Return to Prytania

“Sorry, already taken,” the site genie simpers again. I have already submitted every stupid user name I can invent, old addresses, siblings’ nicknames, all those aliases we need as our cyber-umbilicals.

With a cleansing breath I empty my frustrated mind. In floats a lovely word: “Prytania.” I enter it, and the site cheers, “It Rocks!”

But now I am paying no attention. I’m remembering Prytania Street. Frenchman, Annunciation and Tchoupitoulas Streets. Desire, Rampart, and Gentilly. Where the peeling, multicolored shotgun houses sit by the great sliding brown river.

New Orleans.

I’ll tell you about my first time there. As I lay beside my mother in a narrow bed, my father leaned over to kiss us. Everything about him was in perfect order. His Army Air Corps captain’s uniform had not a wrinkle, the shirt carefully pinched into a single pleat at each side where he had tucked it into his trousers. His black hair was sleekly combed back. I am sure that he smelled good, slightly astringent and clean, like pressed laundry. My mother wore a nightgown with white lace forming a V along the top. The hospital sheet, folded back smooth and tight, came across her body just below the breasts. My parents had joined their right hands with odd formality, like two dignitaries, but their expressions were full of tenderness.

I have no idea who took the little photograph I hold, now curling its crenulated white margins inward. It surely could not have been a grandparent; the trip from Alabama would have been unthinkably extravagant that wartime year. My tiny dark eyes seem to study the photographer. My parents are seeing only each other.

Is it possible that I could remember sucking milk from my mother’s pink nipples? If not, why do I have this magnified vision of them, big as rosy saucers, with thumb-sized papillae? A redhead, mama had fair skin and roseate nipples. I inherited my father’s black hair but got her complexion.

Although I was born there, my parents always said they absolutely did not conceive me in New Orleans. More likely in Carlisle Barracks or Keesler Field. I have had to take their word for it, zygotically speaking. But how I conceive myself is another matter, and New Orleans is my soul’s rootstock.

As a girl in Alabama I loved having been born in Charity Hospital, not some boring hospital named for the stupid town a person lives in. I loved it that for “County of Birth” on my school papers my mother would neatly print “Orleans Parish.” I knew it made me very special. Nobody around here even knew what a Parish was!

It is said that at age four, propped by my daddy on a tall stool at Felix’s Oyster Bar, I consumed some legendary quantity of half-shell oysters, I am tempted to say several dozen. I remember that. At least my body remembers it: the cold salty tang, the squirting lemon, the sweet slippery rush of the mollusk down my throat. Sucking the last of the oyster juice out of each empty shell. And my delighted parents, laughing and laughing.

Nowadays I repeat this story to the shuckers who prise open their heaps of scabby bivalves behind the bar at Felix’s. Prompted, they always say, sure, they remember me. And pour me another Sazerac.

After the storm, dreading what I might see, it was more than two years before I could make myself return to New Orleans. Needing a businesslike excuse I signed up to attend a large conference in a giant hotel and went by myself.

Like everybody else, I’d seen the pictures. I knew Charity Hospital was no more. And I’d heard a lot about the city being “Back in Business.” But what for God’s sake might that mean? As sad as a dispirited, beaten down New Orleans would be, a plasticized theme park of a place would be unbearably worse.

I walked my feet to blisters. I rode a bus all over the 9th ward and took pictures of gutted houses with spray-painted numbers showing how many dead humans and animals had been found there. I rambled (Didn’t I ramble?) through the Quarter. People were still practicing saxophones on doorsteps, instrument cases lying open and seeded with some little currency.

And I rode down Prytania. At one end, a restored old mansion was for sale for five million dollars. Ten blocks away, the hind end of a FEMA trailer jutted from the wall of a mostly collapsed gray frame house. A woman sitting beside it in her white plastic chair waved her cigarette at me.

The trailer’s top and sides were draped with Mardi Gras beads. A huge flag -- purple, green and gold-- flapped from a pole.

Completely covering the end of the trailer that faced on Prytania, someone had spray-painted a tremendous crimson heart.

