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Yours
Truly in a Swamp By Leonard
Earl Johnson Reprinted
from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans October 1999 October
Runneth Out
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"Hurricane winds blow grief and sorrow / I'd run through one tomorrow / Goes to show how far I'd go / For you, if you'd want me to" - song popular in the years after Hurricane Betsy. Hurricane
season ends next month.
Meanwhile, we received a note from
Kathryn Boutwell, Kady
the lady who put her finger in Faubourg Marigny's dyke
(you may read Lady Kady's note in the public forum at http://www.lej.org
). Just
in case, put your wine bottle on the top shelf, Kady.
Between leaky levee's, drenching storms, and youthful gunfire one's
wine bottle must never get washed away. A
garland of Orchards to Faubourgendians
Henry Barro, David Berman,
Carol Carroll, George Cossitt, Gary de Leaomont,
Steve Halpern, Tom Loesch, Wally Mclaren, Carl Meyer, Carlos
Rivera, Grace Yunker, and David
Seymour, who have agreed to serve the neighborhood as board members of
the Foot
note: Board
member Steve Halpern received a letter from The New York Times' columnist
William Safire asking
permission to reprint excerpts from a letter Halpern wrote, in a future
Safire pontification on the English language's use and misuse.
The letter did not say which our hero represents English
is a topic dear to the grammatical hearts of
The New York Times
readers, and William Safire
be their
language pope.
He is also a former Spiro Agnew speechwriter.
If you don't read
The Times you may not know Safire, but once he was famous
worldwide for enriching the Republican Revolution - if not the English
language - with the phrase "Nattering Nabobs of Negativity." Did
he also coin "Nervous Nellies?"
"Nabobs"
and "Nellies," in Agnew/Nixon speak, were those who wanted
to quit Vietnam after only ten or fourteen years, while the "Silent majority," Nixon intoned, "wordlessly
supported"
the war effort.
Do you recall that evil, now-nearly forgotten lexicon? ************* The
other morning, on the rue Desire bus, this was overheard, "A`leas
those white shootins can't be blamed on blacks."
That same day, a clerk in Sam Goodies Record Shop told me,
"They can't blame Forte Worth, Texas on rap music." Being
born - politically speaking - in the fabled Sixties, I know
"blame" alone is not the answer.
Good people do bad things One
can know exact rules of right and wrong, like Jimmy Swaggart, and stray
onto humanity's wobbly path; or, like Ken Starr, and have only fantastical
steel law to plumb your ironclad soul.
We should have empathy for those two, I know, but both are hard
sinners to forgive. I
was in the Merchant Marine for thirteen years, a group as amoral as
grammar.
We lived without a dollop of social concern (unless you count the
urge to guzzle and couple during shore leave's battles).
After Conservatives made America safe for economic exploita… er…
development, I sailed for several years in the civilian crews of two US
Navy ships - war sailors being simply too fat in those years of Reaganized
budgets to actually sail their own vessels. On
one Navy mapping
(spying, said some) cruise between Rio de Janerio and Abajhon,
Ivory Coast, we hauled an even more supernumerary crew consisting of
submarine sailors signed aboard as "observers."
We surface sailors never tired of
laughing at those sub-mariners calling themselves
"observers."
We neither understood them, nor they us.
Nor anyone else any of us.
This is the nature of life - murky, seen through perceptual filters
- and the reason I am a Liberal not swayed by law and order arguments, or
grammarians with dazzling alliterations. ************* Orchids
to Josef Suter, whose lovely
new/old Spain Street shotgun And
Orchids to Faubourg Marigny Book's
Alan Robinson, for hosting a reading of COMING
OUT SPIRITUALLY: THE NEXT STEP (Tarcher/Putnam) by San Franciscan Christian
de la Huerta.
And for turning - dare I say it - fifty.
Did you see him partying at Café
Feelings, pretty dazzling for fifty, huh?
The dazzlers walked out - well, stumbled
out - without paying.
Never fear, next day honesty triumphed and the bill was honorably
settled.
Now had they been sailors, or Conservatives… Thank
you, my own birthday came and went with a combination of joy and terror
replacing the numbness of turning fifty-six.
Ah, to be only fifty again!
February's near-stroke is nearly forgotten, and I've never been
better, health wise, if you don't count being fifty-six.
Which reminds me of what Vernon
Jorden said the other day, "If
you get up at fifty-four and nothing hurts, you're dead!" Copyright ©. 1999, Leonard Earl Johnson Have
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