A Little Piece of Heaven

Last Thursday was a little piece of heaven. I told a work crew, whom I was dropping off at their site in the AM, that I would pick them up around twelve to bring them back to their trailers for lunch. "Oh, hey,” they said, “Steve [a homeowner client on another site] invited us all over for gumbo, why don't you just take us over there and join us!"

“Well, okay.” Big grin.

It was a perfect fall day (the first, really, we'd had at that point--crisp in the morning and warm and sunny by noon), and the whole crew of drywall-dust-smudged volunteers, plus some hangers-on (me) sat around on plastic chairs underneath the house* eating homemade gumbo, Steve's hospitality spread out before us like an expansive picnic blanket.

Steve is what I like to think of as the best-possible-scenario client--unlike many of our clients who are elderly, disabled, working multiple jobs or unable to face the strain of 2+ years of hurricane aftermath, he is physical & emotionally able to work on his house with our volunteers as they replace siding, put in new flooring, trim out windows, etc. One night he stayed up past dark with a spotlight trained on the floor of a tiny closet as he pieced together leftover bits of laminate flooring, determined not to waste any usable material. Our volunteers, who are (understandably) disappointed when homeowners can't, or don't, come to visit their work-in-progress homes on a regular basis, are thrilled with people like Steve. When a homeowner makes an appearance, checking in once or twice a day--or, even better, works side-by-side with the volunteers--it becomes an infinitely more personal and meaningful experience. Suddenly it's not just a house they're working on, but a home. Big difference.

As his 90-something-year-old mother, Miss Sarah, made sure everyone had enough to eat (and more), and his dogs, Stinky and Belle, begged for Halloween-themed cookie crumbs, I chatted with a family friend who works at a local casino. She told me how she's living with Steve and his mother right now because she can't find affordable rent, and how the ladies who come into the spa where she works routinely marvel at the "cheap," $3,000-a-month rent for condos down here. “If I were paying that much for rent, I wouldn’t be able to eat!” she exclaimed. Good thing she has friends like Steve.

I don't know if it was the weather, the food, or the fellowship that made me the happiest--but it just felt like a taste of kingdom come. Houseless and kitchen-less, a regular guy lays out a simple feast on his front lawn for a group of strangers who have come, in the face of so much injustice, to help him recapture a little “just”-ness in his life.

Tell me this place ain't somethin' to behold.

*Steve's house is raised up on stilts in compliance with FEMA flood regulations.

Learning to Receive

I've learned in the course of my travels that you often have to set aside your own preconceptions of "the way things are" in order to pay respect to, and gain appreciation for, your host's cultural traditions. You know, "When in Rome..." Usually this is a no-brainer for me--my openness to other ways of doing things has led me to many adventures and unfamiliar undertakings, everything from eating eel at a French-Japanese wedding to wearing the South Asian equivalent of Hammer pants to conform to conservative Indian mores. But one area of custom and cultural obeisance never fails to put my knickers in a twist: Hospitality. I was raised to offer to pay for a dinner or some other excursion or event when you are a guest in someone else's home, as a way of saying thank you; but in a lot of other cultures, this is the opposite of the norm. I once stayed with a Turkish college student in Istanbul (who had probably as much spending money as I did--zip) who paid for all my meals, all my museum visits, all my transportation, all the tea I drank and all the backgammon games I played, and even bought me a souvenir trinket I'd been admiring. When I asked, for the second or third time, to pay for a meal as my way of saying thanks, she looked me directly in the eyes and said, with a pained expression on her face, "STOP! You are shaming me." What I thought of as courteous offers were, in fact, insinuations that she and her family didn't have enough of a sense of honor to show the proper care and respect due to guests.

This same principle--the inverse of what I know--applies whether you're talking Turkish peasants or Istanbul urbanites, Varanasi schoolteachers or Delhi socialites, Lousiana ranchers or Gulf Coast dockworkers. And it means that I as an outsider have to swallow my own ingrained cultural patterns, rethink my definitions of "generosity" and "hospitality," and give up the power I'm used to having as an equal contributor. I hate that indebted feeling--it takes some serious reconditioning for me to accept, in its totality, being a guest.

