KATE AND LILLIAN

“This month (March) shall be the beginning of months for you; it is to be the first month of the year to you.” Exodus 12:2

I’ve always maintained that if everyone had the opportunity to hold a baby for about a half hour each morning, the world would become a better place to inhabit – and I’m able to add to this sage counsel that if everyone had the opportunity to hold twins each morning, they’d take a twofold mellow attitude into the world that day. I know because I had one newborn squeakbox under each arm yesterday morning — my great-granddaughters Kathryn Ann and Lillian Celeste Romero, and after holding them, I felt like I had just drunk a big cup of “Mello Joy”.

I had read all of this stuff about equations, models, and designs for showing differences and similarities in twins and looked at complicated scientific drawings that predicted behavioral differences, but when I saw those innocent faces framed by silky black hair, I decided to love both of them the same… despite any variations in personalities. Kate weighed in at 6 lbs. 3 oz., one minute before Lillian, who was slightly smaller at 5 lbs. 11 oz. Kate may be the most dominant of the pair because in ultra-sound pix taken before birth, she seemed to be sitting on Lillian during Kristin’s (their mother) entire pregnancy. However, I feel certain they’ll be “same-same” about loving each other.

On March 1, “the beginning of months” for them, the skies were overcast when the day began, but by 9 a.m. a brilliant sun had appeared. I looked out of my window and saw oak leaves fluttering in a south wind and intuited that the twins had blown in. All would be well. A few moments later, their grandmother Stephanie called to announce their arrival. I went into the living room and picked up Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child’s Garden of Verses that I had bought for myself years ago and opened to my favorite poem entitled “Happy Thought:” “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” I spent a few hours thinking about all the children’s books I wanted to share with them, “sitting safe in nursery nooks,/Reading picture storybooks.”

When I visited Kate and Lillian yesterday, they were swaddled in blankets and lying on their backs. They seemed to be totally relaxed about their entry into the world, living up to their names, both of which mean “pure” — free from discordant qualities (which means no all-night crying sessions, right?) and free from contamination (so I hope no one in their room turns on the news containing political posturing this week!).

Here they are, waiting for all those arms to hold them… and one snapshot of big brother Alexander Charles enfolding one of them in his arms, excited about the miracle of two girls appearing in his life. He’s unmindful that he’ll soon have to share his toys and endure two girls following him to soccer games and places that he doesn’t want them to be. There’s even a snap of me in a happy moment bent over an infant that some people deem as “the first object of our compassion.”

A picture is worth a thousand of my words this morning, so I hope you’ll enjoy looking at the miracle of Kate and Lillian and will help me welcome them into a warm and cheerful world.

Photographs by Dad Martin and Victoria I. Sullivan

ALONG THE TECHE

Buttercup

Last week, we traveled to Arnaudville, searching for the cottages being renovated for use by artists and writers, who can apply and receive grants to complete their work in a bayou habitat, and found seven vari-colored cabins still under reconstruction hugging the Bayou Teche. When we turned to pass back along the street for another glimpse of the residences, we spied a beautiful, spreading sea of Ranunculus (buttercups) lining the bayou and stopped to photograph the bright yellow flowers. Ranunculus means “little frog” because the flowers inhabit the same waters as the frogs that are so abundant in south Louisiana.

Live oak along Bayou Teche

We were following Bayou Teche, the stream that Harnett Kane called “the most richly storied of the interior waters,” which snakes through 125 miles of south Louisiana. As it was once highly navigable, communities like Arnaudville sprang up along its banks. Four in ten people in this small community of less than 2000 speak Cajun French, and if you listen closely, you can hear the uncorrupted dialect of the Acadians who settled south Louisiana. The eight-mile stretch from Arnaudville to Leonville is known as the “Teche’s River Road” and is a journey into the heart of Acadiana. Arnaudville is the home of Bayou Teche Brewing, a company that makes a brew called “LA-31 Boucanee” made with cherry wood smoked wheat and is also the site of NuNu Arts and Culture Collective where artists from throughout Louisiana gather to showcase their art.

Scene of Teche at Arnaudville

In Arnaudville, we often have lunch or dinner at “The Little Big Cup,” a restaurant that serves some of the best cuisine in south Louisiana and features a “groaning board” on Saturdays and Sundays. We had been introduced to the town through Darrell and Karen Bourque. Darrell, a former poet laureate of Louisiana, once came up the bayou on a barge and climbed the steps leading to the deck of The Little Big Cup to deliver a reading from his book about the Cajun settlement of Louisiana entitled Megan’s Guitar. Poetry readings are not uncommon at this site.

