⚓The Visitation / September 2023

Yours Truly in a Swamp

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This month's column 

dedicated to the memory of 

 Françoise Gilot, 

Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Dead at 101

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The Visitation

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher
by Leonard Earl Johnson 

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

 🦅

💀

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

www.LEJ.world

❤

Hildegard Bottlebrush welcomed the visitors and led them upstairs to The Rector's study where each took the priest's hand and reminded him where they had first met.  

Balthazar said, it had been in Grand Coteau, at Louisiana's prestigious residential Academy of the Sacred Heart. 

"At a symposium," The Rector recalled, smiling. "The Bishop and I both bought your chapbook."

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The chapbook was titled:  

The Boy Behind the Altar, 

from Big Mamou to the East Village

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Hildegard slipped away and returned with a rolling tray filled with pots, cups, cream pitchers, sugar bowls, warm pecan cookies, polished silver spoons, and white linen napkins.  She poured and passed round the offerings.  

"We have taken rooms next door to the blue and white Mission House of Mother Teresa," Dillard, the taller of the two Red Women Warriors, tells the smiling Rector.  

"We plan on joining the Cathedral," Sylvia adds,  selecting a pecan cookie from a passing white porcelain dish painted with a gleaming gold rim.  

The Rector flinched slightly.  His smile dimmed and the spoon slipped from his fingers.  It bounced twice on the thick hand-knotted burgundy rug.

🥏🥄   

Dillard and Sylvia are the kind of congregate activists who make shepherds dream of parishes where the flock is more settled.  

The rug on which his spoon just bounced had once traveled the Silk Road from Uzbekistan to France before any one in The Rector's study this day were more than dreams in their respective molecular ether.  Centuries later it sailed to Louisiana aboard a ship made of wood and propelled by the winds.  Now it softens the footfalls of these holy, somewhat revolutionary, mostly mercenary, and fully beguiling folks.  Hildegard gave The Rector a fresh spoon.  

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Sylvia lifted her red KRVS ~ NPR tote bag and removed the little package Balthazar had given her for safe keeping.  She handed it to him. 

He opened the tissue paper, folded back the bubble wrap and placed the JFK forget-me-not rocker on a silken reddish-bronze handkerchief that he spread atop the coffee table.  Which, on second look, appeared to be a rather well made shipping crate.  Some high-end retro fashion art object, Balthazar figured. 

Hildegard removed the cups and cutlery.

"I am asking five-hundred American," Balthazar said.  

The Rector's eyes widened as he read the gilded monogram, JFK.  He said, "I am offering you three."

In that little space of time the deal was struck.  Three one-hundred dollar Federal Reserve banknotes left The Rector's alligator wallet for a new home in the

 

fisherman-poet's bejeweled left white boot.  One yellow jewel was slightly larger than the others and covered a secret compartment revealing ~ when unlocked with a tiny gold key ~ ten mildly psychogenic emerald gummy bears.  Next to the gummy bears, Balthazar placed the three crisply folded greenbacks. 

As the visitors left out the gate, Hildegard handed Dillard the Republican National Committee's alligator skin briefcase containing the perfectly preserved Snowball Project.

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🧜‍♂️ 💀 🧜‍♂️

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~  *  ~      ~  *  ~      ~  *  ~

More Next Month on 

Hildegard Bottelbrush, 

a. k. a. Flaschenbürste,

Housekeeper to The Rector

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Your comments 

and corrections

are welcome

click here

~    ~    ~   

🠟

Lagniappe du Jour

💜💚💛

The Ladies Wore Red,
July 2021
Origin Story

💞

Françoise Gilot, 

Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Dead at 101 

New York Times, June 2023

💧💀💧

💧

 

© Leonard Earl Johnson 

Go here for 
T-Shirts, Koozies, LEJ.world icebox magnets and such falderal ...

If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.world anytime. 

They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.

~   ~   ~

 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world,

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Draft HILDEGARD BOTTLEBRUSH October 2023

 

DRAFT

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Hildegard Bottlebrush

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher
by Leonard Earl Johnson 

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

😎

💀💀

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💧

Hildegard Bottlebrush attended the prestigious Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, but chose not to speak of it to the group now exiting The Rectory gate.  They had, after all, come to see The Rector not his housekeeper. 

