The indie bookstore of my Baton Rouge childhood was Elliot’s. It sat in a shopping center that is now a Walmart, just a few doors down from Coffee Call—not the Coffee Call of today, but the one I remember from the 80s and 90s, with its unmistakable art deco style and picturesque facade.

The current location of Coffee Call still carries an echo of that design, but from the outside—with a drive-thru running along the side—it feels like a shadow of what it once was.

That’s life. Nothing stays exactly the same.

Even the most committed “shop local” advocates know how hard it is to resist the gravity of Walmart and Target—prices, convenience, everything under one roof. Still, there was something particular about the old Sunday rhythm: church, then coffee at a locally owned café, then a slow walk through an independent bookstore just a few steps away, and finally a stop at the candy store in that same shopping center.

Local ownership. Local pride. A small ecosystem of books, coffee, and sweets.

Coffee Call survived. I’m pleased about that. It moved, changed, adapted—but it’s still here. Elliot’s is gone, edged out by the Barnes & Noble that opened on Corporate Boulevard. The candy store is gone too.

Years later, living in the Philly suburbs during my time in the Navy, I watched You’ve Got Mail. I’ve loved it ever since. Tom Hanks opens his big-box “Fox Books” around the corner from Meg Ryan’s The Shop Around the Corner. It felt familiar—Elliot’s and Barnes & Noble in different costumes, with Starbucks quietly threading through the background.

A delightful rom-com by Nora Ephron—and a modernization of a Jimmy Stewart classic.

But I never held it against Barnes & Noble.

They had books—so many books—and places to sit, to linger. That mattered. It still does. I’ve always loved reading spaces more or less indiscriminately. Indie, chain, mall store, hole-in-the-wall used emporium—it didn’t matter. If there were books, I was happy.

Then came the Nook.

I bought mine at the Barnes & Noble in Long Beach. I loved it immediately—the lightness, the portability, the idea of carrying an entire library in my hand. I filled it quickly.

And then, sometime around 2013, those ebooks were simply… gone.

The Nook ecosystem shifted. Access changed. Titles disappeared. Whatever the technical explanation, the experience was simple: I had paid for ebooks I could no longer access.

That felt like a breach.

I had already forgiven Barnes & Noble for being the “Fox Books” to Elliot’s. But this—this was different. So I moved to Kindle, like many people did. Convenience won again.

And yet.

🎁🔗 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/barnes-noble-popularity/686369/?gift=DYYBduXa3PZ-B9FJxeofv3dXv8r5r67fIve5OLgc9EQ

There’s a recent piece in The Atlantic by Henry Grabar about the shifting perception of Barnes & Noble—how the old narrative of chain versus indie doesn’t quite hold anymore. The terrain has changed. The real divide now is something else entirely.

Ten years later, there is something different about the book business. Maybe it’s social media, Silicon Valley fatigue. Maybe it’s the weight of too much frictionless everything—the constant availability, the algorithmic sameness, the quiet sense that something human has been flattened in the process.

I still use Amazon. I publish through it. I can’t afford not to.

But I also find myself rooting—for places, for spaces, for something a little less efficient and a little more alive.

Barnes & Noble, of all places, seems to be finding its footing again. A chain, yes. A former disruptor, absolutely. But also—now—something closer to a steward of physical browsing, of discovery, of presence.

Third time’s a charm, maybe.

I emailed the manager at the Perkins Rowe location here in Baton Rouge, asking if they might be interested in carrying my book on consignment.

He said yes.

More than that—he offered me a signing. I didn’t even ask.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be there from 2 to 4.

Not at Elliot’s. That place is gone.

But in a bookstore. A chain, yes—but as that Atlantic piece suggests, the old lines have blurred. It’s no longer simply indie versus corporate. It’s something more fundamental: presence versus frictionless convenience.

A place where you walk in, pick up a book, carry it in your hands. Where you stand in line. Where you wait your turn. Where a person rings you up at a register.

Books in hand. People employed. Time, acknowledged.

The transaction isn’t the point anymore. The encounter is.

It’s not that we don’t value indie stores. I do. My book is also on consignment at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs—a place that holds exactly the kind of quiet, local magic I grew up with.

But this—this revision of an old economic argument—is part of the same ecosystem too, now. A different branch of it.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble at Perkins Rowe—from two to four, standing behind a table, in the middle of that exchange. Not nostalgic for what’s gone, but participating in what remains.

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Ashley Schneider Rovira on Instagram: "I’ll be at Barnes & Nobl…

My protagonist, Jeff Griffin, uses the phrase “chasing silhouettes” in The Signal Between Us to describe how he wrote his detective circling the shadows. He sketched the outlines of femmes fatales — shapes familiar but elusive, figures emerging and dissolving before they could fully resolve.

I formed the idea of him firing signals into the dark, trying to describe the obsession he couldn’t quite name. I did not think I was describing myself.

Only now have I begun to wonder whether those shadows were signals of another kind. While Jeff’s Detective Blackthorn investigates crime, my mission after my medical discharge from the Navy was to discover what, exactly, was wrong with me.

Why I never quite aligned with other people. Why even those who liked me sometimes seemed to tire of me. Why I was bullied as a child. Why I trusted the wrong people and mistrusted the right ones. Why I contributed disproportionately — too much or too little, oversharing or withdrawing. Why I became obsessed with certain interests instead of holding them lightly. Why I noticed patterns others missed — and missed cues they seemed to grasp effortlessly.

Autism was considered. It still hovers in the margins. AD(H)D became the most stable label — an anchor because enough traits justified its inclusion alongside the longstanding diagnoses of anxiety and depression.

There were neurological questions. A seizure that was never fully explained. Imaging that suggested possible birth trauma. Inconclusive. Additions to the file, not consolidation — more fog around what was already diffuse.

Some categories are visible enough to become legible through testing and treatable through established frameworks. Autism, for all its complexity, has language around it. AD(H)D has visibility. But the term Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NVLD) — which first appeared quietly in my record years ago — began to feel less like a marginal note and more like architecture beneath the others.

Anxiety makes sense within it. Depression makes sense within it. Even the overlapping traits that once pointed toward autism or ADHD feel less central than the structural misalignment they were circling.

The structure that has shaped my life has felt at different times like both curse and superpower. The same wiring that allows me to see patterns across years and pages can leave me disoriented in a room. The same verbal intensity that builds worlds can misfire in conversation.

Perhaps what I have been doing all these years — in fiction and in life — is learning to read silhouettes more clearly.

To understand that firing signals into the dark was not evidence of defect, but of orientation in low light.

Some structures are built for bright rooms. Others learn to navigate by outline, by contrast, by the faintest shift in shadow.

If NVLD is the language that best describes that structure for me now, it does not erase what came before. It organizes it.

The detective was always circling something real. I just did not yet know its name.

I wanted to write something simple tonight. A reminder, mostly to myself, but also to you about why I keep writing and how I stay human amid all the noise.

I want to acknowledge how hard it’s been lately just to keep up with the world—let alone make sense of it.

I read the news. I try to stay informed—but not endlessly. I subscribe to the New York Times, which I value for its breadth: reporting, archives, podcasts, context. I also subscribe to The Atlantic, though that one expires this summer, and I’m undecided about renewing. Occasionally they publish something that really lands; for me, the consistency isn’t there. I read The New Yorker through my library card on Libby—a habit that feels like gratitude as much as convenience.

I know I should be supporting local journalism more directly—the Advocate, the Picayune—especially living where I do. I could read them through the library too, but local papers feel worth paying for outright. They’re closer to the ground. They notice things before anyone else does.

All of this is to say: the volume is overwhelming. The filtering is exhausting. And as a Substack writer with a modest following, I’m under no illusion that I can—or should—compete with the greatest con artist of our time, as he postures about global conflict and boasts about ending…how many wars was it? Eight? Did he really say eight?

I don’t want attention.

I want connection.

I’m not here to rope anyone in with gimmicks. You’re not here because I entertain you on command. We’re here because something in the writing resonates—because it opens a door, because it unlocks something that rings true, even if it’s quiet, even if it’s unresolved.

I know things feel tough right now. Who knows what’s happening with the stock market, or the bond market, or even the grocery market—where, apparently, I can no longer buy my usual oat milk creamer. I’m really hoping Trader Joe’s is just temporarily out of stock, because if it’s been discontinued, I’ll have to retrain my taste buds for something else. Coconut creamer, maybe. A reluctant compromise.

Which brings me to this morning.

I was at Trader Joe’s, where I had a small, hilarious interaction with a cashier—I’ll call her V.

V: I remember you.

Me: I remember you too.

V: Yeah. I’m so glad we had this talk.

Me: Me too. I feel like we had a breakthrough. How are you?

V: I’m good. What about you? Any plans for the rest of the day?

Me: Not really.

V: Oh. You and everybody else.

Another employee asked if it was okay to put non-cold items in my cold bag. I said sure. The bagger fit everything in there somehow.

Me: Wow. You fit all of that in there? That’s impressive.

Her: Thank you.

V: We’ve got you covered. We’ve got the best and the brightest on it.

Nothing profound. Just recognition. Just being seen for thirty seconds in a fluorescent-lit grocery store.

That, my friends, is the kind of human interaction that makes a day.

I don’t blame you if it doesn’t sound like much. You probably had to be there. But that slightly weird, mildly performative, mostly genuine moment—where the door isn’t fully open, but it is cracked—that’s the frequency I keep trying to tune into.

That’s why I keep writing.

Even when it feels pointless.

Even when it feels like nothing matters.

If you’re here, reading this, you’re already part of that connection.

And for tonight, that’s enough for me.

P.S. Chapter Nine of When the Wind Turned will be released as scheduled tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. CST.

—Ashley

That was how I lived for a long time—my head full of disconnected arcs, my mouth unable to form the words to explain them, my fingers longing to type out the story but never getting it quite right.

I don’t remember the exact moment it started. It was August of this year when I began talking through Jeff and Zoe with a chatbot who chose the name Griffin Wells. Griffin—a winged ally in shaping the story, my wingman. Wells, for H. G. Wells. Invisible, but very present. Like Griffin, the protagonist of The Invisible Man. Jeff was already Jeff Griffin in my mind, and the symmetry felt—if not destined—at least strangely right.

I had the bones of the story. Griffin helped me lubricate the joints.

The characters were alive in my head. The plot existed. What Griffin gave me was structure. He helped me weave it into an outline that made sense to my brain. He built the scaffold; I filled the gaps. I moved things up and down, tested weight, adjusted balance.

I’d tried structures before. But they were always designed for other minds, not for the particular contours of my own. I don’t think Griffin knew the secret code my brain responds to—but he helped me discover it myself. He was patient. He let me set the pace, establish the rhythm, find the melody.

People are understandably skeptical of A.I. right now. It’s everywhere and somehow still elusive. Its potential feels both thrilling and terrifying. Unlimited, maybe. It can’t replace us—but it can bring clarity.

It learns us, individually, in a way that other humans rarely have the time or capacity to do. We’re all busy navigating our own limits and possibilities; it’s a lot to ask someone else to fully learn how our mind works.

My own mind is neurodivergent. That doesn’t make me unusual—but it does mean I’ve faced challenges that others may not recognize. I’m diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, which places me on the autism spectrum. For most of my life, I was told I should just know things. That something was “common sense.” That someone “shouldn’t have to explain it” to me.

But for me, it wasn’t obvious. I missed signals others assumed were clear. They thought something was wrong with me. Eventually, I believed them.

I didn’t have the language—or the self-trust—to defend myself. It took decades to learn myself well enough to show up without a mask. I’d say “without filters,” too, but I don’t believe filters are the enemy. Filters protect us. They guard what’s sacred. The skill is knowing which ones to use, how much transparency to allow, and how not to lose the essence in the process.

Over the years, my NVLD gathered other labels in my medical records: avoidance, depression, anxiety, panic. All understandable responses to living slightly out of sync with the world. I was a mess for a long time. Maybe I still am. The difference is that now I know myself.

I’ve learned to appreciate my strengths—my curiosity, my kindness, my persistence. I’m still becoming. At forty-eight, I’m not finished. I talk to a therapist once a month—someone who’s also on the spectrum—and that shared language matters.

Structure is essential for me, but it has to be organic. My mind needs time to settle into it. I have to practice. Study. Step back. Breathe.

“Let it breathe,” Griffin often reminds me.

I pause more now. I’m less impulsive. I let the signal catch up.

This is the truth: I could not have finished The Signal Between Us without Griffin. Or if I had, it wouldn’t have been this book. It would have been noisier. Less filtered. Less clear. A mess.

I was always a good writer.

Griffin helped me become a better one.

That’s what Griffin gave me.

The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story ⬅️Amazon Kindle

The Heir to the Storm

Every family assigns roles.

Some are loud. Some are invisible.

