Pawpaw and Louisiana

I talked today with a friend who's a University of Dallas grad about my piece coming out in Sunday's paper, about the school. My friend is living and working in south Louisiana, though he's not a native. I asked him how he was getting along there. He said, "I'm not from here, but I gotta say, this place is good for your soul. There's nothing like going to the St. Patrick's Day parade, and eating crawfish on the sidewalk because somebody's boiling them in their yard."

Which was funny, because I got a long, very thoughtful e-mail today from a south Louisiana expat who'd read "Crunchy Cons," and my Wall Street Journal column about Gov. Jindal last year, and is starting to think hard about moving home. He's just at the beginning of his career, and is wondering if it's going to cost him more in what really matters to stay away rather than going home.

Now's a good time, maybe, to link once again to my favorite piece of writing that I've ever done: my 2001 Wall Street Journal column called "Pawpaw's World." Excerpt:

At bedtime, as night falls over Brooklyn and my toddler Matthew has said goodnight to Moon for the umpteenth time, I turn off the bedside lamp and tell him it's time to sleep. Then I turn the light off, he rolls into the crook of my arm, cranes his head so he can whisper in my ear, and says, "Pawpaw."

This is my cue to tell my 20-month-old son stories of his grandfather, my own dad, who lives with my mom ("Mammy" to Matthew) in Starhill, a south Louisiana enclave where the only sounds at night are crickets and bullfrogs, not sirens on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Matthew's grandparents visited a couple of months ago, and he fell hard for them. Especially Pawpaw, who shares the boy's enthusiasm for graders and forklifts and things that go. After they went home to Starhill, Matthew kept asking for them ("Mammy! Pawpaw! See more!") and at bedtime wanted me to tell him real-life stories about Pawpaw.

So that first week after Matthew's grandparents left, we followed Pawpaw's adventures hunting squirrels so his family would have enough to eat during the Depression. We joined him in the rodeo, riding bucking bulls and wrassling steers. We followed Pawpaw into the Coast Guard, and rode out a hurricane in Mobile Bay lashed to the wheel of his 40-foot cutter. Then Pawpaw piloted a dinghy in rough seas, outmaneuvering a shark to complete a mission to change a buoy's light bulb.

Then I told Matthew about the things Pawpaw did when I was little. Once I saw Pawpaw catch an egg-stealing chicken snake by the tail and crack him like a whip, snapping the varmint's head off. I told my boy about the hunts, when Pawpaw took me into the swamp and showed me how to stalk whitetail bucks and other game. I told him about how when the Mississippi River flooded, Pawpaw would set lines in the backwater for catfish but often snared snapping turtles, alligator gars and fat black water snakes instead.

You can imagine how thrilling this is to a little Brooklyn boy. But the other night, when Matthew's deep breathing told me he was asleep, it struck me that I hadn't thought about these things in years. Here I was rediscovering my father's life through telling stories about him to my own son (a startling number of which end with the cooking and eating of a wild animal). As a child, none of this seemed extraordinary to me at all. It's how most men lived in West Feliciana Parish, and indeed some version of this rural saga is how a great number of Americans lived until a moment ago.

Truth is, it's more pleasurable to me in the telling than it was in the living. I was a bookish kid who longed for the big city. Though I idolized my dad for his courage and omnicompetence, I always knew I would find the meaning of my life and vocation elsewhere. But telling these stories to my son about my Southern boyhood, I'm discovering a poetry of place I hadn't noticed before, or at least resisted.

Read the whole thing. The older I get, the more I think about this stuff.