(continued) station, fingerprinted and booked her, kept her in jail overnight, while Santiago enacted a sit-in on the police steps, wailing, weeping, singing to his love (he has a fine light tenor voice) and creating such a disturbance that the police finally jailed him also. By now the bail bondsmen were getting involved as well as Claire’s father, the bondsmen offering free bail as a tribute to the love story, the police chief wishing the whole thing would go away, and a doctor pronouncing Santiago’s wounds superficial, hardly worth speaking of. Finally, after interviewing the four principals, Claire, Santiago, the ER doctor, and the psychiatrist who monitors Claire’s anger classes, the police chief washes his hands of the whole mess, drops all charges, tells everyone to go home. I spot Claire the next morning as she takes a stroll in the rain, on the sidewalk between my house and the bookstore. She’s lovely, tall, fit, athletic, somehow both tomboyish with those long legs and strong biceps made for playing basketball at Tulane—and simultaneously old-style feminine with a pert nose, long braided hair, brown eyes. She’s a distant relative of mine, like her father, like Santiago, more or less like everyone in the city. The town’s genealogists never tire of reminding us that Louisiana has had a long headstart in the process of ethno-biogenetic non-differentiation, what with the Creoles of New Orleans and Natchitoches, and the great Hispanic migrations of the late twentieth century, and the Asian influx of the twenty-first—all of this along with the routine marrying and inter-marrying of ten dozen generations of Cajuns, Anglos, African-Americans, Vietnamese, God-fearing half-crazy Scotch-Irish emigrants from the Old Dixie states, Lebanese restaurant owners, French anti-royalists, Canadian medical students, and so on and so on. . . .The wedding is set for April. All is well.
House fires are a common occurrence during the November rains. Most of the fires are small and quickly extinguished by the municipal fire department, which fortunately (for us residents) established a sub-station in the neighborhood in 1931. Generations of fire chiefs have despaired of the neighborhood’s rusting space-heaters and floor furnaces and leaky chimney flues. Worst of all, however, are the ancient Russian tea samovars, present in nearly every house since the City Tea Boom of 1910-1912—a peculiar local fashion and enthusiasm (we were written up in Life Magazine in the fifties) which has survived two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the McCarthy era, the Reagan era, even a new millennium. At the height of the craze, each house’s silver-plated samovar had to be larger, heavier, and more ornately emblazoned than that of the house next door. New oak tables were built to support the behemoths , . . . << Return to TSAR Volume 7, Number 2 |
