are missing out on a deep, rich experience of real men in selfless service to their students and to the Church.  I’m sure this school will continue on for another 140 years, but I suspect it will have to continue without the presence of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart.  And that will surely be a shame.

ED

We had a wonderful time for thanksgiving, and the food was unbelievably good.  We had four generations of women in Beth’s family–Grandma Jane, Beth, Catherine, and Liza–and that has to be pretty remarkable in itself. 

Liza was very well behaved, and she sat at her place at the dinner table for all but the last few minutes of the meal, when she had to get up and go play.  There were five pieces of silverware (dinner fork and salad fork to the left; knife, soup spoon, and coctail fork to the right), and we briefed Liza on what to do with all of those before we sat down to eat.  She handled all of those implements very well.  That’s how kids learn how to eat at a formal dinner like that.  We set her place with a liquer glass of our crystal, and she drank Sprite instead of wine.  She loved that little glass, but somebody had to keep filling it for her.

The ten people who shared Thanksgiving dinner with us enjoyed themselves.  We’ll have a somewhat larger gathering on Christmas night, and I’m already looking forward to that.

ED

I make oyster dressing by my mother’s recipe every year for Thanksgiving, and today was my day to cook.  I stopped at a local oyster bar on Monday to order for Wednesday my raw oysters for the dressing, and they told me to call Wednesday morning to place my order. This morning I thought a girl had answered, and I thought she was rather obtuse.

I told the answerer that I wanted three pints of raw oysters with the oyster water intact, and I asked if they wanted my name and a credit card number.  They said no, and we hung up.  I thought that was strange, and I didn’t really expect my order to be ready when I got there.

When I got to Gandy’s Oyster Bar at 11:30, there were two little boys sitting at the bar rolling silverware.  The younger one kept holding up what he called “butter knives,” (which were actually dinner knives) for his brother to pass judgement on.  “Is this for a grownup or a baby?” the younger one kept asking.  The older one kept trying to explain to his little brother that they were all the same, even though some were smaller than others.  Both of those boys were incredibly cute. 

I told the counterman what I wanted, and the older boy heard me.  “Yeah, I took that call.  You want three pints of raw oysters, and you don’t want us to drain off the oyster water,” he said.

“That’s right.  How old are you?” I asked. 

“I’m eight years old, and I took seven or eight orders before we opened today,” he said.

“You’re only eight years old, and you’re already a businessman?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said.

Whoa!  Liza immediately flashed before my eyes.  She’s only four, but in four years I’ll just bet she’ll insist on helping her parents in their restaurant.  Those two boys were out of school all this week, so their parents had them at the restaurant instead of hiring a babysitter.  Liza will always be able to spend school holidays with us, if that’s what her parents want, but I pretty much know that Liza will want to work in the restaurant, even if it’s only to roll silverware.

ED

Catherine called early this morning somewhat distraught.  They had an ox in the ditch, and she wondered if there was anyway possible for Liza to spend the night at our house tonight.  I told Catherine that I was 99.9% sure Liza could spend the night with us, but I got Beth on the phone to make sure.  Beth said that of course Liza could spend the night.  “Catherine, if you remember, this is why you and Mike moved back home after Liza was born.”

Liza was a little confused.  She usually only spends Friday nights with us (occasionally whole weekends), and she and I alway go to breakfast at a local diner called Flapjacks on Saturday morning.  She asked me tonight if she and I are going to go to Flapjacks when she wakes up, and I had to tell her we aren’t.  She has to go to school tomorrow, I told her.  She was fine with that verdict, but I could tell she really wanted to go to Flapjacks.

The thing that’s so great about grandchildren that you have a lot of contact with is you get to savor their process of growing up.  When my children were little, I was working full time, writing a Ph.D. dissertation, and then working a second job as a textbook writer.  I barely had time to breathe, much less play with them like Beth and I play with Liza.  We did lots of family things with our kids, of course, but I can honestly say we didn’t enjoy them the way we’re enjoying her.  There’s a huge irony in that, and, as Beth said this morning, “Catherine, if you remember, this is why you and Mike moved back home after Liza was born.”  And thank God they did.

ED

I usually try to write about things that actually happen to me, but tonight I’m making an exception because what happened to my wife today is eminently blog-worthy.

Beth and her mother had lunch today at a Red Lobster.  Whatever they were eating required salt and pepper, but the only salt and pepper on the table were in mills.  You’ve seen those things.  They require you to grind the sea salt and the pepper corns, and sometimes it’s kind of difficult.  At 91 years old, Beth’s mother barely has the strength to retrieve a Kleenex from a box, and she had a lot of trouble with the salt and pepper mills.  A salt mill or a pepper mill requires two hands, and Beth only has one hand at the moment because of the cast on her left wrist.  They couldn’t operate those things.

The waitress stopped by and asked if they needed anything, and Beth said they needed salt and pepper.  The girl pointed out the mills to them.

“But we can’t operate those,” Beth said.  “Have you got a regular salt shaker?”

The girl was baffled by what Beth said, and she pointed out the salt and pepper mills again.  Beth asked to see the manager.  She explained to the manager what the problem was, and the manager said they can’t get salt any other way than the way it was on the table.  Beth offered to give her $5 to buy a box of salt, and the manager said they can’t really do cash transactions with their vendors.  Beth pointed out that you can buy a whole case of regular salt and pepper shakers for next to nothing at a restaurant supply house, and apparently the girl was befuddled by that.

