Gail Grenier Sweet

People's lives

Sheri, Anna and I talked about our experiences helping people with their houses.  Sheri said, “I think that listening to people’s stories is even more important than working on the houses.”

We agreed with her. 

 

Are Greniers Cajuns?

I wondered about that question.  Acadian people were booted out of Canada  in the 1700s and scattered into New England as well as Louisiana and other places.  My dad’s family is from Massachusetts.

I checked my family tree. It looks like the answer is no, we’re not Cajuns.  My Grandfather “Pepere’s” father was born in Weedon,  P.Q., Canada, baptized at the Church of St. Janvier de Weedon.  So our Canuck ancestors were still in Canada in the late 1800s.

 

Go Figure

Anna and I were honored to give our time and effort to help with hurricane recovery.  However, it was unsettling, to say the least, when we learned about government overspending.  Sr. Ancilla told us the government was paying $600 a week for $60 campsites around Lafayette.  She also said they paid $1,200 per week per stateroom in cruise ships for medical volunteers in New Orleans – and no gasoline was being expended to motor the cruise ships docked for the duration.

My nurse friend “Prairie Dawn” volunteered in New Orleans at the same time Anna and I worked in Lafayette.  She stayed in one of those cruise ships, and helped at St. Bernard’s Hospital in the lower ninth ward.  It was like a M.A.S.H. unit.  She said they had no lab, no x-ray machine, and no centrifuge to sterilize instruments.  Many patients came in with sky-high blood pressure readings (from stress from living in a tent city, she guessed) – their lower blood pressure number was higher than the top number should be.  “They would have been hospitalized in Wisconsin,” Prairie Dawn said. 

The parent corporate owner of the hospital had abdicated.  Nurses told my friend they had lost their pensions.  Doctors said they themselves didn’t have medical insurance – apparently a common way of life in Louisiana.  Prairie Dawn said doctors were working as volunteers, 10 and 12 hour days.  My friend worked there for two weeks of 12-hour days.  When she came home, she experienced chaos nightmares.

The New Orleans Kiwanis are organizing an effort to gather items needed by St. Bernard’s Hospital, New Orleans, LA.  Donations may be sent to them as well as to United Way, Lafayette, LA, or to the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette, 1408 Carmel Avenue, Lafayette, LA 70501. 

How you can help --

Donations to the St. Bernard Medical Relief Fund can be sent to:

St. Bernard Kiwanis Foundation
PO Box 510
Arabi, LA 70032
504-279-8544

Cajun Adventure, Post-Hurricane Rita
(continued)

We made it back to our dorm just in time to eat, wash up, and change out of our dusty clothes.  Joe made supper from our many leftovers.  It was yummy, and we were delighted that Sheri joined us. 

When we finished supper, we showed Sheri our drawer of leftover food in the fridge and invited her to enjoy it – she had about a week more until she left for home back in Maine. 

On the way to Randol’s, Joe somehow got wind of the fact that Anna wanted to buy a ring as a souvenir of her trip, but hadn’t found one.  He told us there was an excellent flea market on the way to the airport where we could probably find a nice artsy ring.  In fact, “if you watch now, you’ll see the way to go – it’s the same route you’ll take tomorrow.”

We needed to be at the airport by 10:30.  I didn’t mind getting up early to shop, but I was tired of navigating. 

“But this is on the way to the airport!!” 

Okay, we’ll go in the morning.

That night at Randol’s, we listened to a pick-up band featuring the very old Marlin Fonteneau with Ray Abshire and the very young Courtney Granger.  They sat on chairs and played, in the style of the old Cajun dance halls and back-porch Cajun music-making.  I walked up to Courtney and Ray and told them, “I have both your albums.  I love your music.”  They smiled broadly.

sheri clement photo	sheri clement photo
Joe and Anna dancing at Randol's the night before we left Lafayette.	Joe and Anna dancing at Randol's the night before we left Lafayette.

We danced with a lot of the locals, one who looked exactly like Tony Perkins of “Psycho” fame.  Sheri took to Cajun dancing with ease.  Tony Perkins asked if we had danced here before. 

“Yes,” I said, “Saturday night.”

Tony remembered Anna from that night, “looking like a princess.”  It was the evening she had worn the long Gypsy-style skirt, the strapless top and the high heels.  By now, Anna knew how to dress for comfort and ease.  She wore jeans, a pretty top, and boots.  Cajun dancing is a bit too athletic for princess attire.