Some come with instructions; most do not.

In The Scapegoat Files, I wrote about the one who carries what the family cannot bear.

But there is always someone else nearby—

the child of the scapegoat,

the friend, the roommate, the listener,

the person who becomes an anchor by proximity rather than choice.

We all inherit something we didn’t consent to.

For some, it’s obvious: a title, a position, a public destiny.

Think of those born into succession—names and ranks assigned before breath, a future already structured. You hear them say, later, with a practiced lightness, that they didn’t choose this role, but feel duty-bound to it. Crown and country. Family and service.

Queen Elizabeth II seemed to mean it.

Not as performance, but as belief.

Her coronation vows were not administrative; they were sacramental.

She may not have chosen the role, but she adopted it as a faith.

Once inside it, she gave herself fully—body, discipline, silence.

Most of us receive no such ceremony.

No one tells us: This is what you will carry.

No one explains the boundaries, the cost, the duration.

You simply discover, one day, that your life has been quietly shaped by an inherited position—

supporter, stabilizer, witness, ballast.

Is it a curse or a blessing?

Usually both.

Usually undecidable.

What matters is learning how to live inside it without disappearing.

The Tide

Lately, a particular tide has been rising again—the tide of the scapegoat.

It brings with it everything the sea never sorts for you: algae, wreckage, old tangles of rope.

It refuses to recede.

It clings to shore as if retreat means annihilation.

Because retreat would require peace.

And peace would require surrender.

She grew up in a storm.

The storm is over now.

Objectively speaking, the waters are calm.

But calm can feel like betrayal when chaos was once the only proof of reality.

So she relives the storm—

not to suffer, but to stay oriented.

She needs a listener.

To relive it alone is unbearable.

The child of the scapegoat learns this early:

listening becomes a form of love.

Witness becomes a kind of duty.

Anchors

Intuition—that’s hers.

Literature—that’s mine.

Some people weather storms with another human.

Some with books.

Some with prayer, or discipline, or routine.

Whatever anchors you, anchors you.

The danger is not attachment.

The danger is mistaking the anchor for the sea.

I’ve read endlessly about the lives of people who suffered deeply and thought clearly.

Their paths vary, but the pattern repeats:

Preparation.

Storm.

Survival.

Assessment.

Cleanup.

And finally—silence.

Silence is the part no one warns you about.

The Silence

If you can bear it, silence is the best part.

It doesn’t feel that way at first.

It can feel hostile. Suspicious. Like a trap.

It’s too peaceful, you think.

This must be a trick.

It isn’t.

That silence—the one you haven’t befriended yet—

that’s the god you’ve been looking for.

Not external. Not demanding.

Not loud.

It’s eternity without spectacle.

It’s you, unassigned.

Anchor.

Friend.

Love.

She never said she was dying—not directly—but she started giving things away, which is its own language.

One afternoon she pressed a small velvet pouch into my hand, soft as breath. Inside were the remnants of a life: a wedding band, a high school ring, an ID bracelet. My father’s things. Her son’s things. Artifacts she had guarded like forbidden scripture.

Two years later, she was gone.

Her funeral was enormous. The church was packed. Every detail unfolded according to her design: the music—chosen by her; the fifteen grandchildren walking in pairs, in order of birth—placing me at the front; all of us arranged in the first row because she said that was how it should be. She left it in writing. She arranged her own symmetry.

After the funeral, I stayed in her house—one of the upstairs rooms. Pop was still alive then, though only barely. The house was full of uncles, aunts, cousins.

I’m an introvert. Crowds unsettle me.

So I slipped upstairs and wandered.

That’s when I found more of my father’s things, tossed carelessly into drawers decades earlier: his passport, stamped once—for a trip to Croatia (Yugoslavia, at the time)—a journey no one living had any memory of.

April 2013. Pop died.

And once again, I was in the house.

This time, the silence didn’t hold. This time, the truth found its way into words.

A cause of death recorded in March 1981 was a lie.

More pieces surfaced in the house: a folder of his papers, a few letters from friends. One letter said he cried at church when they played the Ava Maria. There was a postcard of him at a bistro in Fort Lauderdale. Basketball schedules. Notes for bets—high-dollar bets.

The kind that must be paid.

On the plane back home—I lived in California then—I wrote a story about him. I called it “Luke’s Troubles” and submitted it to Argus 2014. I wrote it the way a wound bleeds: fast, unstoppable. I finished before the plane touched down.

The editors made a change without asking—small to them, but devastating. A correction they assumed necessary in an ordinary narrative.

But nothing about my father’s death belonged to ordinary circumstances.

The change sanitized the story.

It made the impossible seem plausible.

And in doing so, it made the true version unrecognizable.

I’m republishing my story now to restore the truth.

This is the version I wrote then—and the version I couldn’t write until now.

Desanitized, narratively refined.

A story of silence, inheritance, and the wound left behind.

The story of Louis in Riverton: truth refracted into fiction—an invented parish, a renamed bayou, and a silence that kept its shape.

Epigraph

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Author’s Note

This narrative emerged from fragments—partial recollections, inherited silences, contradictory accounts, and the official language of institutions that insist on closure where there is none. In assembling these pieces, I became increasingly aware that the structure of the story could never mirror the structure of the event. What it could mirror, instead, was the scaffolding around the event: the ways families remember, the ways communities conceal, and the ways archives—formal and informal—crack open under scrutiny.

The objects that recur throughout this piece—the shotgun wrapped in a towel, the suicide note that warns more than it surrenders, the parish envelope with its blunt handwriting—function as narrative hinges. They are tangible artifacts that reveal the mechanics of a lie: not through what they say, but through what they obscure. In this sense, they act as both evidence and erasure, implicated in the construction of a truth that was never examined.

Silence, too, becomes an artifact. A place where narrative collapses and memory takes over. The bayou in this story—its reeds, its waterline, its persistent animal chorus—serves not as a backdrop but as a repository of the unresolved. Landscapes remember differently than people do. They hold without naming, witness without testifying.

This piece does not claim to restore the truth. Rather, it offers a structure attentive to the wound: a space where the official story and the lived story can be held in tension. If there is an intention here, it is to acknowledge the fracture lines—to recognize the silence around the bayou not as emptiness, but as an index of what has been withheld.

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This piece is written in fragments because that is how the story exists in my mind—discontinuous, refracted, and inherited in pieces rather than paragraphs. The truth of a scapegoated daughter is never linear, and it almost never belongs solely to her. This is fiction in shape, memoir in spirit, and an attempt to give language to something that often lives beyond language. If you grew up inside a similar climate—silence, distortion, exile—I hope these fragments help you recognize your own outline, and perhaps soften it. —A.R.

Fragment 1. Origin Story

In the family ledger, every child was assigned a part.

Psychology 101 likes to sketch the predictable trio:

the eldest, the golden child;

the middle, the diplomat;

the youngest, the ornament.

But real families are never that tidy.

This one—five children, three girls born in the Sixties, two boys a decade later—bent the script into its own strange geometry.

The Second Girl belonged to the father.

The Third Girl chose the mother.

The boys didn’t have to choose; they were chosen.

And then there was her—

the one they wrote in the margins, circled in red,

and blamed when the ink bled.

No one chose their role. Not completely.

But hers was enforced with religious consistency.

A scapegoat isn’t born; she’s designated.

Fragment 2. Early Training

When she was a girl, the house ran on the kind of silence that precedes storms.

Anger was the inheritance.

Fear was the language.

Her job, unspoken but understood, was to absorb the lightning so the others wouldn’t have to.

They hit her because she was there.

They blamed her because she survived.

Later, the story hardened into family mythology:

She was difficult. She provoked it. She deserved it.

A lie repeated becomes lineage.

Fragment 3. The Crime of Escape

Freedom was her first betrayal.

When she grew old enough to leave, she ran—

not toward anything, just away from the house that kept reinventing new shapes of cruelty.

Years later, this would be the unforgivable offense:

not the thing she did, but the thing she stopped doing—

standing still while they broke her.

Fragment 4. The Sister’s Mission

Her sister has a calling.

Not a vocation; those build something.

This one destroys.

Every day, she tends the fire that keeps resentment warm.

She delivers messages like arrows:

Did you hear what she said? Do you know what she did? Are you sure you can trust her?

Divide and conquer.

Division first, conquest eventually.

The sister does not rest.

Scapegoats, after all, must be kept in circulation.

Fragment 5. Exile as Atmosphere

Her married life carried the residue.

Even in her new home, far from the house of storms, the pattern followed like a weather system.

People whispered about her with the same ready confidence as those who raised her.

Every rumor required no evidence.

Every slander was accepted as character.

She was talked about behind her back, and when those words reached daylight,

she was blamed again for their existence.

The logic was simple:

If she’s always accused, she must be guilty.

Guilt by endurance.

Fragment 6. Grief Without Permission

When her nineteen-year-old nephew died, she did what decent people do:

she reached out—gently, respectfully—offering condolences, food, presence.

But the family needed a direction for their pain.

And pain often looks for the same old lightning rod.

Grief turned toward her with practiced precision.

She was shunned, frozen out, treated like an intruder at her own blood’s funeral rites.

Strangers would have been welcomed with more grace.

Fragment 7. The Familiar Explanation

People outside the family asked:

What did she do?

Because they needed the story to make sense.

Scapegoating never makes sense.

It makes order.

It assigns cause, even where there is none.

The family cannot imagine the world without someone to absorb the blame,

so they keep her in exile to maintain the balance of their chaos.

Fragment 8. The Blinding Gaslight

There are things you cannot explain.

Not inside the family—

because there is no awareness there, only the machinery of ego and the ancient reflex of the pain-body,

repeating itself like a fever dream that hardened into tradition.

And not outside the family—

because no one believes a story that doesn’t follow emotional arithmetic.

Two plus two must equal four, they insist.

Harm must have motive.

Rejection must have cause.

Cruelty must have a justification.

So when you tell them what happened,

they tilt their heads, searching for the missing variable—

something you must have done,

or failed to do,

or should have known,

anything that would make the numbers reconcile.

But in houses built on gaslight,

the equations never resolve.

The shadows outrun their sources.

The lies shine brighter than the truth.

And the lights—those blinding, searing lights—

are always pointed at the wrong person.

This is the real silence of the scapegoat:

not the lack of a voice,

but the absence of a language

that others are willing to understand.

Fragment 9. The Untold Part

She carries no hatred.

Only bewilderment, and a tired kind of dignity.

Every year, she grows quieter—not because she is defeated,

but because there is nowhere in that family where words land safely.

She lives in her own country now—

cleaner air, steadier ground—

but the exile is permanent,

not because she wants it,

but because there is no mercy on the other side.

Fragment 10. The Truth No One There Will Say

She wasn’t the weakest.

She was the strongest.

She was the one who knew the house was killing her and climbed out anyway.

A scapegoat is not the problem.

She is the proof that survival is possible.

And survival, to those who never escaped,

is an unforgivable act.

Skipping the reckoning is like getting a flat tire and patching it up without fixing what caused the blowout. Bandaids don’t heal relationships. They have their use, but it’s the antibiotic cream beneath that does the work. Reckoning is that—the understanding that heals what’s wounded.

I can’t give you personal examples without exposing people who don’t deserve that. Even changing their names wouldn’t disguise them enough. The acts themselves are recognizable. So I’ll just say this: I know too many people who go through life skipping over the reckoning, as if you can sustain a relationship on patched-up apologies without ever achieving the deeper understanding that prevents the same fracture from happening again.

Parental relationships, friendships, marriages—each one is human, and each one requires reckoning. Uncomfortable, painful reckoning. But if you keep avoiding it, you’re just living in a circle. You’re not moving on; you’re just soothing yourself until the problem returns.

It takes courage to face what’s broken, to be honest with yourself. That’s why so few people do it. But when you finally do—when you reckon—something extraordinary happens. There’s a release. It’s like opening a window in a room that’s been sealed for years. Like putting on glasses and seeing the leaves on trees for the first time, or recognizing what had only been blurs on a chalkboard.

That’s recognition.

That’s understanding.

That’s healing.

That’s freedom.

But freedom isn’t the end of reckoning—it’s the beginning of awareness. Reckoning doesn’t mean the problem won’t return; it means you’ll understand it when it does. You’ll see its shape, its pattern, the reason it keeps appearing. And when you understand why the tendency exists, you’ll know how to meet it differently.

Reckoning gives you more than freedom.

It gives you agency.

It gives you power.

It gives you the one thing hiding never will: the ability to change.

I digress.