In fact, it seems to me that the whole guest-host relationship is about power--my inclination as a white American woman is to assert my independence by showing that I can take care of myself (financially and otherwise) and that I won't be sugar-daddied, especially by men my own age. I'm used to being in power, or at least sharing power, and when I can't I chafe against what I see as being constrained to a very limited, passive, female role. This is, in part, why I find myself wanting to rebel so hard against the "Southern gentleman" type down here, the man who tries to pay for everything, all the time, no exceptions--and who looks at you like you're cross-eyed if you even think of trying to pick up the tab. It's like you're insulting his mother--come to think of it, you are, because you're implying that she didn't raise him right. Now, I'm not sure I could ever be that unequal of a partner, in terms of finances or power, in a longterm relationship--but as a short-term resident of the South, I am having to learn to accept the intensity of the "chivalry" here. (As an aside, let us note that chivalry as a way of life went out either with the Crusades or the pistol duels of the 19th century, depending on whom you ask, but either way it is long gone.)
Really it's a matter of becoming vulnerable enough, trusting enough, to let someone else make the decisions for you; but I tend to see the "imbalance" in this dynamic in terms of what I can't give or repay, not in terms of what I am allowing others to give to me. Something to work on.

The other aspect of this hospitality conundrum is something I often witness workcampers butting up against--accepting gifts from those you have come to help. One pastor from Connecticut who volunteered here told me how frustrated he had been when, as a young man leading a work group at our organization, he and his crew had stocked the empty pantry of the homeowner whose kitchen they'd been rehabbing as a house-warming present, only to find on their last day of work that she had used every last pickle slice and potato chip to make them a huge farewell lunch. "That food was supposed go to her," he had lamented at the time; "it wasn't supposed to be used on us!" As he later put it, he learned some grace-filled lessons about hospitality and generosity that week. I'm reminded of the parable of the Widow's Mite: the fact that the homeowner gave all she had, even though she had so little, amplified the magnitude of her gesture so that it was able to embody the sense of gratitude she felt for the work that had transformed her daily existence. In response, the workers had to learn to give up the control they'd had of the situation all week and, in a Christ-inspired role reversal, let the receiver become the giver, and vice-versa.

Another example from earlier this year: each week for 1o weeks straight my good friend Lucious cooked a massive feast for the volunteers who had come to work on his house. Each week he bought 30 or 40 steaks; he slow-cooked 3 racks of ribs; he boiled, fried, and grilled several pounds of huge Gulf shrimp; he fried up tons of flaky catfish; he roasted heaps of chicken wings and legs; he boiled snappy blue crabs; he whipped up endless batches of onion rings, waffle fries, tater tots, potato salad, etc. etc. Even though he claimed to have an "in" at local butcher and seafood shops (which he probably does, since he's been in the restaurant business for years), it still cost him a small fortune to prepare all that deliciousness; not to mention to do it ten times. And not only was each such undertaking financially burdensome, but it was time-consuming as well: he would start the day before by smoldering an entire section of tree trunk in a burn barrel to make the coals for his grill. Come the morning of the day of, he would spend hours slicing and chopping and roasting and boiling in the hot sun in order to feed his crew (and half the neighborhood). And he consistently met with a withering look of disdain all offers of reimbursement.

Often volunteers expressed consternation about this: "Why does Lucious spend all this time and money on us, when it would be better spent buying supplies or paying for labor to rehab his house?" It's for the same reason he doesn't think twice about buying workcampers a radio or renting a Port-O-Potty for their convenience: it's his way of saying "thank you."

Once again, it's about power--or rather, the lack of power you feel when you have been forced to cram yourself and your wife and your granddaughters into an unsanitary FEMA trailer for over 20 months, the helplessness you feel when even though you are the family provider, you can't get together enough resources or time to restore your family's home to a condition that's fit for living. I can't imagine the humility it takes to allow someone to help you rebuild your life and do for you what you cannot do for yourself, day after day after day. How vulnerable and indebted you would feel... and how badly you would want to restore the balance between you and your helpers, even in a symbolic way. Lucious responded to our doing for him what he couldn't do for himself by doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves--preparing a soul food-seafood feast and treating us to a good dose of Southern Hospitality. Which means put your billfolds away, shut your mouths and "eat you some shrimp, Boo!" A delicious lesson to learn.

Strawberry Fest

This past weekend I again crossed state lines in search of good friends and a good drink. Most of my weekend time is spent doing things like learning how to use a nail gun, digging through large amounts of rotting organic material and composting earthworms, rescuing turtles stranded mid-highway, cleaning trailers and RVs, and church-hopping (another effect of having no UCC congregations in Mississippi--I am forever bouncing from Missionary Baptist to Methodist to Episcopal and beyond). But somehow, it is more fun to tell stories involving line-dancing and 3am truck stop diner buffets than it is to recount the wonders of emptying the toilet holding tank on my RV.