Our recent visit to Arnaudville included brunch with the Bourques, and we sat on the deck of The Little Big Cup overlooking the bayou on a halcyon February day, talking about future glass work I’d like Karen (a consummate glass artist) to do for the cover of a new book of poetry and about Darrell’s chapbook, Where I Waited, to be published in the spring of this year by Yellow Flag Press whose editor is J. Bruce Fuller. Darrell’s work will focus on the paintings of Bill Gingles of Shreveport and I think it’s some of his best work. Just to titillate

Bayou Teche at Arnaudville

readers, I’m including one that I particularly liked entitled “Here and Here” that Darrell wrote and dedicated to Goldman Thibodeaux, notable Creole Cajun musician who was honored in 2014 with the Louisiana Folklife Heritage Award. The poem is after Bill Gingles’ painting Here and Here:

HERE AND HERE   

Sometimes my brother lives in a yellow temple inside here and here,

sometimes he lives in blue arches bent around those songs he’d keep

all his life if he could. I go to see him as often as I can, play Quoi faire

as many times as he asks me to. For him songs stay a while then seep

back into that almost imperceptible line here makes next to a place

not here. That line is the place we were boys together, pulling plows

through black gumbo dirt, picking the cotton the dirt made, his face,

then as now, darker than mine, bronzy color that favored blue, a vow

almost that beauty would always live in our house. He seemed a race

all to himself when I knew him then. He knew no other time than now

& he took me with him wherever he went. If he held something dear,

I did. If he climbed the sides of field wagons and burrowed in the heap

of white fluff we’d picked, I did too. He taught me how to lessen fear,

to live where he lived. Here is one leap; another here is another leap.

Darrell Bourque, December 21, 2015

Darrell and Karen Bourque at Little Big Cup

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

A BOX OF HUMILITY

I’ve often refused to give out copies of sermons that people request when one I’ve preached pleases their ear, mostly because I think that a sermon is more effective audibly delivered, but sometimes people hear a story and ask for a hard copy of it. Ash Wednesday I talked about pride and its effects and how Lent was a meet time to do a little self-examination, pray for, and practice humility, and several people expressed interest in a printed version of a story within the sermon. Here’s the story:

“Almost twenty years ago, I was director of Solomon House, an outreach mission at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana, and a woman came to me on a day we didn’t usually give out money for emergency assistance. She had visited us often, many times going into the sheds behind Solomon House that held clothing for rummage sales…to get clothes for her sick husband she always said. The woman made the request so many times and carted away such quantities of clothing that I thought her husband was either the best-dressed man in a small community down the road from New Iberia, or she was collecting clothes for her own backyard sales. In my arrogance, I presumed to know what her real needs were.

The morning she came to me, I began, rather impatiently, to explain why I couldn’t help her. When I finally shut up, having used up all the reasons, justifications, and explanations I could summon to mind for not helping her, she just looked at me and asked if she could come into my office. I said “yes,” but I was suspicious.

The woman held a small cardboard box with a lid on it that she brought into the office with her. “I don’t want money or clothing,” she said. “I just want you to help me with some closure about my husband. These are his ashes.” She pointed to the box she had plunked down on my desk. “And you’re a good person, so please bless them.” She began to lift the lid, but I motioned for her to leave it on.

As minister of an outreach mission, I had to be prepared for most anything, but this request was a first. I can’t tell you how small I felt. Most Episcopalians say that when all else fails, consult the Book of Common Prayer, so I picked up the BCP lying on my desk, flipped the pages until I found the Committal in the burial service and read it aloud, then embraced the woman, who was, by now, crying softly.

As I ushered her out, a friend who had accompanied her said: “She has been riding around since daybreak waiting for you to open Solomon House to do that blessing.” The women got into a car and sped off, sans clothing, sans emergency assistance, leaving me with my presumptuousness and my former judgments about who the woman with the ashes really was. And she, of course, had been the face of Christ.

Most of us have met at least one person who holds up a mirror for us to see the real Self. Thank God. This Ash Wednesday we confront with humility the fact that we don’t possess super-powered lenses to see into the soul of others, and we’re forced to let go of our presumptuousness, to allow faith and trust to take over.”

That’s not the complete sermon, but it’s a starter for going into the desert of Lent, to enter this time of self-emptying. As the Scot preacher George MacDonald once said: the love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of Self — nothing else added, nothing else needed.