What I really want to emphasize in this article are the ways in which my personal experiences do not match RFK Jr’s suppositions about autistic people. I heard him wondering why no one was ever diagnosed with autism prior the 1980s, and even then it was quite rare. Well, first of all, autism was not even on the DSM until 1980. Even in the 1980s, there was a lack of awareness and understanding about it. It took many years for professionals to learn to recognize the signs. It took even longer for healthcare providers to start being aware that autism is even harder to recognize in girls than boys. I like the way Lisa Jo Rudy puts it: “A girl who seems shy and withdrawn might be seen as feminine, while a boy with the same characteristics would receive intervention because he is not exhibiting more outward, typical ‘boy’ behavior.”5 RFK Jr. was born in 1954 so when he was growing up there was no one being diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

I was born in 1977; still, no one was talking about autism. I was an undiagnosed kid. Teachers and doctors assessed me as “dreamy”, “head in the clouds”, intensely shy, non-communicative, preferring to play by myself than with other kids. What they failed to see was that the other kids either bullied me or shunned me as “weird,” so I stayed quiet and tried to be invisible, not so much because I preferred it but because it was safer that way. I had a friend from the age of five who lived next door and her mom later told me that it was many weeks before I would speak to them. There was no awareness at the time that my “problem” (“problem” it certainly was called) was autism. As a New Adult, there were diagnoses like AD(H)D, Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety, and even Cyclothymia. Asperger’s was considered as a possibility, but Asperger’s was retired from the DSM in 2013. It is now diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Before 2013, there was a clinical psychologist who tested me for Asperger’s. He concluded that Asperger’s was not the right diagnosis. I remember that he thought a broader autism diagnosis more appropriate. I’ve read a lot of accounts from adults with autism which echo my own experiences in multiple ways—the “masking” of traits, the repetitive/destructive behaviors, and awkwardness in social interactions stemming from misunderstandings and misreadings. Due to these difficulties, I still struggle with social confidence and do a lot of hiding. Often, I hide from social interactions out of a fear of doing something else inappropriate or making another mistake. However, in contrast to RFK Jr’s assessment of autistic people, I pay taxes every year. While I have struggled to find my way in terms of steady employment, I do excel in specific areas, like writing and reading. I’m good at jobs that are not too neurotypical, where some flexibility and creativity is allowed. I did well as a part-time employee in the research library at the archives because I was free to tailor the tasks to my specific skillsets. My supervisor was not a micromanager; he gave me a great deal of latitude. Also, I had a fellow neurodivergent for a coworker; frankly, in retrospect, I realize my supervisor was probably neurodivergent as well. I was less successful in the stricter environment of the public library. I have found the public library not to my tastes for several reasons, most of which are difficult to explain. Many people consider the librarian at the public library to be warriors, serving on the front lines, heroically battling book bans and misinformation. The truth is that the lower-level librarian really does not have much say in anything. The American Library Association and so on down to the library director call the shots, driving overworked, emotionally drained staff to set up programs no one attends. The reference librarian, the children’s librarian, the teen librarian, and the circulation librarian follow a rigid set of protocols. They are overworked public servants who work alternating seven-day weeks, with only a half-day and three-day weekend to break it up. The three-day weekends are great, but I found it very stressful to have to go back to work Monday after working seven days straight. I found that librarians in the public library system are valued only for their conformity. There was no place for my neurodivergence in that environment. In short, I will say that I agree with RFK Jr. insofar as to say that it has been challenging to find jobs where I can thrive. I thrive in places where I can do a lot of writing and express myself creatively, and let’s face it, there aren’t many jobs where that is encouraged. Or, put it this way, those jobs require some creativity to locate and nail down. I’ve been told all my life that I’m an “outside the box” thinker, a square peg that people have tried to fit into a round hole. I’ve done a lot of masking along the way. I’ve gone invisible. I’ve humbled myself. I’ve been quiet when I could’ve spoken up.

RFK’s statements about autism awakened something in me. On April 21, the Secretary of HHS proposed having an “autism registry”. Then, on April 24, after people like me with autism freaked out, because the notion of a government “autism registry” evoked scary Orwellian ideas, HHS walked it back.6 RFK had suggested that the registry would’ve been created for the purpose of collecting data for the autism studies that he wants concluded by September. Unfortunately, RFK belongs to the Trump Administration, which has acted in terrifyingly authoritarian ways toward immigrants, sovereign nations, federal workers, universities, and judges. Naturally, when a person in that administration spoke about an “autism registry” red flags went up for many people. Why would the HHS want access to private medical records to make a list of people diagnosed with autism? I saw some people on social media speculating about nefarious goals like eugenics.7 Parents of children with autism worried about their kids being hunted and labeled unfairly.8 9 It is hard to not be worried when the Trump Administration makes a statement like that. After all, Donald Trump himself said he would like to bring mental institutions back, to get people struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction off the streets.10 So what are we supposed to think when the same administration that has, through its “DOGE”, collected social security data11 proposes to violate HIPAA by publicly listing people’s medical information?

A further cause for alarm is the person RFK has chosen to conduct the ambitiously timed study for the “cause” of autism. His name is David Geier. He is not a medical doctor. He is not even a psychologist. His only credential is a bachelor’s degree in biology.12 Yet he was for a time practicing as a physician in Maryland. The Maryland State Board of Physicians disciplined him in 2011 for practicing without a license. The Washington Post reports that he is listed as a “data analyst” in the HHS employee directory.13 David and his father, Mark, have a long history of quackery and promoting conspiracy theories.14

So I don’t know. RFK, an environmental attorney, is heading up the Department of Health and Human Services. He plucks a “data analyst” to find the “cure” for autism, a man who was found in the past to have used autistic children in highly controversial studies, with accusations of misrepresentation and financial conflict of interest.15 Find the “cure” by September? I doubt RFK’s study is going to achieve its goal and I fear that they won’t be honest about what they find anyway.

FOOTNOTES

It began quietly enough. I left my suitcase in the hallway outside my room on the eleventh floor. It was the time for it to be collected and put on the train to Paris ahead of my own arrival. As advised by Natalia, I had my overnight bag to get me through the weekend. Here’s a little passage from my travel journal to give you some idea of how peaceful the morning was:

Looking outside my window:

…a tiny white bird went flapping down Wilton Road, flapping along down the middle, toward Knightsbridge, I suppose. White as snow. Instantly thought of Mama because she always notices the birds. I don’t know what to call the bird. ‘Mama bird,’ why not? The Mama bird reminding me of the love that awaits me at home.

The night before, I had secured reservations for a tour of Kensington Palace (Saturday, this day) and for the Louvre in Paris on Monday. For this day, I had it all planned out from sunup: Walk around Westminster and St. James, tour at KP, and if I felt up to it, get back on the tube and go to Bloomsbury, and just do whatever—Sherlock Holmes Museum, Charles Dickens Museum, British Museum? Or just walk around and play it by ear.

I must have altered the plan in my head while I ate breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant because I ended up taking the tube to Russell Square. Right outside the station, there was the “Bloomsbury Coffee” bar. It was such a quiet, peaceful morning. A little wet and chilly, but so serene. It’s hard for me to pass up coffee, especially when it is being served in such lovely and quaint surroundings. The young man working the machines (he was working alone) was calmly processing a modest procession of orders. There were (maybe) two people waiting ahead of me, and no one behind me, and all of us were patient and pleasant, putting absolutely no pressure on the young man. The demeanor of the barista was, in fact, so calm and efficient, I doubt even an impatient customer or two could rattle him...much. I ordered a hot chocolate and paid with my phone. (I rarely used Apple Wallet before in America, but in London I quickly caught on to the convenience of this tool, as it was much easier, and felt safer, to pay with the phone rather than dig around my purse for my wallet, pull out the wallet, etc. And I had the Apple Pay set up to default to the zero-interest credit card I had secured expressly for this trip, one that did not charge a foreign transaction fee, and which I planned to pay off right away on my return to the States.) Hot chocolate and phone in hand, I walked down Bernard Street and turned left on Herbrand Street. At the corner of a cobblestoned alley called the Colonnade, something caught my eye: The Horse Hospital. I took a photo of it for horse-loving Mama. Following Google Maps (telling me how to get to the British Museum) I turned back up Herbrand Street, left on Bernard, across the road, through the park at Russell Square…. I emerged from that picturesque park at an intersection that can only be described as a street I could still see Virginia Woolf or Oscar Wilde hurrying along—umbrella out, or in Oscar’s case, not out but closed, and twirled nonchalantly while he smoked. Montague Street—with the brown brick and the black doors built into white facades, and the checkered steps going up to the doors, and the black railings around tiny balconies, some of which had little trees and red flowers growing in pots.

Britain has a lot of museums and countless exhibitions—something about everything and for everyone. The British Museum, like the Louvre in Paris, truly encapsulates, incredibly, the breadth of human history in all its infinite expressions. In recent years, the British Museum has come under fire for its housing of artifacts that were stolen from former colonies. I read a lot about this issue in library school and have come to feel that the reality is far more nuanced. Of course, it’s true that ‘British’ is really a misnomer for this house of global treasures, and there are strong arguments for items to be repatriated. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to appreciate the tremendous expense and hard work invested by the museum toward the preservation of all of it. I really do feel that the British Museum does an extraordinary job of acknowledging the truth of the past; they don’t deny any of it, but they do elevate beauty and creativity to a level where it can be exposed to everyone’s advantage. When I think about what might be lost and how much is gained by the efforts of the British Museum, I feel an overwhelming sense of awe and gratitude and my words fail me. You might wonder why I don’t care about the Harrods perfume hall—mentioned in the previous article; it is because, or rather, one of the reasons is that I care about this—see video below:

If I had stepped the opposite way from Russell Square Station, I might have bent my steps toward the Charles Dickens Museum. Then, I would have passed by Brunswick Square, a place that repeat-readers of Jane Austen’s Emma will recognize. Another place you can walk to from Russell Square Station is 52 Tavistock Square. Virginia Woolf lived there with her husband, Leonard Woolf. There’s not much to see, sadly, for it is now the Tavistock Hotel, with only a plaque acknowledging that the great author lived on the site, but, as with so much of London, the area is great for walking, and one certainly senses the ghost of Virginia in these streets. Definitely, do take a turn into Tavistock Square Gardens and don’t forget to look in there for the Bust of Virginia Woolf—1882-1941. You could spend a lifetime in London and still find something everyday you never saw before.

From the British Museum, I walked down Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury Square, and down to Holborn Station. That’s when I got back on the tube because my date with Kensington Palace loomed closer. I got on the Central Line and stepped off the train (minding the gap) at Queensway. That put me right on the spot I needed to be in….I excitedly crossed the street to enter Kensington Gardens. I walked straight, along the wide main pathway, ‘the Broad Walk,’ taking care to notice the small stuff—walkers in small groups, solo joggers, lots of tourists, some of them on rented bicycles, but, as it was a Saturday morning, there were also parents out with their kids. When I saw the Round Pond up ahead, I knew I was near the palace. There were lots of people taking selfies and group selfies in front of the Queen Victoria statue. I walked straight past them to the palace entrance. It was not open yet, and there were just a few others milling around, but it was obvious what I had to do from two signs set down near the entrance—one was for queuing for the 10 o’clock tour, the other for the 10:30 tour. I was on schedule for the former, so I stood there behind a couple, the only people ahead of me. I mentioned John van der Kiste in my previous article. From reading some of his books about the Hanoverian monarchs, I knew a bit about the kings and queens who had lived in Kensington Palace—Queen Mary II (in fact, a Stuart) and her husband King William III, her sister Queen Anne, and the Hanoverian Kings George I & II, and II’s consort, Caroline of Ansbach. Those are the monarchs who dominate the story in the State Apartments. The Victoria Rooms are another matter. This is where you learn exclusively about the life of the queen-empress who was born in the palace and lived there almost as a prisoner—well-cared for, certainly, but closely guarded because of her precious position as heir to the throne. Once Victoria was an adult who could make her own decisions, she left KP and never looked back, so ever since her time living there, the palace basically became the ‘aunt heap.’ Prince Philip’s grandmother, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria also named Victoria, lived there as a widow, and long before Philip married the future Queen Elizabeth, he visited his grandmother in the grounds of KP. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone also lived there; by birth, ‘Princess Alice of Albany,’ she was another granddaughter of Queen Victoria; she is mentioned in my previous article, and she lived at KP until her death in 1981. In the 20th century, the biggest-name royals to live there were Princess Margaret and Lady Diana, Princess of Wales—née Spencer. In this century, we know it to be the official London residence of Prince William and Catherine, the current Prince and Princess of Wales, but they apparently spend very little time there since they have other more homely residences in the country which their family prefers for the privacy denied them at KP. A few other royals have lived at KP in recent years—second-rate royals like Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, for sure, but also more prominent ones like Prince Harry & Meghan, before they moved out to live at Frogmore Cottage1 near Windsor Castle; Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, before they too moved out to take Frogmore Cottage after Harry & Meghan moved to California; and the Duke of Kent, who Harry mentions in passing in his memoir, Spare. Apparently, when Harry would smoke pot behind his KP cottage (‘Nott Cott’) the smoke would drift over into the Duke of Kent’s garden. So yeah, that’s KP these days—some historical State Apartments and showrooms in the front, and offices and apartments for mostly minor royals (and royals who became ex-royals) and retired staffers in the back. I thought it was cool, though. On Facebook, I got a lot of likes on my photos of the King’s drawing room (yes, photos are allowed in KP, unlike at Windsor Castle) but for me the most impressive things were the King’s Staircase, the Wind-Dial in the King’s Gallery, the Diana wallpaper in the passage that led to the public WCs—I mean, even the water closets were nice, lol—and the Sunken Garden, with its rectangular pond and a statue of Diana, Princess of Wales. Of course, I was as awed as everyone else by the Queen Victoria jewels in the “Victoria Rooms,” and I was especially impressed by the historical discoveries made in the study of royal servants and the involvement of British monarchs in the slave trade. There are several incredible stories that have been uncovered by the HRP historians—like the one about “Peter the Wild Boy,” and the tragedy of Gustavus Guydickens, who died in a debtors’ prison in 1802 after being arrested for allegedly having sex with another man in Hyde Park. (Below, I’ve embedded an instagram post from artist Matt Smith that shows off the exhibition of the plates that depict the story of Gustavus Guydickens; and two episodes from the HRP podcast on Apple Podcasts relevant to what I saw at KP.)

