Flash Fiction: Tchefuncte River, Summer 2005

One summer a boy dove into the Tchefuncte river and hit something at the bottom. When he came back up he hurriedly free-styled to the flood wall, clambered up the algal steps, frightened. We all looked and saw the corpse of a calf float to the top of the water. It had risen up from the depths. Bloated. Passed along by a farmer from downriver to here, near the mouth. Thrown in for the alligators. And a few days before that, a kid caught a nurse shark in the same river, near the same spot. Adam told me he used to swim in it, but not anymore. -- Rivers aren’t supposed to have cows and sharks swimming around in ‘em, he said. Besides, the water’s been getting muckier, disgusting. It’s not just the boats, either.

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Image Credit: "Bogue Falaya River Bank" © 2005

Poem: Mo

you are beautiful in your floral arrangement

paisley printed dress fuschia blown

patterned garden scarf, pale green, brilliant magenta

carefully placed on your body

like a funeral

or a balle masqué

a night out with the ladies,

or merely crossing Canal street to type,

nonetheless

you are beautiful quite in your floral arrangement

and your arms extenuate, lengthening, your beauty,

cotton white comfort that serves as a “drawing out” of your body

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Picture Credit: "Georgette" by Greig Roselli © 2005

The pig people: urban legend or fact?

They live under interstate highways. In New Orleans, they call them the "pig people." The locals say they're cannibals and their noses are upturned, like a pig. At least that's what was told to me on Carrollton and Tulane the other night. At about two in the morning. I just had coffee with Danita and I took the streetcar back to school. But I had to transfer to a bus. The bus wasn't coming anytime soon, so I figured I might as well walk.

The pig people purportedly live under the interstate in New Orleans 

Home was only five blocks away. But I was afraid of walking underneath the overpass at night. The interstate loomed before me like a badly placed skateboard park. From my room at Notre Dame, the blinking lights of vehicles communicate to me during REM sleep, the balustrades to commerce, concrete effigies that simultaneously (concurrently) hold up the little modules of despair, racing through our fair country, while harboring pig people down below in her concrete bosom.

So I decided not to risk an encounter so I waited for the last bus.

At the bus stop, I asked about the pig people to some wearied travelers.

Here is what they sang:
In her concrete bosom, the pig people sleep.
the pig people live and eat.
the pig people, the loup garoux, the boogey man,
the monster in the closet, the fear out to get ya, man.

boom, hear that, y’all?

yeah, bitch, she's keen on your hide,
her nose upturned like a pig snake, like a pig,
like a celluloid freak from the comic pages of your friendly horror page;

an immaculate mother, slouching to Bethlehem --

Urban legend?

Maybe. But no. It's not a legend. I have never seen a pig person, but I am sure they exist because I have seen their shadows lurking behind the balustrades of the interstate and I can give you a considerable amount of witnesses who can attest to their existence.

Next time you are around the interstate at night (or even by day) please let me know if you encounter the pig people.

Update: I heard a rumor that Master P is doing a horror flick based on the pig people legend in New Orleans.

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Obituary: Georgette Pintado 1924 -2005

Georgette Pintado (1924 - 2005)

“Les enfants, les enfants,” whispered Georgette Pintado, when Br. Bede Roselli and his mother Pam found her at Covington High School’s cafeteria, curled in the fetal position on a thin mattress on the floor. “All she could tell me was, ‘I’m worried about the poor children,’” Br. Bede said. “We called her Nanan. Anybody she took care of was called Nana’s kids. She even had a personalized license plate on her old Cadillac: NANAN. She took care of my brother and me when we were kids and was one of the first people I confided in that I wanted to be a priest.”

     Georgette, along with dozens of other patients from Pontchartrain Health Care Center in Mandeville, had been temporarily relocated to the school turned shelter. Br. Bede, a monk at Saint Joseph Abbey, didn’t know she was at the school but stumbled on her while distributing Bibles with his mother, a certified surgical assistant from Madisonville, who had been volunteering her service at the shelter in the days following Katrina. “We didn’t know she was at the high school so you can believe how shocked we were when we found out she was there,” said Br. Bede.
     Georgette Pintado was born in France in 1924 and grew up during the time of the Nazi Occupation. As a young woman she had been harassed by SS soldiers at a train station for not having her papers on her; she couldn’t understand them so the German soldiers slapped her and threatened to rape her. Fortunately, she was able to get away unharmed but vowed to emigrate from France after the war. Leaving her family behind, she sailed to New York after the liberation, moved to New Orleans, had a son named George, married Nicholas Pintado, a Coast Guardsman, and moved to Mandeville where she lived over forty years. “When they met, her husband knew how to say, “oui,” and she knew “yes,” which was all the language they needed to fall in love,” said Br. Bede.
     Especially after her husband’s death of a heart attack, Georgette dedicated her life to caring for children at her home in Mandeville. In her two-story blue house in Old Golden Shores, she fed, cleaned and bathed scores of children through the years. “She wasn’t just a baby sitter, she was a real nanny,” said Jackie Lark, whose two children, Brian and Jeffrey, were cared for by Georgette from birth until they were old enough to be home alone. “She did everything for our kids, even baked cakes for them on their birthdays,” she said.
     For twenty-five years, every Wednesday she visited the sick at Pontchartrain Health Care Center as a Eucharistic minister. She was so committed to this weekly service, that if a parent kept their child late at her house on Wednesday they knew to pick them up at the nursing home. It wasn’t unusual for Georgette to arrive at the nursing home with five or six children in tow, assigning them special tasks for the patients. She not only distributed communion to the patients but spent ample time with each person, talking to them and giving out candy or cigarettes as needed. This was the same nursing home where she would move into after her quadruple bypass surgery in 2003. Her condition worsened after her son, George died of a heart attack in 2004. The impact of Katrina worsened her condition even further, along with the stress of relocating, her debilitating arthritis, and poor vascular circulation became too much for her body.
     Georgette was moved back to Pontchartrain Health Care Center three weeks after the storm. Father John F. Talamo, a Salesian priest at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church gave her the anointing of the sick before she went into a coma and a few days later she died on October 4, 2005. Father John declared her a “living saint” at her funeral mass and commended her for her unfailing service to the church. He mentioned that in her final days she still remembered the “Hail Mary” and the “Our Father” even though she was quickly losing consciousness.
     Georgette’s daughter-in-law Marci Tittle of Hickory Creek, TX and her granddaughter, Megan of Seattle, Washington, arranged the funeral and the gathering afterward at the home of Jean Champagne of Mandeville. Many of the children she cared for, the “les enfants” she spoke about before she died, gathered together there and shared stories about their Nanan. Nanan’s kids. Simone. Katherine. Sarah. Brian. Greg. Jean. John. Jeffery. Margaret. “It felt good to share what we remembered about Nanan and to know it was her who brought us all together,” said one of the children at the gathering. Nanan was the glue for these children’s lives — an influence that cannot be easily forgotten, no matter what may befall us.