From Rome, A Stone

“While the family of a 9-year-old incest victim’s abortion is excommunicated, the perpetrator never even made it to the ecclesial radar screen. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority of bishops and the dawn of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.” Mary E. Hunt

An eighty-pound, nine-year-old girl in Brazil is impregnated with twins by her stepfather’s rape. Her doctors advise abortion, explaining that her tiny body will not carry to term without horrible damage or death. The Catholic church, having failed to block the abortion in court, excommunicates the girl’s mother.

The case has caused a furor. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger, both of which apply in this case. Legality is not what counts in this human and spiritual tragedy. Mary Hunt of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) lays it out masterfully.

Here are excerpts from Hunt’s piece, printed in full at:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/humanrights/1206/rdpulpit:_excommunicating_the_victims/

“The details of the case are grim. The little girl went to the hospital with stomach pains only to discover that she was four months pregnant. By any measure, the family involved is in big trouble. The father is gone, the mother has at least two children, one of whom is handicapped, and the stepfather is a sexual predator…

“The pregnancy happened because an adult male assaulted a girl child; an oft-told story, tragic every time. The mother endeavored to do the best she could in a bad situation… But the Roman Catholic Church used the tragedy to make a theo-political point...

“It is sickening and morally repugnant to realize that abortion, in this case the most humane solution to a terrible problem, is the cause of excommunication while sexual abuse is not. Something is seriously wrong with this picture, and it is the Roman Catholic Church...

“My sadness in this case comes not only from what has been done in the name of God to people who are living a nightmare, but from what might have been done to help. Sexual abuse, especially incest, is hard to stop. But once perpetrated it need not be made worse by ecclesial sanction...

“A proper pastoral response would include: support for the pregnant child as she lives through an abortion; care for the mother who is responsible for the child and the rest of the family; protection for the family from the stepfather whose arrest may trigger backlash behavior; sensitive work with the other daughter who has also been sexually abused; HIV and venereal disease testing for the girls and the mother; economic support for the family; counseling for the family, the community, even the neighbors and parishioners who have been affected by this trauma; prayer and pastoral attention, including reception of the sacraments according to the family’s wishes. They need a spiritual community more than ever. Instead they got excommunication.

“‘Is there anyone among you, who if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?’ (Matthew 7:9). Apparently there are several in Rome and Brazil...

“I believe that this case serves as further proof that the jig is up for Catholic clerics who dare to excommunicate a mother who has already suffered enough while they continue to embrace priest pedophiles and the bishops who hide their crimes. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority such bishops might make, and the beginning of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.”

The "W" Word

Here in the privacy of my own blog I guess I can risk spelling it out: I’m talking about that stigmatizing, weaponized word Welfare.

You might try this exercise before reading further—compose a fifteen-words-or-less answer to the question, What does “government welfare program” mean?

The first person I asked that question had a succinct reply: “Welfare is the government giving money to people who don’t work.”

Still curious, I posted the question on Facebook, getting back around twenty responses during one afternoon. All were passionate and thoughtful. The points made boiled down into five assertions:
1. Yes, welfare means giving cash to people who don’t work, and it is a bad thing. It destroys initiative and creates dependency.
2. Welfare was supposed to help people who are disabled and can’t work, but it has gotten way out of hand and now able-bodied cheats are drawing welfare checks.
3. Welfare is necessary because of our responsibility to care for the poorest among us. But welfare’s central flaw is that people receive benefits for such a long time that it becomes a pattern for many generations.
4. Welfare is a good thing, because most welfare recipients are children. Play and school are children’s legitimate work, and they did not choose to have poor parents, so most would agree they don’t deserve to go hungry or homeless.
5. People who don’t work are not the only ones on welfare: wealthy people with tax breaks, greedy investment bankers, government contractors and so on get huge government handouts. Then they complain about poor people on welfare.

There are a couple of problems here.

“Welfare,” according to sources that range from the conservative Heritage Foundation to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, designates any means-tested government program designed to assist low-income people.