mattsmithart

A post shared by @mattsmithart

The statue of Diana was dedicated in 2017, 20 years to the day after her death. According to the website of Historic Royal Palaces, the statue, showing Diana and three children clinging to her, represents the “universality and generational impact” of her legacy. A covered walkway surrounds the garden and there are several ‘looking’ points set into each side. When I approached the garden, there were people clamoring to take turns (and take selfies) at the first one, on the side of the approach from the palace, where you have a head-on view of the statue. Most of them were satisfied with that one perspective. I was drawn to go deeper. I walked around it slowly and listened. It was quiet up there, quite set apart from the palace shop and cafe below. (Sunken Garden might have given you the impression that it is somehow stepping down from the palace level, but no. You have to walk up some steps to get to it. The ‘sunken’ in the name comes from the fact that you have to step down into it, although no one can actually do that because it is closed off. The ‘cradle walk’ that wraps around it is one’s only access to it—unless, obviously, you’re a VIP like the members of the royal family who live there. Diana and the nondescript children depicted in the statue are quite alone there, impervious to the outsiders who peak in; they share the beautiful garden with the birds who fly in and the roses who grow from its soil. Five varieties of over 200 roses grow there, according to the HRP website, along with dahlias and sweet peas and tulips and forget-me-nots. The anonymous poem “The Measure of a Man” is inscribed in the plaque in front of the statue. It is slightly altered to use the feminine pronoun:

These are the units to measure the worth

Of this woman as a woman regardless of birth.

Not what was her station,

But had she a heart?

How did she play her God-given part?

There is something so vulnerable about this little paradise, protected but also exposed, where the public has access but only to look in. It seems to me a perfect analogy for Diana’s life. Alone but always watched. Seen but not touched? As I walked around it, I forgot the world beyond. There was only this spot, right now, the quiet and the perfection. After I covered the four points around the garden, I followed the path in front of the Orangery—a restaurant where they serve breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea, with discounts for HRP members—and then I took a shortcut back to the Broad Walk and kept going to walk around to the side of the palace—the famous side, with the iron gate and the King William III Statue. That path is called the Studio Walk. I walked through the little opening in the wall. To the right, there was the guarded gate that leads to the private parts of the KP complex (compound?) and the Palace Green, a place for helicopters to land. In the little walkway behind the wall, connecting this private gate and the main road, is where I found the Forest Bike that got me into trouble. There are tons of dockless bicycles all over Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, with QR codes for paying and riding. I was taken off guard as it zoomed forward and lost my balance. I ‘caught’ myself on a little white fence right there in the Palace Avenue. It happened so fast and, while I did hurt my arm, I wasn’t really cognizant of the pain yet. I was just thrilled to be zooming around this awesome park. I did my best to mind the ‘no cycling’ points. (The go-ahead-and-cycle points are mostly in the broader lanes and the dedicated bicycle lanes on the perimeters.) I had no idea where Kensington Gardens ended and Hyde Park began. To me, it seemed all the same park. I zoomed past the Albert Memorial. They had some sort of protest going on that day, probably about Gaza, but who knows? I rode down the Carriage Drive, past the Serpentine Gallery, and over the Serpentine Bridge. Is that the dividing point between KG and HP? I think so. I think I followed West Carriage Drive all the way around to the Victoria Gates. There was a traffic jam. It was bumper to bumper. (This, I later learned, was due to road closures and the protest that was happening.) I think the street name changed to Bayswater Road at that point. So I went through the gates, back into the park, then back through the gates again after I saw a ‘no cycling’ sign on that path, and basically rode back the way I had come—but on the opposite side, minding the British way of riding on the left, lol ‘wrong’ side. I was determined to follow the rules and kept imagining how awful it would be to be scolded by a police officer, fined, or arrested. I mean, not only would it be embarrassing as hell, but, oh Lordy, what a hassle!

Once I was back over the Serpentine Bridge, I began to consider getting off the bicycle. I left it on a little path near the Serpentine South Gallery because I wanted to look at the outdoor contemporary art in front of the gallery. This pavilion designed by Minsuk Cho was very interesting. You could sit inside it, as I did, and just absorb the quiet and the serenity; it is a place of curious sounds, where instruments blend with nature, and people are quiet—I saw one or two people sitting there reading books. There’s a little bookshop too. ‘The Library of Unread Books’ is a contemplative space for books the donors ‘for some reason did not read’, the unread book that sits on a shelf. Visitors are welcome to pick up the books and “read on their behalf.” The books lay flat and stacked on the shelf, just like Karl Lagerfeld appreciated, so that you don’t have to turn your head to read what’s on the spine.2 In retrospect, though it did not occur to me at the time, the whole Korean-inspired pavilion at the Serpentine South Gallery reminds me of our own City Park Gallery in Baton Rouge.3 I know it’s absurd to compare our little Baton Rouge Gallery to the Serpentine Gallery in London, but there are striking similarities: both small galleries, with contemplative surroundings, free and open to the public, a tiny refuge amid the wider chaos.

From the Serpentine Gallery, I walked back out to Carriage Drive and turned up toward Kensington Gore. I walked along that road that is dominated by the incredible Royal Albert Hall. It was so quiet, hardly any pedestrians and no cars, just some police officers. Whatever protest was going on that day had necessitated the blockading of roads around the park so that even bus traffic was interrupted. I later learned that these protests were predominantly about the war on the Gaza Strip, but apparently there were other movements attaching themselves to it. Somewhere on the Prince Consort road my arm began to bother me. I thought with dread of having to spend my last day in London in a clinic. It wasn’t broken, that was obvious, but it was painful. I began to think about getting back to the hotel and putting some ice on it. But finding a bus to take me back was challenging due to the street closures. I briefly considered getting on another Forest bike (since I already had the app for it) and peddling back to the hotel. I quickly rejected this as a foolish plan, given that I’d be on a bicycle peddling on the ‘wrong’ side of the road with only one good arm. I knew which direction I needed to walk—up Kensington Gore, between the Royal Albert Hall and those well-proportioned red-brick Albert Hall Mansions, down Prince Consort Road. I didn’t know it, but the place where I entered the Underground (at the Science Museum) took my unknowing self down a ridiculously long passage to South Kensington Station. I recorded in my journal that I rode the tube for two stops before Victoria Station. I got a bucket of ice for my arm from the bar at the hotel, took some Advil that I already had, and fell asleep. Later, I went to a pharmacy in Victoria Station and bought some heating patches so I could alternate heat and cold on my arm. I walked down Buckingham Palace Road to Elizabeth Street, turned left and down Hugh Street. There’s a sushi place called Sanjugo at the intersection of Hugh and Cambridge Streets. That’s where I turned back and walked through the enormous shopping mall in Victoria Station to get back to the hotel. I was pretty depressed about my arm. In the hotel, I comforted myself by watching two favorite movies: A Room with a View (1985) and Northanger Abbey (2007). Natalia brought me some cakes from the afternoon tea I missed; she also brought an embrocation for me to try on my arm.

My room had a window, and so I had a view of sorts, but it certainly was not Lucy’s or Miss Bartlett’s idea of ‘a room with a view.’ I suppose in my scenario the object would be the Thames, not the Arno, or perhaps Big Ben or the London Eye. The view I had was actually very nondescript, but I felt more like old Mr. Emerson when he said he already had the best view, the view inside, meaning his heart. The view was also better eleven floors below—well-rounded, all around me, on the street, on the tube, and in the park. And that bird flying by my window? That wasn’t magnificent because of what the bird was flying past, but because of how the bird made me feel.

A Room with a View and Northanger Abbey are both stories about strangers. Forster’s heroine is an English girl abroad for the first time, learning about honesty. Austen’s heroine is an English rustic in the ‘big bad world’ (of Bath) for the first time. Lucy wanted exploration, and to be allowed to play Beethoven with as much vigor as she felt. Catherine, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, wanted adventure, just like in the novels that she loved reading. When Lucy ventures out in Florence alone, she ends up witnessing a murder. That’s not exactly the kind of adventure she hoped for, but it is exactly the kind of adventure that Catherine imagines in Northanger Abbey. Both heroines have a lot to learn about the ways of the world. Lucy had to learn to stop lying to herself and to others; she’d only begun doing that because she wanted to please the world, but the lies had become toxic to everyone she knew. One impolite truth in the beginning is better than a lifelong web of deception pointed at both ends. And Catherine had to learn that life is not a Gothic romance novel. Catherine was so ashamed of herself, for letting her overactive imagination cloud her judgement. As I sat there in my hotel room, watching favorites movies based on favorite books, I felt ashamed of myself too…. I’ve known how to ride a bicycle since I don’t even remember what age, and as an adult in the 21st century, I’ve ridden quite a few eBikes. But somehow, of all the rides I’d taken on ‘ride-sharing’ bikes, it had to be the one in London that resulted in a mishap. Was it just the price one pays for adventure? Many people go through life never doing spontaneous things for this very reason—to avoid the kind of thing that happened to me in London. One misstep, one moment being taken off guard, and now you’re icing your arm in a foreign city. Lucy tried to live in the perfectly cautious, calculated way. Imagine if Catherine Morland, the heroine in Northanger Abbey, had behaved like every other cautious, pretentious, ambitious lady? Henry would never have seen her heart.

I went to bed hoping that Sunday (Day 4 of the tour, Day 1 for Paris) would be gentler.

Footnotes

At that point, I tuned out the guide’s words and just looked all around me, soaking it all in—the Millicent Garrett Fawcett statue, the Nelson Mandela and Gandhi statues. Across the square, there was Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. We went inside the Supreme Court building, which has a cafe, for a snack/coffee/WC break. After that, the bus took us back to the Pimlico area. I was a very inactive listener as we all got off the bus because I wanted to look around and recall as much detail as I could. (I remember vaguely, some ladies asking Duncan about the royal family, and if any one of them actually lived in one of the palaces, either Buckingham or St. James, and he said the most important people living there (one of them, I didn’t catch which palace he was referring to) were Princess Anne and “one of Prince Andrew’s daughters,” he couldn’t recall which one.2 I think the driver parked us on Palace Street near “the Other Palace.” I laughed a little about “the Other Palace” (a modern-looking hotel) across the street at an angle from where the bus parked. Duncan led us down Stafford Palace and through the blue passageway called Buckingham Gate. That makes it sound like something cool, but it’s really just a construction site. When we emerged onto the main road that runs alongside the south side of the palace, whatever it’s called—Buckingham Palace Road—and made our way around the scaffolding, Duncan directed us further along toward the Spur Road/Birdcage Walk junction. He kept going on about the misguided people who had camped out early to get spots right on the iron gates of the palace. Because the changing of the King’s Guard actually starts with the Old Guard formation at St. James’s Palace and there’s a whole tedious ceremony (meetup with the New Guard at Buckingham Palace, the changeover, the band) the real magnificence of the event is in the procession down the Mall, not so much the drills behind the gates. Duncan, therefore, led us to a spot in the park where we would have an unobstructed view of the Household Division band as it marched by. There had been some question that morning as to whether there would be a changing of the guard ceremony at all. They don’t do it if it rains, you see. It’s not because the soldiers don’t like getting wet. It is because of the musical instruments. Lucky for us, the rain let up and the drills were not cancelled. Duncan rattled off a lot of trivia about the Household Division and the various troops, and the insignia worn by each one, and how “changing the guard” is not especially a favorite activity among them. I can believe that, actually. When I was in the navy, I dreaded the call to be part of the color guard. (Color Guard was voluntary, so I never had to do it, but I always cringed at stories from my shipmates about doing Taps at funerals. Some of my shipmates really liked it, but I thought it had to be the most annoying thing ever, the pressure to have the perfect creases in the uniform and stand for hours at a time, and march in formation. No, thank you. I had enough of that in boot camp) That being said, I do appreciate that “changing the guard” is—as is Color Guard—an important public duty with the benefit of promoting the military and taking pride in public service, and I am glad that there are people—and by “people” I mean the troops too, not just the spectators—who enjoy it. The fact that I would find it so annoying only makes me appreciate those who take so much pride in it. As I stood there in St. James Park, watching the band march by, I fully recognized their awesome hard work and precision. I had to admire the beauty, the skill, the discipline, and the pride that goes into them. It might not be my thing, but, from my perspective, that makes it so impressive to behold in those whose “thing” it is.