I motored over to Louisiana in the driving rain on Saturday afternoon, stopping in Ponchatoula once the weather had cleared for that town's famous Strawberry Fest. Strawberry Fest is your typical town festival deal, only it revolves around all things Strawberry--strawberry shortcake, fresh strawberries, strawberry daiquiris and margaritas, chocolate-dipped strawberries, strawberry wine (and endless playing of that venerable country tune), strawberry pendant necklaces and earrings, strawberry plants... I sampled a strawberry margarita and a strawberry dipped in what tasted like nutty-fudgy brownie batter. Dee-vine. I also visited the Turquoise Coyote, a gem of a bead and jewelry store with a Southwestern theme. If you are at all a fan of jewelry-making, or of antiques, and you are driving through southeast Louisiana, you should visit Ponchatoula, America's Antique City.*

This was all on my way to visit a friend from school who lives on her family's farm in Tangipahoa [Tanj-ih-pa-hoe] Parish. They raise cattle and timber, and it's sort of a gathering place for all W alums in the Louisiana-Mississippi area under the age of 30--A's mother has an open-door policy and showers true Southern hospitality and cooking on all her daughters' vagabond friends.**
The reason for this weekend's gathering was a David Allan Coe concert at The Stampede, a local honkytonk. (Definition of 'honkytonk': any establishment south of the Mason-Dixon line combining a bar and a dance floor, showcasing line-dancing or the two-step; particularly, such an establishment frequented by cowboy wannabes and rednecks, hence honkytonk.)
The beautiful thing about the kind of social dancing found at such places is that it's actually social--there is a set of commonly known dance steps which allows strangers to interact with each other in a way that mercifully avoids grinding, humping, etc. This means that folks dance with all sorts of partners, and pairing up with a given individual for a song or two doesn't mean that you are confined to that person for the rest of the night or that you are going home with him/her. So we had a great time kickin' up our heels with our friends and with friends of friends, and with friends of friends of friends--even though we were 20 miles from A's house, it seemed like she knew everyone, and if she didn't know someone, she knew their uncle's cousin's grade school teacher's daughter's boyfriend. Or his dog.
There's just something satisfyingly carefree about a night of good dancing with your friends. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday evening, even if it does involve witnessing folks falling-off-their-chairs drunk or wearing Confederate fishing hats (you thought I made that up, didn't you??).

The next day involved sleeping in, touring the farm, and trying to get one of A's heifers back up on her feet--she'd been sick and unresponsive for the last few days, and they may end up having to shoot her. We also planted lilies at A's grandfather's grave, and took a run distributing what I like to call "cow crack"--high-protein supplemental pellets that look like gigantic guinea pig food. If you ever want to see a herd of stoic, stand-offish cows get real excited and trot after your pickup truck like you're Santa Claus with a sleigh loaded with pre-chewed cud, get a bag of these pellets and pour a trail of them out behind you. You will see those slow-footed sourpusses perk up like comatose teenagers awoken by the end-of-school bell--running as fast as they can from one pile to the next, nudging each other out of the way and gobbling up little gray cylinders like kids in a candy shop. Mm mm, good!

Despite the fact that I got a flat tire outside of town on the way back, it was a great weekend--time to relax, make new friends, eat some real home cookin', and consume a whole stack of pickles straight out of the jar. Nothing like beer munchies!

This weekend it's time for the Crawfish Festival... even though it takes me half an hour to eat half a dozen crawfish, I can't wait!



*More fun facts about Ponchatoula: Home of the Strawberry Farmers' Wall of Honor; recognized in 1936, by the federal government as the greatest shipping point of strawberries in the world. Ponchatoula derives its name from the Choctaw Indian language meaning "hair to hang" because of the abundance of Spanish moss on the trees surrounding the area. http://ci.ponchatoula.la.us/ and http://www.ponchatoula.com/
**More on Southern Hospitality, the code of which is politely but firmly etched in stone, iron-bound by honor, and festooned with food and drink:
Once I tried to pay for lunch at the local Oyster Fest (a lot of the social scene in these parts revolves around _insert regional food specialty here_ Fests)--fried oyster po boys all around, and for me, my very first slippery, uncooked bivalve. I followed our waiter over to the cash register nook, handed him cash, and explicitly instructed him not to let A and her mother pay for me, because this was my way of showing gratitude for their hosting me. He played along and my fiendishly smooth plan went swimmingly... until he asked if they needed anything more, A. and her mom asked for the check, and I said I'd taken care of it. Out came the credit card, onto the table came the "We're locals" trump card, and back came my cash (except the tip, which they actually let me get!!).