Beth pointed out that people like her, or people with severe arthritis or amputees or others with impaired hands might appreciate having regular salt and pepper shakers.  The manager didn’t really seem to comprehend the nature of the complaint.

This country prides itself (I think) on making accommodations for people with disabilities, and it seems strange to me that a company as large as Red Lobster hasn’t figured out that salt mills and pepper mills–while probably delivering superior products for their “gourmet fare”–are simply inaccessible to some of their customers.  Ironically, there were probably ten empty disabled parking spaces in their parking lot, but two customers at the same table couldn’t salt and pepper their food.  Isn’t irony great?

ED

…This is what I want for Christmas:

This will help a good boy (me) be even better.

ED

I got a craving for chili this morning.  I make a big pot of it two or three times a year, and today was the day.

Welll, I screwed it up by putting too much salt in.  I called my friend, Addie, to see what to do, and she said to put a raw potato in it to absorb the salt.  I did that.

Then I called my son-in-law, Chef Mike, and he said the only way to get rid of a too-salty dish is to dilute it.  Following Mike’s instructions, I added another can of beans, another can of tomato sauce, and a can of crushed tomatoes.  That diluted the salt, but it made the chili so tomatoy.  I wasn’t the good chili I usually make.

The irony?  Beth had chili for lunch, and she brought home the leftovers for me.

ED

Beth’s broken left wrist has been in an arm-length cast for two weeks as of today, and late this afternoon she finally got fed up with what she said was the “stench” coming from her “dirty arm” from under the cast.  I never noticed any odor at all, but evidently she thought she did.  So, this afternoon she took off her cast to wash her arm.  She didn’t cut it off, which I’ve heard of people doing; instead, she slipped it off.  After she washed her arm, she slipped the cast back on.  I asked her if there was any pain doing that, and she said there wasn’t.

I have never heard of anybody doing such a thing before.  When I saw her in the kitchen after her shower, I asked her where the cast was.  She said she took it off, but she also assured me she’d put in back on in a few minutes.  And she did.  She said she knew she could take it off the first day she had it on because it’s loose.  If you read back in this blog for a couple of weeks, you’ll find that the cast was the $60 alternative to the $6,000 operation the doctor proposed as an option.

Beth broke her leg a couple of years ago, and that did require surgery.  She says that the broken leg was an alligator bite, but the broken wrist is a mosquito bite.  Our friends offer great sympathy, of course, but she’s quick to point out it’s not colon cancer, it’s not throat cancer, and it’s not Parkinson’s Disease, all afflictions our very closest friends had/have.  I’m constantly amazed at this woman I married up with in 1973.

ED

Like most people, I’ve seen the odd running of a red light or stop sign, which are “crimes” of a sort, but today I saw the real thing up close and personal.

I discovered, via Beth, some fantastic seafood gumbo that comes pre-packaged and ready to heat up at Publix.  It’s a Publix brand item, but it has whole shrimp, crabmeat (including the odd shell), okra, tomatoes, and a wonderful dark roux like real seafood gumbo is supposed to have.  The package says it has “Cajun” spices, but it’s really Creole gumbo.  The best Louisiana food, in my opinion, is Creole, not Cajun, but the Creole-Cajun distinction is hard for non-Louisianaians to comprehend in the world of TV chefs who have never set foot in Louisiana.  The gumbo doesn’t come with rice, though, and gumbo without rice is like Eggs Benedict without Hollandaise sauce.

A few doors down from Publix is the China Wok.  I went in there today to buy a small carton of their white rice to put in my gumbo.  A boy of maybe fifteen or sixteen went in just before me, and he might have even held the door for me.  I had seen him coming out of a Firehouse Restaurant a few doors down with rolled coins in his hand, and I became suspicious of him immediately.

He got to the counter ahead of me, and he said something to the Chinese man behind the counter that I didn’t catch.  I placed my order, and I heard the kid say to the Chinese man that he had rolls of dimes.  I think he said each roll was worth $20, and he had five or six rolls.  The man gave him the bills, and the kid took off sort of running.  I looked out into the parking lot, and he was dancing around. 

I paid for my order (96 cents, but they gave me a nickle in change from my dollar bill, which I put in the tip jar), and left the store.  I was walking to my car when I saw the Chinese man come out in an obviously aggitated state.  The kid had ripped him off.  He had wrapped up pennies and claimed they were dimes.  The Chinese man was pissed off.  I asked him if the boy had given him pennies instead of dimes, and he said yes.  I told the man to call the cops, but, alas, he didn’t understand me.

What that kid did was a crime, albeit a low-level one.  I doubt he wanted that money to buy tickets for the Christmas Dance at his school.  If he’s doing that at fifteen or sixteen, what is he going to be doing in ten years?

The people who own that Chinese restaurant are obviously immigrants who are working their butts off to succeed in the American Dream.  They recently opened a second restaurant in our neighborhood that I haven’t been to yet, and there are usually two, three, or four toddlers and young kids in there when I go in.  They weren’t there today, though.  When I’ve talked to the kids in the past, their English was faultless. 

What I’m seeing in this restaurant is emblematic of the immigrant experience in the United States.  The parents are limping along in English, getting robbed in one of the oldest stings there is, and their kids are playing on laptops while their parents dish out wonderful ethnic food behind the counter.  I assume the parents are documented and legal aliens, but I don’t care one bit if they’re not.  They’re helping this country be itself, and I’m for that.  I just wish they hadn’t been victims of crime this afternoon.

Irony?  How often do you see that kind of thing happen?

ED