Category archive: Louisiana

Louisiana Falling, Rising, Falling

Originally in American Thinker,  May 29, 2010.   In 2006, my wife and I traveled to New Orleans and visited the site of an unassuming two-story house on Navarre Avenue. A gaping top-to-bottom crack stared at me from one wall. A horizontal water line on the bricks four feet above my head marked a chapter [...]

American Mother

The room was silent but for the sound of a woman’s voice tracing the recollections from the long life of a dear lady. Millie was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1918 as the War to End All Wars wound down. The world faced change. And not just political change. By Millie’s reckoning, the most significant [...]

Here and now

Angela Cazorla was born around 1775 in the Canary Islands. She was my fifth great-grandmother. Angela’s ancestors lived near Cazorla, Spain, 190 miles northwest of Gibraltar. The town sprang up in Roman times as Carcacena, a silver and lead mining center where Roman aristocrats profited from the slave labor of Angela’s — my — ancestors. [...]

Heated liberals, emotional gymnastics, and a bird named Dodo

Don’t like the huge cost-of-living increases that will whack you under President Obama’s carbon cap-and-trade scheme? Then “address your anger at the Bush administration.” After all, “regular American citizens” wanted “wholesale changes,” so we should welcome anything that Obama does. Is it worthwhile to try to reason with people who think this way? In other online [...]

Thank you America

John Lennon’s harmonica greets me as I plop into my cousin Steve’s car. Please Please Me has been out for three years, but even at o’dark-thirty, DJs still play the song as well as more recent Beatles hits. Mom waves from the front door as Steve and I drive away to join our fishing buddies. A few [...]

Crab envy

The daily summer thunderstorms are starting to drift over the marsh from the Gulf. My brother Harry and I heave our catch from the bayou. An old gent who’s come to gawk struggles to return his eyes to their sockets after seeing 200 pounds of Louisiana blue crabs that threaten to burst our homemade trap. “Give [...]