N.B.: Georgette Pintado's obituary was published in The Times Picayune, Wednesday, October  12, 2005

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The Bread Run: When I Delivered Loaves of Bread for Pennies for Bread

The loaves are already “stacked to the back” of our Ford delivery truck in the morning before we leave. The bread was baked the day before by a handful of Benedictines and sliced and bagged by volunteers, mostly retired men, that same afternoon. All the bread, about 900 loaves, is placed in trays for easy delivery.  We have about twelve different stops to make in the city, and we want to finish the route before the southern sun becomes unbearable.

     We leave the Abbey early to beat the commuters; I notice it takes a few swipes of the windshield wiper to get rid of the moisture and insects that have collected through the night.  Even with a full cup of coffee in my system, I usually fall asleep on the passenger side as Joe crosses the long causeway over Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans, listening to AM radio.  In the brief moments that I am awake, Joe, in his own words, gives a commentary on world and local events, and I look out into the lake to see what it looks like this time: either calm and muddy or sometimes the lake is brilliantly blue, like an ocean, but this morning it is dull with an irksome pallor of gray.

Poem: "Ordinary Childhood"

Fontana della Barcaccia - Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy

brushing past the crêpe myrtles,
their slim, shedding bark legs entangled
on the shadowed front yard of this house,

i see rebecca and her children
hidden in the silence
of their pacific northwest camper trailer,
parked against a red brick wall of a church

my grapes of wrath family laugh and play checkers,
swatting mosquitoes
hoping for a better licorice stick,
praying to god for a sturdy black mailbox.

And even at stan’s funeral the other day
mom and dad with their stoic, but engaged stares
singing remember me when you come into your kingdom
as if they had been with us all along,
comfortable pictures,
hands
firmly embraced on roger’s shoulder,
his ordinary childhood shaped and formed,
sifting sand and dirt through his green hands,
shoveled onto the pine box we have chosen to gather around, singing our songs of christian burial,
quickly rubbing our eyes from the bright daylight −
too much light and not enough darkness

too much information and not enough silence

we all dispersed quietly,
but the children who had lingered,
fascinated by a dead body they once knew,
wishing to sprinkle their own earth over him,
instead ate sandwiches and sprite later on at supper,
their collection of forks and knives piled up in the newly acquired yard of louisiana,
remained silent and grinned,
helping themselves to a bag of chips, tater tots,
hamburgers

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© 2005 Greig Roselli

A response to a new pope

The following is a brief response to 

Cokie Roberts's editorial on Ratzinger, 

newly elected to the papal throne.

Ratzinger squashes individuality; Roberts questions his rash stamp-out.

Papal Conclave, photo credit: reuters

It is true; the church is not immune to the laws of human nature, but according to the church, strict individualism that is separated from objective truth, that attempts to construct its own truth denies human nature.  Roberts champions individuality, the freedom to express one's point of view, to be an individual; Ratzinger sees individuality as a threat, liable to "dissent," tantamount, for him, to infidelity.  
Is individualism to be respected, or is it a suspicious slight to Christianity? Has modern individuality silenced human communication with the gods?
 
We are individuals, unique beings created in the image and likeness of God.  God gave us a mind and a heart, so we should use it to stumble upon goodness and truth.  I disagree with  Cokie and Steven's use of the word "condemn." It is not true that this pontiff condemns individuality, but he and his predecessor worry that unbridled individuality separated from truth will cause more damage than good in this world. I can see unbridled individuality divorced from reason as a poison, like an inexperienced student who thinks they know more than the teacher, but really they know nothing, or the kid who spouts out ideology his parents taught him rather than speak for himself.

But, I disagree with Ratzinger more; It is not true that individuality serves only "ego and desires".  The Church needs to realize that individuality is not going away, and maybe honor individuality a little more (just like the Copernican Revolution never went away) and the rest of the world needs to realize that objective truth and goodness should never be separated from individual conscience.

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