Are you now, or have you ever been, on welfare? If you got a Pell Grant to help pay for college, the answer is yes. If your child attended a Head Start program or gets a free lunch at school, you’re on welfare. If you buy nutritious food at a discount because you are a pregnant woman, an infant or a child (WIC) you’re a welfare recipient. Also if you live in low-rent subsidized housing, have your health insurance through Medicaid, or use Food Stamps to help with the grocery bill. Doesn’t matter whether you’re working or not; doesn’t matter whether you’re disabled. If your income is low enough (that’s where “means testing” comes in) you can get welfare help until things improve.

These safety-net programs seem hard to argue with. All around us we see poverty amid plenty. Surely it benefits our society to have healthy citizens, children who are ready for school when they turn six, a shot at higher education as a boost out of poverty.

Not all government giveaways are means-tested. I myself—a wealthy woman--receive thousands from Uncle Sam every month, in the form of Social Security and Medicare. I choose not to work, I didn’t have to answer any financial questions , and the cash I rake in comes from taxes on people much needier than me. But I’m probably not what you think of as a welfare queen, and I’m not required to be ashamed of myself in the checkout line.

(Please explain to me why means-tested handouts are dishonorable but no-questions-asked handouts are virtuous.)

It’s also not true that welfare benefits are long-term. Not anymore. This false belief should have vaporized back in 1997, when Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC or ADC) was abolished under the Clinton administration. Its substitute, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) is a short –term cash program, stringently needs-tested and full of requirements that recipients work or lose benefit money. TANF also contains strong financial incentives for recipients to be married and living together with their children. The average TANF recipient draws benefits for two years or less, and the maximum lifetime eligibility is only 60 months.

Call it the safety net, call it the dole. One side sees humanitarian and societal reasons for helping the poor. The other side fears that taxation could choke the economy, and warns that feeding the hungry keeps them from learning to feed themselves.

But could we please keep in mind one other definition of “welfare”: the good fortune, health, happiness, or prosperity of a person, group, or organization. Or nation.

"Still Anchored"

I finished this painting yesterday. I worked from a photograph I took about a year ago in St Louis Cemetery, New Orleans. It had been a warm day, with one of those parti-colored skies, dynamic and splotchy with swatches of blue, white and slate shifting and overlapping above.

I don’t think the disrepair of St Louis Cemetery had anything to do with Katrina. The tombs and monuments had simply been ignored into decrepitude. Thorns overgrew the plots. Majestic marble statuary, soaring twenty feet into the air, had relinquished parts of itself to the ground below, where they lay growing lichen.

All the while I worked on this painting I thought of it as “The Headless Angel.” Only recently did I notice the absence of wings. One person who saw the work in progress seemed to find it shocking, blurting out, “Oh! She’s helpless! No head, one arm gone, the other one anchored to the ground!”

I have a different feeling about it. When I go beachcombing, I always seem to pick out the shells that have been rolling about in the surf for years, dead but still being transformed. This statue feels like that. What’s inside is showing, and it’s beautiful, with a battered dignity.
I call the painting “Still Anchored.”

Poetic Homage to My Ancestor, Ogden Nash

Quest With a Happy Ending
By Alice Chenault

At long last, after half a century of searching, if not more
Today I discovered what I have been longing for.
Fashion and good grooming’s tenets require a lady’s legs, axillae, and chin to be unhaired
But pursuing this goal adds hugely to women’s unending travails and trouble.
For one thing, no matter how sharp the blade or deft the hand
You always end up with razor rash and/or stubble.
Worse than that, blood oozes from legions of abrasions, lacerations and contusions.
Having discovered the cure, my ethical standards dictate that it not languish unshared:
Go out and buy yourself a gadget known as the Gillette Fusion.
It will leave your legs smooth as a catfish belly and your epidermis fully intact, so that people will heap you with flattery
Please do not be alarmed to learn that the device operates on electric power:
I assure you it is quite safe to use in the shower
And requires only one triple-A battery!
Moreover, Monsieur or, more likely, Madame Gillette must be a person who is all heart
Having conveniently supplied his or her product to outlets including CVS, Costco, and Walmart.
And at the low price of only nine-ninety-five
You can get one for the bathroom and another to keep in the car and use while you drive.