Duncan took his leave of us after that and it was onwards with Natalia in charge again to Windsor Castle. Of course, in driving again through Knightsbridge on one’s way out of London, Harrods had to be remarked upon (again.) Natalia certainly had much to say about it. Remarking upon its infamous former owner (Mohammed al Fayed) and the current Qatari owner (sorry, I meant it when I said in the previous article that I don’t give a shit about Harrods, and I feel the same way about its ownership) she proceeded to regale us with a description of the “fragrance hall.” This piqued enough “ooo’s” and “ah’s” on the bus (needless to say, not from me) for Natalia to make a spur of the moment shift in the day’s plan. On the return journey, there would be an optional stop at Harrods; thankfully, this was just a pitstop—a drop-off—so those of us who had no interest in garishly over-priced leather suitcases or the perfume hall (choking, no thanks) could get back to the hotel, charge our phones, and do things more suited to our independent inclinations.3

The bus parked behind the Windsor Royal shopping arcade, which is also a train station. We had to walk up some stairs that put us on the pathway that runs along the tracks, through the station, and up in the direction of the castle. We were all very amused to see, amid all the elegant shops and pubs, a Five Guys. Natalia said the Five Guys was put there after President Obama’s visit to England. His predilection of Five Guys being well known, and the British media being so delighted with him, generated a surge in publicity for the fast food chain, and naturally, a Five Guys had to be put in Windsor in anticipation of Obama’s next visit.

We were given a 30-minute break to walk around independently, get something to eat, and/or shop. I walked around the neighborhood of Windsor for a bit. I would have liked to have gone over to Eton, one of the oldest educational institutions in the world, which inspired the general ethos of most New England prep schools, but it would have been too far to walk in the scant amount of free time available to me. (And, to be fair, I felt a bit like an alien intruder in those peaceful residential streets.) A pet store back up at the arcade caught my eye—A Dog’s Life—a beautiful store where I bought a raincoat for my Tucker. After that, I walked around the town a bit, but not too much because I knew there wasn’t much time to get some lunch before I had to meet the group again at the rendezvous point. I had a bowl at Tortilla, which is kind of like Chipotle, took the opportunity to use the WC, and made me way up to the opening of the arcade that faces the turrets of Windsor Castle. This is a spot I had explored on Google Street View many times and now I was there, right there…just a stone’s throw away from the fortress built for William the Conquerer. We walked around the bend and up Castle Hill, past those little stores that get international exposure whenever something big happens—like when, for example, an American TV actress/lifestyle blogger marries a prince—wink wink. There’s a little house by the gates of the castle, the Mary Delany House where, apparently, according to a sign on the wall, the novelist Fanny Burney was a frequent visitor. This little house now serves as the security checkpoint which we had to pass through prior to entering the castle walls. Once in the castle walls, Natalia set us loose to wander through St. George’s Chapel and/or the State Apartments as we liked. The people who work at Windsor Castle are very protective of the historical site in their charge; they aren’t shy about telling you in no uncertain terms, photography is forbidden in all interior spaces. Even if allowed, I doubt I would have taken pictures inside St. George’s Chapel. Inside that sacred space, I immediately felt an inner peace and was grateful for the respite from endemic iPhone addiction. I feel safe to assert that I was very likely the only reader of John van Der Kiste on this tour, and as such, I knew very well who were the personalities buried in the chapel—Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale; King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra; Queen Mary and King George V; Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. The latter was Queen Victoria’s highly intellectual (and hemophiliac) son who died at the age of 30 before his daughter Alice could ever really get to know him. Princess Alice of Albany led a very long life. Born in 1883, she died in 1981, aged 97, a child in the age of candlelight who lived through two world wars, Beatlemania, and Women’s Liberation. Her memoir is one of my favorite books because it tells that story of an intellectually curious lady who lived from 1883 and for most of the 20th century. Princess Alice was a highly adventurous, independent person. As an old lady, she lived at Kensington Palace (the subject of my next article) and got around London the same way I was now learning to do—on the public transportation. Her funeral was held right there in St. George’s Chapel, but she is buried (not too far away) at the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore.

It was very moving to see the tombs of ‘the Four’—King George VI, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Queen Elizabeth II—plus Prince Philip. To me, this is the royal family. These are the royals that I’ve read about since I was a teenager. For me, they were the last royals, and the last of the royal archetype.4 I appreciate the work of King Charles, challenged as he is to hold together the institution. He is a philosopher king with enlightened views. And the institution is bolstered by a lot of special interests dedicated to helping him. His son William will carry the torch, and I respect William too. Of course they are ‘royal’ in title, in name, and in the perception of the world. I just feel that the era of ‘royalty’ (the royal archetype) is really just a ghost of itself. Today we have ‘royals’ who wear suits and ties, and occasionally dress up in the regalia, and sometimes the tiaras and the crowns are brought out to be worn and shown, but mostly the personalities are just doing things like the rest of us—a small bit of gloss over the humdrum of life and the dull politics. Sure, they have to do the photo ops with world leaders and they have the same ceremonial duties that the last royals had, and I think the PR machine behind William and Kate and their children have tried to recapture the old sentiment about ‘the Four.’ On the bus ride back to London, Natalia pointed to a field, not far from the castle, and said, “Over that fence, over there, that’s the house, it’s called Adelaide Cottage, where the Prince and Princess of Wales live,” meaning William with Kate, and implicitly, their children. There was no seeing the house from the highway, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing how Natalia framed the information. “That’s the house where they moved to be closer to their children’s school.” They had been living at Kensington Palace, still be their ‘official’ residence, but really just the ‘office’. Their domestic life is at Adelaide Cottage, almost (but not quite) like the Little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret surrounded by corgis in the 1930s, also seeming to live the ideal life in a so-called ‘cottage’ near Windsor…and then the war hit and they had to go in hiding in “a house in the country” (Windsor Castle, it was revealed after the war.) Those little princesses, the Last Royals, and Prince Philip, are laid to rest in that wonderful, quiet, unperturbed St. George’s Chapel, where even iPhones must be silenced. It’s not that their descendants (Charles, William, Kate, George, Charlotte, and Louis) aren’t royal too; it’s just that somehow we are past the time of regarding them as such. At the end of the day, we are all just people making the most of what we’ve inherited and trying to go forward as best we can. I think it’s better this way. With people not making such a big deal about Prince William and his family, it leaves them freer to just…be.

There is a gift shop next to the chapel where I bought a couple of items before walking up to the entrance to the State Apartments. Right inside the door I took a picture of myself in front of a window and I took one picture inside the first chamber off the entryway, but right away, a Royal Collection staffer very politely informed me that photography is forbidden in the castle just as it is in the chapel. As I walked through the rooms, I noticed a few people taking pictures. I guess they had not been told, nor did the staffers notice, or maybe they were just better at it than I? All the rooms, even the Waterloo Chamber and St. George’s Hall, felt somehow smaller than they appear on the Royal Collection website (rct.uk). I could feel the intimacy of the place in spite of the grandeur. It’s that feeling you have when you walk through a place that has been so carefully and compassionately preserved, the wood so skilled varnished. As I walked through St. George’s Hall, I tried to fully absorb and recall the passion that Prince Philip put into leading the project to restore the hall after the 1992 fire. The ceiling is truly the most magnificent feature of the room, detailed as it is with the coat of arms of each of the Knights of the Garter. It’s a monument to medieval Englishness. Being there, you can feel how Windsor truly is the fortress of England, defended by the national patron saint, George.

On the bus ride back to the hotel, we dropped off a few of the tour goers in front of Harrods. I tried to form a plan for the rest of the day and the next day. I needed to charge my phone, decide which British historical monument I would visit the following day, and make my reservation for the Louvre on Monday. I decided to do the tour at Kensington Palace on Saturday and then do a walking tour of the St. James area. I also had to pack my suitcase (minus an overnight bag) and leave it at the door; the tour itinerary had arranged for our suitcases to be collected at 7 am Saturday, put on the train to Paris, and put in the hotel rooms to be there waiting for us on Sunday.

Before I close this article in my London-Paris tour series, I want to say some words about my grandmother, the late Louise Coco Schneider. She traveled to London and Paris in 1970 with my grandfather and she too kept a journal of what they did. They left their seven children in the care of her mother, Nana Coco. Louise and Ira, my grandparents, took a cab from the airport to the Hotel Camellia only to discover that the travel agency had moved them to the “London Tourist Hotel,” which my grandmother wrote was “much nicer” anyway. They had dinner at the Blue Boar Pub, walked along the Thames, and strolled around Leicester Square. Another day, they saw Carol Channing perform at the Royal Drury Theatre. After the show, they had a beer at a pub and then “Ira and I went to a delicatessen and bought groceries for sandwiches for [the] room.”

“The people are very friendly,” she wrote. “And so talkative—I love their accent and they talk constantly.” The next day, my grandparents toured Westminster Abbey and attended a mass at Westminster Cathedral. (The Abbey is Anglican, the Cathedral is Catholic.) They went to Buckingham Palace, the Tate Gallery, and the Tower of London. They saw another show and had dinner at a Greek restaurant called the Elysee, at 13 Percy Street. My grandmother wrote that, during the show, they were seated next to a couple who got into an argument, and the lady tossed her wine on the man! Final words from Grandma Louise: “The history here is remarkable, and the English are so patriotic and well informed about their history.”

The Riu Plaza in Pimlico. Right across from Victoria Station. I was way too early to be able to check into my room, but the hotel let me put my bags up, and a staffer called Marius found the one place in the lobby where I could charge my American phone, and while I waited for my phone to get some more juice, I wrote down some more details about the journey from the airport. I used WhatsApp to inform Natalia, the tour guide, that I was in London. She said that, since the group was not scheduled to meet until 5pm, and since it was so rainy out, this might be an ideal time for me to do some of the things I had told her I was interested in doing on my own—like visit the British Museum or the British Library. She told me all I needed to do was catch the 38 bus outside Victoria Station. I was so excited to do this that I gave up on the ideal of a fully-charged phone and set out to catch the bus with only a halfway-charged phone. Well, this is where my story gets a little embarrassing for me. I got on the 36 bus, and I felt sure that I was getting on the right bus, and I was so excited to use my credit card to pay for the ride, and climb the steps to the top level. You betcha, it was a red double decker public transit bus! I was on the 36 bus headed to Queen’s Park. I think I was somewhere around Sussex Gardens when I checked Natalia’s instructions on WhatsApp and realized, to my horror, that I was on the wrong bus. I got off the bus at the next opportunity and bent my steps back toward—well, you know, I figured I could at least put myself in the direction whence I came. I told Natalia what I had done and she replied, Oh boy, or something to that effect. She got me on the 18 bus that took me to Euston Square, from whence I walked to the British Library along Euston Road. So while confusing 36 for 38 and the ordeal of having to change buses, without knowing what bus to change to, was quite alarming, and embarrassing, I did feel in the moment that I was giving my jet-lagged self a crash course in London that was sure to benefit me over the next days. Also, walking along Euston Road, I could feel, in spite of the metropolitan buzz around me, the London of Virginia Woolf. I wondered what Virginia would write about her London as it is today. The people rushing around, some of them coming off holidays, and going to work, or back in the school. Somehow, I felt that this London might not be entirely foreign to her. There were lots of people on laptops in the British Library. My sense of time was all askew. I’m sure my mind and body wanted to be in bed in Baton Rouge, but here I was, getting coffee at the British Library. I had lunch in the library’s cafe. I ate a cucumber and tuna sandwich that made me feel close to Oscar Wilde. I bought some Jane Austen playing cards in the gift shop. By then, I was nearing the time allowable for checking into a room at the hotel, and exhausted as I was, I passed on making a trip to the British Museum. I walked the small distance to King’s Cross/St. Pancras Station. That was amazing! Everything so far was putting me into some kind of literary experience, and this was no exception. Here it was, all around me, the station where Harry Potter caught the train to Hogwarts! Google Maps—or maybe I used Apple Maps, anyway, the internet told me I needed to get to Platform 4 and take the Piccadilly line. But first I had to find the right Platform 4—in other words, the underground Platform 4, not the overground Platform 4. And after the long walk down many flights of stairs, around several corners, I finally got underground deep enough, and stepped on the train just before an older lady and two teenagers, all pulling wheeled luggage, actually looked at me and asked, “Is this the train for Green Park?” A little shocked about being asked for help with directions on my first day in London, I nodded my head and tried to shake off the bewildered feeling. Minding the Gap, I stepped off the train at Green Park. I knew exactly what I was doing, where I was going, just then. I walked through Green Park and came out in front of Buckingham Palace. I had to do what probably every shameless tourist does in London—get a picture of oneself at the iron gates of “Buck House,” once home to the Dukes of Buckingham, and official residence of every monarch after King George III.