"Catholic hierarchy runs mostly Gott-to-Cloth with merely passing nods towards housekeepers, gardeners and cooks," she said this once to the now canonized spokesperson for the world's disregarded, Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity.  

They met during the future saint's visit to Louisiana.  

She had traveled to the sportsman's paradise to bolster the faithful in the roiling wake of Jason Barry's exposé of Church complicity in the sexual abuse of children.  He published the story in book form, in movie form, and in the National Catholic Reporter.

Cathedral of Saint John The Evangelist, Lafayette

Mother Teresa's visit to Lafayette led to the establishment of the order's Mission House, on la rue Saint John, across from Dillard and Sylvia's new quarters, and the Cathedral's magnificent Oak Tree. 

🎋🌳🎋The sunlight cast shadows across the cured and waxed alligator briefcase Hildegarde had handed to Dillard on their departure from The Rectory.  The reptilian scales on it's tanned hide looked like waves crashing across a leather sea, and felt to the brush of the hand like some thousand year old armer pitted against the sins of the day.  In Louisiana alligator skins cover treasured cedar chests, briefcases, wallets and ~ most prized of all ~ the feet inside a pair of alligator shoes. 

"Oh, mon cher!" Syllvia exclaimed.

Dillard opened the case when they got back to their apartment and explained to Sylvia how they were being asked by the Republican National Committee, to join the Snowball Project and display the frozen snowball contained inside, 

"To dispel talk of Global Warming."

She waved two bumper stickers in the air, "Also these bumper stickers blaming it on Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton." 

Sylvia nodded her agreement but harbored doubts, given the staggeringly high temperatures currently  outside their own door. 

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Flaschenbürste

Flaschenbürste was the Bottlebrush family name before assimilation from German to Cajun English.

Hildegard Bottlebrush  is descended from a line of 1721 immigrants from German/French disputed Alsace/Lorraine; lured by the Compagnie du Mississippi, the bubble-destined, "Mississippi Company" of John Law ~ then the richest man in Europe, and

Controller General of Finances of France under

le Régent Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 

after whom the bejeweled City and Parish of Orleans are named.

Philippe II's crest

Born a Scotsman, Law worked variously for English and French governments, and in the process helped invent paper money. Which is, after all, merely a bank issued promissory note payable in silver or gold to any bearer thereof.

On this high rolling flimflam, Law financed and promoted Louisiana's "German Coast," as a New World colony favoring German-speaking farmers; promising them riches in abundance derived from feeding the hungry flocks of Africans, French, Germans, Irish, Italians, and Spanish arriving daily aboard every ship in the booming nearby

Port of New Orleans.

This coastal region where the Familie
Flaschenbürstes eagerly settled and prospered, took the French name, 'Bayou des Allemands,' meaning in English, 'Bayou of Germans.'

Bayou Des Allemands

It is a scenic spot on the Amtrak line thirty-five miles west of New Orleans.

Never incorporated it is known still today, and posted on signs and maps as "Des Allemands" (Of Germans).

One morning aboard the Sunset Limited out of New Orleans, passing over the scenic bridge at Bayou Des Allemands, The Bishop and The Rector saw three boys ~ two white and one black ~ turn their butts upward and moon the train and its holy passengers.

"Some things never change," The Bishop said. 

"Some do," The Rector smiled, "Rosa Parks would be amused."

~ www.LEJ.world 

 

🧜‍♂️ 💀 🧜‍♂️

A famed motor boat chase in the 1973 James Bond spectacular, Live and Let Die, was filmed on Bayou Des Allemands.  Click the link below if you desire the thrill of film chair travel.

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Live and Let Die

Youtube 

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~  *  ~      ~  *  ~      ~  *  ~  

💜💚

💛

💧

🗣😷

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

~    ~    ~   

The Ladies Wore Red,
July 2021
Origin Story

💞

 

© Leonard Earl Johnson 

Go here for 
T-Shirts, Koozies, LEJ.world icebox magnets and such falderal ...

If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.world anytime. 

They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.

~   ~   ~

 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world,

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved