Good morning everyone and welcome to Thursday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Before I begin, I need to offer two apologies: one for being so absent yesterday and a preemptive one for repeating that again today. I’m afraid I’ll be back down in the lower reaches of a neighboring parish for meetings and job-site assessments. Yesterday was the district’s largest high school, today one of its more modest elementary schools.
Yesterday, I ended a long, hot day on my patio with a tall glass of iced tea with lemon and a copy of The Best American Short Stories (2016), [BASS] edited by Junot Diaz. Reading—particularly after an arduous day—is a luxury of which I seldom partake these days. Tiredness after hours of work, the immediate pressures of preparing dinner and managing a household are my typical excuses; but with my son away visiting his maternal grandparents, finding an excuse not to take time for myself is harder. And so I read for a few hours while my sister’s dogs wandered in and out the house (the heat drives them in until they forget and come out again, and then the cycle repeats itself), the bees swarm the mimosa tree blooms that occupy a third of my small cordoned space, and the mosquitoes probe tentatively around the edges of my cuffs and collar.
Reading is a skill we take for granted most times, but shouldn’t. The latest studies of education in Louisiana put less than half of children (K through 3rd grade) reading at grade level. When I went through the system, those numbers were even lower (though they improved before falling again). As a Cajun, it was generally believed I belonged to a less-educated population—a nicer way of saying “part of the ignorant classes.” Though education among Cajuns has always been on par with national averages in this country, the perception was, and still is, there.
Part of that perception was part of the construction that happens with the process of “othering” people: they don’t understand English that well, don’t look like us, and have distinct cultural traditions, so can’t truly appreciate or attain our level of sophistication. With revisions of this state’s constitution in 1921, French was prohibited from being taught in school. While the Supreme Court ruled that such English-only instruction was unconstitutional two years later, it remained official educational policy for the next four decades and the unofficial policy for a couple decades after that. Education, it seems, was equated with assimilation. From a certain angle, one might be excused for reading a grade level behind when the words being read are in a foreign language—but I’ll leave that thought for another day.
Briefly, the BASS series began in 1915 and was edited by Edward O’Brien until his death in 1941 (in London) when it was then given to Martha Foley. After her death in 1977, the series started the modern tradition of having a guest editor each year that would select the best 20 stories from about 120 screened by the series’ editors. It has become a tradition (started by John Gardner in 1982) to stray from that blinkered list and pick stories he thought more deserving. That act of inclusion (at least in my mind) has improved the series vastly and this 2016 volume demonstrates that nicely. Junot Diaz, whose writing I do admire, brings together a host of writers with names that don’t begin with “O’” or ring of northeastern families of long standing. Authors of the first two stories are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mohammed Naseehu Ali; and both stories are as finely told as any old Cajun tale I heard told from the back of a lantern-lit trawler drifting on the slow current waiting for the moon to rise and the shrimp to come up to feed.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?