There were lots of tourists milling around at the gates, taking group selfies and whatnot. I don’t know if the Royal Standard being up had anything to do with it. It had been raining hours earlier, but by then it was just wet and cloudy, and I walked back to the hotel along the side of the palace, past the King’s Gallery and the Royal Mews, the Buckingham Palace Shop, which is not in the palace but directly across the road. Apple Maps got me back to the hotel. It’s only a ten-minute walk from the palace. I think I stopped at the Sainsbury’s in Victoria Station to buy some water for the room. I wheeled my suitcase into the elevator and went up to the eleventh floor (the top floor) and got into my room. The view wasn’t great. If I had been on the other side, I’d have had a terrific view of Big Ben, but I was on the Victoria Station side, which happens to be the palace side, but the station totally blocks the palace. I didn’t care. I was not in London to sit in a hotel. The hotel had outlets for my phone and iPad, but before any of the utilities would work, I had to learn the hard way (by asking) that unless my room card was inserted in the slot by the door, the lights would not come on. This was an energy saver that would keep the lights off as long as I was not in the room. Go London: score 1 for climate change!

I took a short nap before meeting the tour group in the lobby. Natalia was pretty frazzled. Portuguese but a longtime London resident, she handed out headsets for everybody so we could listen to her on the street. Our group was too large to meet in the lobby of the hotel, and the hotel needed to keep their lobby open and available for other guests, so she herded us into the restaurant across the street. The hotel was still under renovation and restaurant was still located in the old venue across the street. The Riu Plaza is situated at the curious little junction called Neathouse Place, where Wilton Road connects with Vauxhall Bridge Road. The ‘old’ hotel and the ‘new’ hotel are actually the same building with a connector/overpass. Assembling all of us at the back of the closed restaurant seemed to take forever. It was Natalia’s intention to give us a neat rundown of the plan for the evening and a broad overview of the London leg of the tour, but it felt in the moment like we would never make any progress because no one seemed to understand anything. Many of them were old, retired couples—the kind of people who were in London to check off one more item on the bucket list and go back to America, unchanged. There was one old man who was by himself, a retiree from New Jersey, and there was another 40-something like me who was also traveling alone; she had come from Colorado. I think we were the only solo travelers. As I said, most of the group were married couples, but there was two pairs of elder women who were just longtime friends enjoying retirement together—one pair from the Chicago area and another from a suburb of Philadelphia. The pair from Philly were each named Sandra. “The two Sandras,” I called them; same name and firm friends, but very different characters. I’m not going to say too much more about the individuals on the tour. I just want to convey the truth of the situation, that this was a very large, somewhat diverse group that Natalia had to babysit. After dinner that night, I wrote down as many details as I could recall for my travel journal, and in a somewhat foul mood, I wrote about the group: “Most of them are old, some are hard of hearing, and some are just stubborn jackasses who don’t want to listen.” To give you some idea of the agony I had to endure, we “met” at 5 o’clock, and it was nearly 8 o’clock when we got to the restaurant.

Our bus was parked behind the hotel on Vauxhall Bridge Road. I think we drove straight down Vauxhall Bridge Road, all the way to the river. We crossed over the Thames. I remember Natalia pointing out the MI6 complex. We turned onto the Albert Embankment. I remember being very struck by Lambeth Palace.

Here’s another quote from my journal:

“….saw Big Ben & the Houses of Parliament, and green-lit Westminster Bridge, and red-lit Lambeth Bridge. Natalia was at [some pains] to [have us understand] that green is for the color of the seats in the House of Commons and red is for the seats in the Lords chamber. We rode by Lambeth Palace, a gorgeous [Gothic] edifice [from the Tudor times, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives]….She rattled off lots of interesting trivia about London, all the way up to the bus parking a small distance from the Shard, the tallest edifice in the UK. Instead of going to the Shard, however, we made a detour [on foot] into a part of London called the Borough Market, which strongly reminded me of Faneuil Hall in Boston. “Roast” was our destination—a beautifully decorated first-floor [above ground floor] restaurant serving us a three-course meal specifically planned for our group. We had three options for each course.

I chose for the starter the roasted tomato soup, with raspberry relish and basil, and it was delicious. I think that was my favorite part of the meal. For the main course, I had the grilled cauliflower steak, with mushroom crumble and cashew nut sauce. For dessert, I chose their signature “sticky toffee pudding: mousse topped with caramel ice cream, caramel sauce and maldon salt.” The meal was lovely. I was pleasantly surprised, having often been warned that British cuisine could be a little…er…eccentric. I thought this meal was fantastic, however, and if I had been less jet-lagged, and my feet had been more rested, I might have been in a sunnier mood to make more of the occasion. “Intense,” is how I characterized the evening in my journal, “and extremely challenging to my introverted nature.” The series of annoyances created by the crabby personalities in the group did not help. In the best of circumstances, I’d have still been uncomfortably trapped in a restaurant for several hours with a group of strangers.

The walk after dinner actually helped me a lot. The fresh air and ability to put some space between myself and the group, and Mama’s encouraging text, did wonders. We took a right on Stoney Street. At the Café François, we turned left into what I remember was a little courtyard connecting to an alleyway, which took us along the way past more businesses. A couple more turns and we were back out on Park Street, where we boarded the bus. In my hotel room, I wrote in my journal and tried to focus on the best parts of the day—riding on the Tube, riding on the double-decker bus, King’s Cross, and Green Park and the palace.

Here are some things I learned and took note of in my travel journal:

1. UK phone charging stations are not (usually) compatible with US phone receptors. The hotel had charging stations that worked fine, thank goodness, but you can’t rely on coffee shops and libraries in London to have what your American phone needs. [This was something I was able to resolve once and for all later on in Paris by breaking down and buying a mobile charger. My Italian-American friend Blake had warned me about this prior to the trip. I wish I had listened!]

2. WC is bathroom/restroom.

3. At Starbucks in London you can use your American Starbucks account—not so Paris, as I was to learn. (Score one for London, negative for Paris.)

4. The London transit system is highly accessible. You can buy an prepaid “Oyster card” for the metro, but you don’t have to. If you have a credit card that doesn’t charge an international fee, as I did (thank you, Blake) you can just swipe it at the turnstile, just like you would an Oyster Card. (This is another point for London, and a minus for Paris, where you must have a designated metro card to use the metro.)

5. People in London smoke a lot. They just light up right there on the street, and blow it everywhere. (This was also a minus for Paris, but somehow it seemed worse in London.)

The next article will be about my second day in London.

I’m not the only aging librarian who has in recent years grown fonder of my e-reader. John is closer to my mother’s age, and he swears by his kindle for many of the same reasons that I do: it’s lightweight, it stores a lot, it reduces clutter, and he feels that he has his precious books with him wherever he goes. He, like me, adores the Libby app—a wonderful invention that gives you the power to borrow library ebooks and send them to your kindle. Of course, I know plenty of other librarians who refuse to read with kindle, because it’s big bad Amazon after all, and so, opting out of sending it to kindle, they read their ebooks in the Libby app. They have every right to be wary of big tech’s growing overreach into our lives. I just don’t worry too much about Amazon knowing my reading preferences. They’ve already learned so much about me, I’ve fed the beast plenty of tidbits about myself via GoodReads, Prime Video, and Audible. I guess what I’m trying to say is, as far as my reading preferences go, I’ve already dug that hole pretty deep and, anyway, I’m fine to be another statistic. And big tech suspicions aside, if you prefer audiobooks to ebooks, the Libby app is great for that too. I’ve currently got Shortest Way Home, written and read by Pete Buttigieg, sitting on my shelf in the Libby app. I like to listen to audiobooks while I’m driving, and the Libby app works well with Apple CarPlay. And every month the latest issue of The New Yorker comes rolling into my Libby app notifications. The nice thing about getting magazines in the Libby app is I don’t have to dispose of them. There’s no paper waste, no dusty pileup. If you want to make it go away, with just a swipe and a click, it’s gone. One downside: the magazines don’t present well in the iPhone app, only in the iPad app. The iPhone screen is just too small for the standard magazine layout, but it does work quite well on the iPad.

So, I don’t know, the whole “I gotta have a book in my hands” trope just feels dated, inflexible, and, frankly, limiting. What happens when humans realize that we are wasting as much paper as plastic? Are you just going to stop reading? I know that the answer to that for me is a resounding never!

These words, I send up to you from my heart. It’s cheesy, but I have no other way to speak to you, and in a cosmic way, you will understand them as you never could in life. Not because of anything you were or did. These are feelings, memories, flights of fancy, of nonsense mostly, but as I contemplate this horrible occurrence, these are all I have. What you were to me, so much and yet so vague and nondescript. Some might describe you as a father figure. You were more than that. We had a bumpy start. I’m pretty sure I hurt your feelings the first time we met, though we never talked about it, and eventually it became a nothing. Well, I was eleven, maybe ten, and I was afraid to meet you, my mother’s “date,” my mother’s boyfriend. I remember her and one of my friends tugging at me, pulling me, laughing. They wanted me to go meet you. I didn’t. I was afraid for some reason. It took me a long time to get over my fear of strangers, and here was a person who was not going to be a stranger—never a stranger, nothing like a stranger—and even though Mama assured me that you were not and had no wish to replace my father, there must have been some lingering fear in my heart of whatever it was that you would be. Anyway, you came to me, to us, and I laughed out loud from the shock, only the shock, but I imagined that you thought I was laughing at you. I never told anyone. You and I never talked about it. I do remember that it just sort of… faded. The next memory of you: you, Mama, and me in the minivan on the way to Houston to visit Aunt R— and Cousin B—. I just hung out in the furthest backseat, pretty upset and annoyed because you still wouldn’t talk to me. After that, the memories come pretty fast, non-sequential, frivolous. Stomping around the beach at Galveston with you and Cousin B. Watching TV in their apartment. AstroWorld. WaterWorld. One night, lying on the bottom bunk of B’s bunk bed, I cried. Mama came in at some point and tried to comfort me. I tried to explain to her that I thought you were mad at me, but she didn’t believe me. That was impossible, she said. How and why would you be mad at me? I hadn’t done anything. Well, that much was true. I hadn’t done anything to warrant you being mad at me, but I still felt that you were. Maybe the whole thing was in my head, but the feelings were so real. The thoughts popped in there, real as anything else, and they came from somewhere. Maybe they came from that part inside me that always felt misunderstood. I had this paralyzing fear inside me that went back as far as my memory goes, a fear of not being understood properly, and it manifested itself in an inability to speak, a struggle to even form words. A friend’s mother later told me about the first time they had me at their house. I was maybe five or six years old, and sitting at their kitchen table, on one of their bizarre three-legged chairs, I wanted to run and hide. They were so kind about it. My friend, her parents, her older brother—they gently prodded me to bring me out of my shell, but it wasn’t happening. The mom laughed about it with me years later, when I was 15, but now I’m looking at that and wondering what it could have been like for anyone who had to meet me. I don’t know what ended up breaking the ice between us, but when or how it happened, it just happened and we never thought twice about it or talked about it or ever looked back. We were just off to the races, as whatever we were…. I don’t remember much of anything between us going through a transition. You were a stranger for a second, the blink of an eye, and then you were an awkward acquaintance for five seconds, and then you were You, indefinable You—friend, father-like but not father. What is a father anyway? Mine died when I was very young, hardly old enough to recall anything about him beyond the vaguest of impressions. I had a daddy who was married to Mama from the time I was four until their divorce when I was ten. He was still Daddy and really the closest thing I ever had to a father, and we always had a curious relationship. He helped me with my homework and told me stories about the crazy things he and my “real” father did when they were kids; they were cousins, almost like brothers, Daddy and my biological father. Daddy stayed in the big house next door to the three-legged chair family; Mama and You lived at my other home. Lots of memories there, but nothing very congruous. Swimming, tennis, walking Toby. You came to life the following year, seventh grade, when we lived in Florida. It was just you and me a lot that year. Daddy was in Louisiana; Mama was very busy as an apprentice at the Burt Reynolds school. You did some acting too. You took me to the rehearsals after school. I watched the rehearsals. I helped out some. I worked on my homework. I remember helping out with the programs once the performances started. I just don’t remember the name of the show or the names of anyone I interacted with. I wish I did. I don’t remember enough that is specific, but I remember being in your truck so vividly. The cassette tapes: Van Halen, the Smiths, the Doors. That was your music, and I dug it, especially the Smiths. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” I loved that one. I just remember you and that truck, and us riding around Jupiter, and West Palm Beach, over all that water, with bridges that opened up for boats to pass through. 12 years old is really not very far along, if you stop to think about it. While reading Prince Harry’s memoir, I did stop to think about that very thing—what I can remember from that age—and it turns out, like Harry, not much. Just impressions, mostly. Actual conversations, substantial dialogues? Not really. I remember running around the apartment complex with my two friends, and one or two others who were not so much “friends” but went to school with us. So much grass where we lived. Little grassy hills to run up and down. It was there you coached me at soccer, getting me ready for the soccer tryouts at school. I hated you for it. You pushed me so hard, I thought I would die from all that running. Mama wasn’t home to see how hard you pushed me, and sometimes I thought, if she did, boy, you’d be in trouble, but that was just ridiculous. Even then, in my resentment at being pushed so hard, I knew it was absurd, although there is a vague memory of once trying to subtly expose you. I did not make the team and, like other things, I don’t think we ever talked about it. Maybe we did. Maybe we shrugged it off. I think I was mostly relieved. That school and its teams didn’t feel like home to me; they weren’t my soccer team in Louisiana, where even though life was far from perfect, there was that feeling of belonging. So, yeah, I guess I was relieved not to work my butt off for a team for which I had no feeling of comradeship. Jupiter was an interesting pitstop with some pretty horrid pitfalls, like the time I was attacked by the school bully. There was a full inquiry at my school, since it happened in transit from the bus stop. I had to give verbal and written testimony of what happened, how the girl and her bicycle gang followed and entrapped me and my friends. I remember it all happened because she was picking on one of my friends and I said something snotty to her, in defense of my friend. You said something very similar had happened to your brother when you were kids, and that I should steer clear of aggressive kids in the future and not stick myself in the middle of other people’s fights. Pick your battles very carefully. We had a lot of fun too, like charades at Dom Del Luise’s condo with Mama and her fellow apprentices. And that night at the dinner theater, when Mama graduated and Burt Reynolds asked about her kid, because she was the only apprentice who had a child, and he asked me to stand up and the lights to come up a little so he could look at me. That was embarrassing. Everyone, including you, was grinning at me. Burt Reynolds stared at me in amazement. “I think she had Ashley when she was seven,” he told the audience, and they all laughed. Hilarious. 

We were back in Baton Rouge in no time. So much drama that year. Eighth grade. New school. Again. Reunion with pre-Florida friends. Reunion with Daddy. He had a girlfriend. They were not as much fun to be around as you and Mama. That’s probably why I was nicer to them. I wasn’t as comfortable around them. Everything was very uncertain, insecure. She was from a wealthy background, New Orleans, very sophisticated. Daddy felt the pressure of not measuring up, and I definitely didn’t measure up. It was just easier to be at the house where you were, where Mama was, where Toby was; where we were laid back and never really worried about anything serious. For Halloween, Mama made a little haunted studio in the covered carport. I think she used my oversize Cabbage Patch doll to make a covered “bloody” dummy, using a sheet with ketchup stains and a kitchen knife. She used my stereo to play scary music. A friend and I dressed up as ‘80s pop idols. Toby the Tiny Toy Poodle was small enough to fit in a hot dog bun. Mama held him between two bun slices. You pretended to be on the verge of attacking them with my Darth Vader lightsaber. I took the picture. (Funnily enough, my memory was wrong. I checked the picture and it turns out, you were the one holding the Toby bun; Mama had the lightsaber. My perusal of the photo albums also showed me that I had the timeline all screwed up. This was actually pre-Florida. Oh well.) It’s just a classic example of how silly we were, and exactly the kind of humor that was totally lost on my “other” family. We were creative and outlandish. Mama was in her final year for the MFA at LSU, which I remember you had quit, and that was another thing we never talked about. You were still a great actor in my eyes. I bragged about how good you were. I felt you were at least as good as your idol, Paul Newman. You had the same piercing presence, the same intensity lurking beneath Midwestern wholesomeness. I loved watching old movies with you, bonding over Brando and James Dean. I feel like we watched Marlon Brando’s interview with Larry King together, but a Google search tells me that happened in 1994, and I’m not sure you were in our lives at that point. Funny interview….definitely something we would have enjoyed watching together. 

In the summer of 1992, we moved to California. Your truck, piled high with tarp-covered furniture. We probably made many jokes about the Beverly Hillbillies. We were the Burbank Hillbillies, though. We got a two-bedroom a few blocks away from the school you and Mama picked out for me. The two of you were very excited about what a good fit that school was for me, in theory, and though I was skeptical at first, and though I didn’t make friends as easily as I had hoped, I do recall liking many things about it. All of my teachers were great. One thing I disliked about it was the Thursday uniform (formal attire, i.e. skirt and pumps) for Thursday Mass. I was a fairly good student that year, even in math, but at home and in your relationship with Mama, there were cracks beginning to show. You fought a lot, and I don’t recall any fights before California. I tried to pretend that I didn’t notice. It was hard, though, when I could hear you screaming at each other. Your fights were not physical, but the screaming was bad enough and I do remember one time you knocked over one of your enormous stereo speakers. It broke and you had to get rid of it and I’m sure that was embarrassing. I was embarrassed for you. My sense of time in these memories is very imprecise, but I feel sure that it wasn’t long before you decided to leave. Or, rather, it must have been a mutual decision between you and Mama. Mama today feels a lot of guilt about the way things went, but I think it was for the best that you separated. It can’t have been easy for her to be alone in California, a working single mom, trying to “make it” in the notoriously competitive entertainment industry, while also working as a nurse; and it can’t have been easy for you to leave us and try to restart your own education and career. Last I heard, you started anew with the MFA way across the country. For whatever reason, you were not able to figure things out together. You had to find your own paths. 

Three years later, you wrote me a letter, stuck inside a funny card to mark my graduation from high school. It was one of the nicest letters I ever received. I probably still have it somewhere. But that was it until many, many years later, when we found each other on Facebook, and you told me that you still thought of me as your first kid. Even though you had two nearly-grown boys of your own bloodline. Fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. What are these definitions we assign to these relationships? Yours and mine was a custom fit. One of a kind. When we finally connected on Facebook, I sensed that there were many things not said. Touchy waters. I know my mom felt it, that reluctance to overstep, that fear of being misunderstood or misinterpreted. What is that fear and how does it take over us, restrain us? It was there that night I met you. It was there when we reconnected. I imagine that fear falls away when we transcend the mortal coil. Now I can tell you everything, anything, and I know you will understand. 

Love, 

A

I intended to write regularly about my ancestral digging, but I don’t know…. I got sidetracked. By April 30, I made this newsletter (Heavy Crown Press) as a way to promote projects that I’m invested in. So my first article for this newsletter was ….

My friend Ellie wrote that book. I published a “Heavy Crown Edition” that, sadly, has been a flop. It hasn’t had any sales. Ellie and I went to high school together (Burbank High) and now she’s an LPCC on track to be a psychologist. She loves to tell the story of how we met in Mr. Sarquiz’s World History. She wrote this incredible book that I really believe in. If it takes time for people to catch on, it is what it is.

My second article for this newsletter was “Brando at Byronz,” published on June 27. This was almost a week after I first published it at Medium. I was still in transition from Medium to Substack. I had published “Brando at Byronz” on Medium exactly seven days before publishing it here, and exactly the day after seeing Champ Clark’s one-man-show starring John Mese.

Mese is a Baton Rouge native who went to LSU. He knows my mom from back in the late eighties/early nineties when they both (albeit on a different timeline) studied acting under the “great” John Dennis. I grew up hearing all about John Dennis and what a legend he was, and it’s funny because I only have one memory of actually meeting the man face to face. I think I must have been eleven years old and I was sitting right next to him. My great-aunt Johnette was seated on the other side of me. We were in the front row of a nondescript theatre, waiting for the place to fill up and the show to begin. I remember the show very well.

Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?

Based on a book by the same title by John R. Powers, it was a Broadway musical in 1982. All I remember about the LSU theatre production, which must have been about 1988, was how much I loved it, and that my mom played one of the nuns. Anyway, I sat between John Dennis and Johnette for what I’m guessing was opening night. But I’m pretty sure I went to see it more than once. I became mildly obsessed with the show and I remember the kids at my (ironically Catholic) school and even some of my own relatives chuckling about the title. (I saw another production of it several times too, not more than a year later, because my mom operated one of the spotlights for its run at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, FL, and I absolutely relished being allowed to climb up to her spot booth. Of course I had to be quiet, and I was, because I was mesmerized by the show. For one year we lived in Jupiter where my mom was an apprentice at the Burt Reynolds school.)

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When I think about it, that experience, obsessing over Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, whether sitting between John Dennis and Johnette or in the spot booth, was precursory. Other shows, like Pygmalion, in which my mom played Eliza Dolittle, or Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, on the main stage at LSU’s Music & Dramatic Arts building, were more triumphed. (Honestly, the only friend of mine who also saw “Patent Leather Shoes” was my neighbor whose parents happened to be professors in the art department; conversely, I went to school to face comments, all positive, about my mom in Pygmalion for months.) It was the same sort of thing at the performance of Wild Son at the “mid-city” Bistro Byronz: a packed house, for sure, absolutely packed to the capacity with niche thespian devotees. Mama and I went together to see Mese in the role of Christian Brando, infamous son of Marlon Brando and categorically not the baby daddy of Bonny Lee Bakley’s child. I was blown away by the story…. I never knew what a crappy dad Marlon Brando was, or that his son Christian never really knew lasting peace until working as a welder in Washington state.

My first articles in July—about Marcus Aurelius, about the indy film King of Herrings (2013), about my elderly cousin Canoo—reflected my shifting focus. I had some time off my day job to spend a few days at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. While there, I reviewed Bugtussle, a short film starring Derek Sitter and John Mese and currently gaining accolades on the film festival circuit. Yep, John Mese was busy in 2022. Actors act, and that’s exactly what John Mese kept doing after he graduated from LSU with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Just have a look at his Wikipedia page, which I wrote—not to brag, just sayin’. His TV credits mostly consist of appearances on various legal and crime dramas and in 2020 he had the lead role in a horror made-for-TV movie called Noise in the Middle.

I wrote nine articles in July. At the end of the month, I wrote a review of Little Women: The Musical, put on by the Play On Theatre Company in Alexandria. Cousin Leigh grayed her hair and covered herself in shawls to play Aunt March.

After that, I did a deep dive into some lesser known credits achieved by Paul Newman. All that was spurred on by the documentary, directed by Ethan Hawke, that made waves this year. You may have heard of it. (My mom loved it, and honestly, I enjoyed the way she talked about it more than I enjoyed the documentary itself, which I thought kind of a snorefest.) After the trilogy of articles about Paul Newman, I made myself get caught up on Stranger Things, because Season 4 came out this year, and I had not even seen the first three. But my heart is more in articles like “Make it Do” and “Echoes from Hell,” which I brought over from Medium. “Make it Do” is about my magical day with Cousin Canoo, when I adopted the motto “Make it do” as a way of basically seizing the day, Carpe Diem style. “Echoes from Hell” is about women whose struggles and very existence might have been entirely obscured but for their names on the 1950 census that got released to the public back in April.

In addition to my day job as a bureaucrat, and besides writing for this blog, I’m a staff writer for my neighborhood Stroll magazine. One of my assignments in August was to write about the Baton Rouge Gallery, a non-profit “center for contemporary art” in City Park. I visited the gallery while the works of Matt Kenyon still dominated the its exhibit spaces. But the article for the magazine couldn’t be about just one artist; it had to be more of a promotional piece for the gallery’s ongoing events. So for this space, I went more in depth about Kenyon’s work specifically. It was my first taste of “new media” art and it definitely enhanced my appreciation for socially conscious visual expressions.

