When I learned that mother was dying, I flew to Baton Rouge and went straight to her hospital. The night receptionist told me her room number, and, after I asked, directed me to a room dedicated to prayer and meditation. A few minutes later, I left the small chapel and rode the elevator to Wendy’s room in intensive care.
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I arrived at my grandfather’s funeral riding a motorcycle and wearing my high school letterman jacket. I turned off the motorcycle and took off my helmet, left it and my jacket on the bike, and walked past a crowd of reporters and the mayor’s police escorts. But I couldn’t get past the crowd of people surrounding a handful of LSU football players who must have showed up just before I did.
Read moreAndrea and I arrived at her parents house and walked in, barely able to squeeze in the living room because of all of her dad’s partially completed projects and her mom’s collection of things that she felt added decor. Her mom waved from the kitchen, where she was feeding the baby. Alice, Andrea’s younger sister and the baby’s mom, was trying to clear away enough dirty dishes to make room for two boxes of Little Ceasar’s pizza, the one that had commercials with a tiny cartoon Caesar, dressed in a toga and chirping “Pizza! Pizza!” I devoured two slices while watching Alice learn to feed her daughter by helping her mom.
Read moreJudge Robert “Bob” Downing of the 19th Judicial District Court, East Baton Rouge Parish, State of Louisiana, peered down his nose at my paperwork then looked up at Wendy and me across the top of his reading glasses. He paused, then looked back down his nose and reread my request. A few seconds later he put down the paperwork, took off his glasses and rested his arms on his large wooden desk and leaned forward. He sat silently for a moment or two, calm and not judging either of us .
“Miss Partin,” he began, “this is the first time I’ve been asked to emancipate a youth at their request.” Wendy looked up with a sad look on her face and quickly narrowed her eyes and looked back down at her lap where her hands held each other tightly.
Read moreSome time after I saw Stevie Nicks and single handedly helped deliver phone books to all of Baton Rouge, I stayed with Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo for a while, and they took me to Disneyland to see my grandfather. Not Big Daddy, but Wendy’s dad, they said. He was a cartoonist there.
Read moreThe weekend after I saw Miss Nicks dance, Debbie and Wendy picked me up at Paw Paw’s and took me for a drive. The new phone books had come out and were piled so deeply in Debbie’s car that I had to sit on Wendy’s lap until we had delivered enough for me to have room in the back seat. It was always fun with them, they laughed and joked and never asked me what I did on my other weekends, so I never had to think hard around them.
Read moreI said goodbye to PawPaw and crawled into my dad’s truck. I was anxious to show him my award from school for having drawn the best art in Baton Rouge for my age. It had been all over the news, but he didn’t have a TV. Even if he did, it’s unlikely he would have been awake at 7AM for the Buckskin Bill Black show that I watched with Paw Paw before school. But I wanted him to know that I had been on television and was famous, just like Big Daddy had been so much lately.
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A construction site boss was interviewing men for a job, when along came Boudreaux. The boss thought to himself, “I’m not hiring that ole lazy cajun…”
He decided to set a test for Boudreaux, hoping he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions, and he’d be able to refuse him the job without any problems.
Read more“I missed wrestling in the junior olympics because I overslept,” is what I told most friends later that summer. It was true, in a way. I never told Coach what happened, because he didn’t ask; he never asked about anything that happened in the past, only what I was doing today for tomorrow. But when Mrs. Abrams asked if I were okay – she didn’t ask what had happened to my face – I told her all of what had happened that day. I was transparent, like she had taught me to be.
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