Matine, Good Deeding -and- Humpday Angsties

Some of you already heard this around the campfire, but Johnny T. and I escorted Ms. Matine, a 94-year lady, to her St. Bernard church down the road for Palm Sunday mass.

Jonathan also has a garden in the back of the church, where "we" (mostly Johnny and Ana Helena (friend of Ben), despite my landscaping resume) planted a few new additions after mass and the subsequent visit to Matine's house.

To rudely splice in the umpday angst -- I've been wanting to write about this/ haven't -- and the thing is, it seems as you gravitionally go toward a new weekend, it becomes less possible. Hump be the last stand methinks.

In any case, I highly recommend a trip to St. Bernard with Jon Dan Travvy to check out his Adamic (pre-kickout) handiwork. I was feeling like a representative of ASCO Sunday morning after the Saturday crayfish berl indulgences, and almost didn't make it. Through my child-memory mind I also remembered the Palm Sunday mass as eternal, so it seemed quite daunting. But as we process ed in to the church with palms, we were hit with a yellow light like a sun vitamin. The church itself is very un-baroque, and seems more like a country Baptist church than the typical Catholic offering. The reader lady's Chalmette-inflected passion play was also quite nice.

You're probably wondering how J., A-H, and myself got tasked with this. The answer is that Matine typically goes to church with her granddaughter Monique, a friend of Jonathan's. She was in Florida. Cue the replacements.

Matine lives in a replacement house on the site of her 'cane-capsized former house. It is a pre fab of sorts, but has porches, and still has the barn out back where Matine and family members weathered the storm, which had to be sawed open by rescuers. The saw job is still there for the seeing. There's a new raincatcher for to serve fresh rainwater in the kitchen. Monique lives on the property in a railroad container car, in some post-K, Cajune-M.I.A shotgun of sorts, with a geodesic hut and chicken wire fence attachment to that for her dog.

Ms. Matine served us chicory coffee after church and it tasted great (good-tasting homemade chicory coffee, as opposed to Cafe du Monde, is a feat I've never been able to master).

If there was a cartoon cutaway of my belly (skipping tarny-soul view) at this point it would have shown nothing but the communion wafer and the coffee, to be joined later in the garden by one of Ana Helena's chemically delicious green swedish fish.

It also turned out - as the promised storm was nowhere, and the powerful nearer-to-Gulf sun beat down - than Ana Helena was friends in Alaska with a couple - Rocky and Destiny (a whole nuther tale) - than I was friends with in Savannah, GA.

We tried to go into Rocky and Carlo's (no relation to Rocky and Destiny) on the way home, but it was blue-closed old style. We stopped at a convenience store and I got to add an apple Hubig's to my near-empty belly, along with some Zapp's and Chex Mix from the car friends. Vitamin Water then. This the new loaves and fishes. We were all in such a good mood at this point - I even thoroughly (say in Arabi inflection) enjoyed checking out a picture of Ana's 20-month old daughter - everything seemed like a feast. The wind spiced the world nicely through the open windows of the Pathy [Pathfinder] as we toured through the oak-columned road, wheeled along the edges of the Chalmette Battlefield, and went past the yet-floodskanked planted helicopters of the old Jackson Barracks on the way, ultimately, back to the Ninth Ward where Ana Helena was scheduled to give Ben (believe it) a massage.

And then all was later recounted, spun, and examined on Judy's deck that Sunday night, just upstairs from the scene of the rubdown.

Johnny and I were so pleased with the day's events that we even threatened/ are threatening to go to the St. Bernard church's walking of the Stations of the Cross on Friday. Is this Church Slumming or are - we - for - real?



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In other notes -- I watched CLOVERFIELD last night. As someone who went through the Poseidon Gras that was Katrina and lived before that in NY, it was a weird experience: a perfect house blend of the hurricane and 9/11 disasters. I actually liked the movie a lot: much better than what I expected. It could just be, however, that scenes like friends getting separated by escape copters hit some deep place. Last night I ended up with dreams far more diabolical than the movie, and then near morning woke with laughter because Marc Robinson had decided to rename himself "Va-necknuts" [I'm sure that's not how he spelled it - I assume an umlaut was involved].