At one point, Anna began teaching Cajun two-step to a hunky 14-year-old German foreign exchange student.  Joe laughed hard at that sight.  “Look at that Wisconsin girl teaching Cajun dance in Louisiana!”

Anna told me later that the German boy asked her if she was “a real Cajun.”

We danced longer than we planned to.  I walked up to Courtney and Ray again, and thanked them.  They beamed and kept sawin’ and fiddlin’.

We took Joe back to St. Martinville. The night was dark and the back roads even darker.  Sheri drove along with us to be extra navigation assurance, something I really appreciated. 

Back at the dorm, we bid her good night and packed our bags.

Saturday:  The Flea Market that Wasn’t

We got up early and found the flea market location no sweat, except the flea market wasn’t there.  Grrr.  Luckily we found Joe by cell phone.  He had just arrived there himself. 

We found out the flea market shuts down almost completely during the winter months.  There were just a few vendors, and we took full advantage of their presence.  We bought brown organic eggs (a thank you gift for Joe), kumquats and satsuma (both flavors new to us), and pickled okra!!, then enjoyed coffee and sweet bread in a coffee shop nearby.  Joe, as usual, chatted up the locals (“Where do you live?  What’s your dad’s name?”) and got a tip for a jewelry shop nearby for Anna’s ring.

We had just enough time to search for a jewelry shop.  Trouble was, most stores were not supposed to open until 10:00 am.  Joe led us to a shop that didn’t have rings but he kept asking until he found one.  Finally, thanks to Joe’s persistence and my patience,   Anna found not one but two rings, inexpensive, silver, unique.  She put them on her fingers and flung her be-ringed hands outward.  Almost every finger had a ring from some different place in the world, including Key West, Northern Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. 

“I still have three fingers left with no rings!”  she announced.

To my surprise, I found a little sterling silver fleur de lis charm at our last shop.  I had been thinking how nice it would be to have one to put on the silver chain I usually wear around my neck.  I usually wear a Celtic cross I found in Dublin, but it would be nice to wear something French for a change.  I bought the charm.

“Now I can wear two sides of my ethnic heritage,” I said to Anna and Joe, slipping the charm onto the chain.  “I wonder how I should show my German side – with a bratwurst charm?”

Anna and I left with other souvenirs, also.  Joe gave her a necklace with a pendant he made out of volcanic rock and clay – beautiful.  He gave me a little Paris Posey, a tiny pin-on flower-holder he made out of clay.  I remembered learning about these little things at Old Falls Village back in Menomonee Falls.  In the old days, women would pin the little flower-holders onto their dresses and put tiny flowers, in water, inside them.

Joe’s best gifts to us were the stories he told constantly, history then and now, about the places we went.  We hugged him goodbye and drove to the airport.

This time there was no gator on the runway, and our flights went without a hitch.  One of the best parts about coming home was letting Mike do the driving!  I was sick of navigating.  I realized on this trip that one reason I’m so bad at navigating is that I’ve been married for 33 years to a guy who insists on driving and I, lazy, don’t pay attention.

In the week to come, I returned to my various jobs but my feet felt like a sleepwalker’s feet, like I was walking through Jello.  I could not wake up.  It felt like depression, but I wasn’t depressed.  I thought it might be mental and physical exhaustion, but that didn’t make much sense to me.  I had a couple of chaos dreams, which maybe reflected that I was disturbed deep down by all the evidences of chaos I saw in Louisiana. 

Finally on the seventh day of exhaustion, I figured out was probably behind my fatigue:  NO SUN!  I had worked and walked so much in the bright Louisiana sun for a week, and then came home to cloud-cover.  After that epiphany, I kept lots of lights turned on and got better quickly.

Anna had an incredibly hectic first week back in town.  It was the start of second semester, which is stressful in itself.  Beyond that, she had to go from class to class to beg to be allowed to late-register, because of registering after deadline when she returned from New Zealand last semester.

I called and asked her if she was experiencing any bad dreams or having any difficulty after our week in Louisiana.

“No, not at all,” she said.  “Those people lost their homes.  I can handle this.”

The End

All writing unless otherwise noted is ©Gail Grenier Sweet. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint must be granted by the author.
All photos unless otherwise noted are ©Gail Grenier Sweet. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint must be granted by the photographer.