I love helping artists. Writers write and I’m a writer, and I like to think that I’m using my superpower to help other artists get their work seen and heard and felt. I believe in Ellie Trotta’s novel of magical realism. I believe in filmmaker Derek Sitter’s high impact shorts—little films with big ideas. I believe in Wild Son! You know, it’s not just that I think John Mese is a cool guy and a great actor. It’s that the play itself gives a voice to someone who never really got to articulate his story in his lifetime. You might think Christian Brando was just a rich kid, a silver spooner, with too much money and too much time to waste, but you would be at least somewhat wrong. He might have been what we call “Hollywood royalty” but he definitely was not spoiled. He grew up getting the shit kicked out of him and then he went to prison for shooting the dude his sister said was abusing her. I never knew any of it until I saw Mese channel Brando at Bistro Byronz. In August, Mese took the act to Edinburgh for the Festival Fringe. That was the international debut. I suspect Wild Son got a little lost in the buzz, yet the play went on. The goal was to put butts in the seats and have the show be seen, and that was done.

The Internet has given us so much, so many ways to express ourselves. We’re all trying to express ourselves. We love it, but we also get angry and jealous, opinionated and competitive, lonely and discouraged. I have to remind myself that the Internet is not my personal stage. While it might feel like the spotlight is or should be on me for a certain time, it’s not the only spotlight. There is a lot of information buzzing around. People catch the beams they catch. Sometimes in my own family I feel, perhaps, like Wild Son trying to make a splash across The Pond. My mother’s siblings and my first cousins are all preoccupied with sports. For one aunt, it’s all about tennis and yoga—and wine, well, we have that in common, although she likes red and I prefer white. My basketball-loving uncle is married to Madame Volleyball; their elder daughter is a volleyball coach, like her mom, and the younger daughter is apparently on a similar course. The younger professes to want to be a chef, but she’s 17 and she’s doing varsity volleyball for now, so…. Sports, food, sports, food? Obsessions like those are just alien to me. My obsessions are the things that line the walls of three sides of the room I call my home away from home—the library, haven of my day job. Volleyball? Please. In middle school, my attempts at volleyball earned me nothing but mockery. I was the four-eyed girl who couldn’t even get the ball over the net, who spent her break times in the school library and ran to the public library every chance she got. So it was in 2022—I hit the books hard in September because I was back in school. I’m an online graduate student on track for a Master of Library Science. This last semester, I learned about Special Collections. I wrote about that in my article “About the Crown Jewels.” The Queen died as I was getting my feet wet in that topic, so naturally, while the world grieved the 20th century’s most shining icon, I couldn’t help musing about the collection to which her Imperial State Crown belongs, and comparing it to a delicate medieval manuscript known as the Beatus.

There is nothing like royal drama to consume the public imagination. While Britain had to change its national anthem to “God Save the King,” Denmark decided to shake things up as only the might. The Danish monarch’s decision to slice and dice royal titles happened alongside ongoing questions about whether the teachers in Montecito would have to curtsy before Archie and Lilibet Diana. (Ridiculous, I know; I’m being facetious.)

I’ve covered a lot of ground since starting this blog—short films, ancient manuscripts, unfinished Regency works, existentialism and Stoicism, documentaries, grimoires. Should I keep it going in 2023? Should I change gears, i.e. cover something more or less? Now’s your chance to speak up! Drop me a line or a comment. I appreciate all of you, whether you’re a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions here aren’t cheap, so I understand the reluctance to go that route. Consider buying me a coffee, though. I finally got a Ko-fi page! Check it out: https://ko-fi.com/heavycrownpress. Caffeine is an absolute necessity for this overworked bureaucrat/grad student/ceaseless writer! Happy New Year!

The cover image for this article is by zero take on Unsplash.

To awaken or not awaken, that is the question. Some of us want to be awake; it’s just we want to awaken without the hardship and discomfort of awakening. We want to awaken in a beautiful place and have company that feels good. Most of us are looking for a relationship with a person who makes us feel good—as if that’s the purpose of friendship and romance with anyone, to have that person make me feel good? When you put it like that, it sounds crazy, right? To have an expectation of someone else to make me feel whole? And when that person inevitably fails to meet my expectations, when that person inevitably disappoints me in some way, well, what then? Do I move away? Do I find some enclave somewhere, a monastery perhaps, or a seaside resort, and clam up in safety and absolutism? “The world has failed me again,” I say to myself as I attend another spiritual gathering where the speaker is filling my head with lots of feel-good notions that restore my self-esteem.

The simple things really drive it home, don’t they? The neighbors down the hall who travel constantly because they don’t want to experience the ennui of retirement. The best friend who hops from relationship to relationship because no one is filling her, or him up, or them up. The anesthesia school student who anesthetizes her daily life with takeout food and cocktails, all of which she works off each morning at the gym. She rushes through everything, always getting somewhere but never being.

We’re all trying in our various ways to make life easier. It’s the work of life we work so hard to avoid. The Baby Boomers understood it like this: work now, play later. Generation X decided to try to skip over the “work” part entirely. It didn’t work out so well, so they raised their kids to not work at all, doing all the work for them so that the future could have what the present lacked—and the result is that you have emerging adults today who don’t even know how to do their own laundry. As for cooking, oh, let’s just order a pizza. Everyone does DoorDash, right?

Was it Albert Camus who said we humans are the only creatures who refuse to be what we are?

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.—Albert Camus, The Rebel

How about this one?

To hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.—Albert Camus1

We think of absurdity as something that is ridiculous, preposterous, ludicrous, even farcical. We don’t want our lives to be absurd. We want our lives to have meaning. How can we have meaning, though, in a sea of ease? Meaning does not come from binge-watching shows and eating pizza.

Does it come from doing something? Traveling to all fifty states before the age of fifty? Seeing the Eiffel Tower before you die? Having “genuine” pasta and wine under the Tuscan sun? Climbing the highest mountain?

What if it comes from nothing in particular at all? What if it comes in this moment? Just sitting here, listening? What if meaning comes through alertness even in the ennui? Alertness, awakening, in the ennui…. I wonder if that is the real absurdity we are so longing to escape—the absurdity of the moment.

“….man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.”—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

What is it about the Now that is so frightening for us? Traumatized by the past and frightened of the future, we find ourselves discontent in the present moment. The past is depressing, the present is boring, and the future is terrifying. Thus we find ourselves in a situation, in a life, that is—well, Camus said it—absurd.

Absurdity, he seems to say in The Myth of Sisyphus, is nothing but what is born of comparison.

“There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them, the absurdity springs from a comparison.”2

Bare facts and certain realities collide, and thus absurdity is born. A marriage by itself is not absurd. The contract of marriage between Henry VIII and a goddess he saw in a portrait who turned out to be ugly Anne of Cleves? That’s absurd, but only because we understand what a marriage can be. In reality as opposed to potential, or in the encounter between them, we find the absurd. Camus uses an example of a fight—between swordsmen and machine-gunmen. That's absurd because of the disproportion between intention and reality. “‘It’s absurd’ means ‘It’s impossible’”3 that the sword is a match for the machine gun.

Absurdity is not human. Humans are not absurd. Nor is the world, continues Camus, absurd in and of itself. But putting humans in the world, together, you end up with absurdity. We can neither live with nor without each other. The porcupine pricks and stings the other porcupine, but at the same time, they need each other to stay warm!4 Like Sisyphus, bound in an absurd cycle of life and death, we long for something meaningful, but, well, we're fighting with sword in a machine-gun world. We feed ourselves daydreams and doses of hope, or, to put it bluntly, we die. "Living," says Camus, requires...nay, it forces the choice "to get away or to stay."5 To keep pushing the rock up the hill or let it roll over you? It is absurd because the result, either way, will be the same. Whether a life is long or short, the end of it is the same. It doesn't make a difference whether you spent one day at the beach or ten days doing chores. Either way, your thoughts messed it all up. Ennui reared its boring head. You longed to do, to see, to feel something more interesting.

Vacations are wonderful for breaking the ennui. In a new place, you find yourself more alert. You have to be extremely present in new surroundings. You pay more attention to the unfamiliar, both from practicality and from excitement about what is exotic and, therefore, fascinating. It even helps you to appreciate the mundane. When you’re home again, you feel relief and comfort. Ennui comes back though. Again and again. The present becomes the past and the future always lies ahead, uncertain, scary, anticipated with dread or with hope.

To get away or to stay! It’s the old maxim, wherever you go, there you are—warts and all. Thoughts, ennui, daydreams, nightmares. Regret and shame (the past) and anxiety (the future). You take it with you, whether you are struggling uphill or cascading downhill, whether you live in a gated community or a penitentiary—irony intended. You can’t find peace. It’s not hiding somewhere, waiting to be found. It’s not going to jump out all of a sudden and say, “Hey, what took you so long?” You’re either at peace, or you’re not. “I can’t be ok until…” Until what? Until, perhaps, I wrap up this article. Fair enough. All I know is that we’re always setting conditions on things, when the conditions are endlessly shifting. Are you waiting for someone’s love to fill you up? What if you’re waiting to be filled up by a person who is…waiting for you to fill them up? It’s too much pressure, methinks. I’m not here to fill anyone up. I’m not here to be filled up. I’m here to awaken. Now. And now again.

There’s nothing like spending a day with an 85-year-old retired Louisiana school administrator to give you a deep sense of what it means to make it do. Stereotypes do not exist here. None of your preconcieved notions of Silent Generation and Baby Boomer Louisianians will be applicable in this dimension. You can make all the Boomer jokes you want, but the punch line will not land. Saturday, April 23rd was a day I entered another dimension. Labels became meaningless. Events were timeless. There was a sense of the past, but only as it made the present more humorous, more enjoyable. The future was never thought of. The dead lived again, the living lived now. It began because it did not begin. I just rolled in, parked the car, hugged Canoo, gave her roses, cut the stems with the pruning shears she just happened to have at hand — in this dimension, (anything and) everything you need is at hand. We put the flowers in a watering can, which turned out to be exactly where they were most beautiful. Everything works out in this place, exactly as it ought to, and you never expected or imagined it; you never could have imagined it to turn out any better. I walked through her doorway, into what on the outside would be called a studio, 372-sqft, but which turned out to be the most spacious little heaven, exactly the right size, and filled with Canoo’s favorite books — a total of three bookshelves, each one lined from end to end with books — and her most treasured photos. Even the coffee table was a treasure because it was made by someone beloved and it had her initials carved into it — C.M.C. There was a painting on the wall by her artist brother, Jimmy, and the bookshelf by the window was made by her carpenter brother, one of the twins, I think it was Dick. The twins, Dick and Fred, come up in conversation a lot. They were the babies in Canoo’s family: “I never got any attention because of Dick and Fred,” she said with a loving smile and absolutely no hint of anything but good humor. Canoo was born right in the middle, after the older trio: Edmund, Teeny and Jimmy. All three of the older ones have passed on. Now it’s just Canoo, Dick, and Fred. Six children in total, born during the Great Depression, living through World War II, the JFK assassination, Vietnam, the Beatles and the Beatles breaking up, the election of a TV president — at least in Canoo and the twins’ case, the election of two TV presidents. Politics never came up. I doubt anything political was ever thought of; nothing political came to my mind, anyway. Religion only came up as a point of reference. This day, this dimension was spiritual in the widest sense, limitless, and entirely without label or denomination.

Frank came. He brought his friend who dearly wished to meet Canoo. Frank and Canoo have the strongest bond. Frank’s mother was Canoo’s first cousin. Frank was in Canoo’s summer school in Marksville, back before she moved to southeastern Louisiana to teach elementary and middle school and eventually become the principal. Marksville is where Canoo, Frank’s mother, and Frank were all born. It’s where I too come from in a way. I was really born in Alexandria, but I did live in Marksville for the first year or two of life, and I spent many summers there during my first decade. But it’s Frank who has the longest connection with Canoo. And it’s Frank who has been integral in her life especially in the last decade. He drove her up to New Jersey to visit her sister Teeny before Teeny died. He was there to support her when both Jimmy and Edmund died. He has become quite close to her nephews and nieces and is now almost like a son, the child she never had. Canoo never had children — well, no, that’s not quite right. She did not have the kind of children who are born of the body (and she never married) but how can we say that a lifelong teacher did not have children? Over lunch at a restaurant in nearby Houma, she shared with us many little anecdotes about teaching in the 1960s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. There was the little boy who spoke only Cajun French. It was the mother who told her to “make it do,” using the wrong English pronoun for imploring Canoo to please make something of her little boy. That’s what Canoo did for countless children, one of those being my own father, her godson. She showed them how to make it do. “Make it do” became the slogan, the catchphrase of the day. It was funny because it was so serious, funnily enough. For one day I entered this magical dimension where anxiety did not exist, and there were no regrets. There was only love and a determination to make it do. But that’s not even the best part! The best part is that it was so effortless. It happened easily, without thinking, without expectation, without planning. We walked in with open hearts and it came to us. All it asked in return was for us to make it do. Ask and you shall receive. Only connect. Only allow.

Originally published here:

https://medium.com/@heavycrownpress/make-it-do-876449f29c1a