We Will Rise Again George Rodrigue Original

"Aren't yous happy?" my uncle asked Marie Rodrigue on the night of my engagement to her son.  "You're going to accept a daughter-due north-law!"

"I had one," she replied, her face deadpan.  "It didn't work out."

When she died in 2008 at age one hundred and iii, George Rodrigue's mother yet wanted to "go abode" to New Iberia.  She wanted her automobile back, to remove her grandsons' hats and cutting their hair, to lengthen my skirts and overcook my Thanksgiving turkey, to visit long-dead friends and family, and, most important, to see her son become a real chore, "with the telephone visitor," she said, every bit she worried about his pension:

"When volition yous realize that nobody'south gonna purchase those pictures?"

She was tough, 'solid,' equally George used to say, with legs like tree stumps (her description, non mine, although…)…

…and the closest she always came to happiness was in worrying nearly it.  At age ninety-two she chosen u.s. in Carmel, as information technology stormed at our business firm in Lafayette, Louisiana, concerned virtually the rise water in the front yard.  We heard the telephone drop and an 'Umph,' amidst the thunder and rain, as she slipped on the front porch, her solid body rolling into the flower bed unharmed.

"Where are the sandbags?!" she hollered, recovering the telephone equally she lay trapped beneath an azalea bush.

(George Rodrigue painted his mother's 1924 graduating grade from Mountain Carmel Academy in 1972; Marie sits lesser row, third from the right)

Like most of her generation, the Low hovered over Marie Rodrigue's decisions, threatening to return at any moment.  However, she lived with another experience merely as powerful.

It was a Lord's day morning in 1927, and like all of New Iberia, twenty-two yr former Marie Courrege knew that the h2o was coming.  The U.Southward. Corp of Engineers, hoping to spare the big urban center, blew up the levy at the Mississippi River nearly Morganza, northward of New Orleans, and in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, a few days before.

Marie parked her Model T Ford at the edge of the floodplain, just eastward of New Iberia, where the river ran thousands of years before, and where the land descends toward St. Martinville.  She heard the water before she saw it, and for the balance of her life she recounted the story, her hands moving with the retention.

"The water was rollin'," she said, her arms twirling and her eyes wide. "I jumped in the car and collection to the church, the river rising on the wheels of daddy's motorcar.  'It'south coming!' I screamed in the middle of the sermon, and the people ran from the church and left town."

Marie Rodrigue, a devout Catholic, proud to be 'French' every bit opposed to 'Cajun,' was an odd and some would say charming mixture of funny and mean.  "She has no filter," George used to say in response to her biting comments.  If information technology entered her head, it came out of her rima oris, and like most families, maybe all families, it was those closest to her that felt the sting.

"George, you're total of sh*t," she said, on more than one occasion.

And somewhen I was as well.  We learned to lie and tell her what she wanted to hear, that the new clothes were actually the dry cleaning, that I scraped the insides of the pumpkins to make the pies, that nosotros sold paintings on our vacations, that her savings paid for her living expenses, that our dinner guests left twenty dollars at the door and, that if she would wear a new arrange instead of her shroud to our wedding, I would,

"I swear, on the day you die, permit the sleeves out again so that someone else can wear information technology."

George, an only child, tried to delight her, and mayhap that is the best that tin can exist said of their relationship.  He loved her deeply and lied daily to his mother, because he wanted her happiness.  I know for a fact that she bragged about George to others, nonetheless she existed on another aeroplane from her son, unable to admit his accomplishments where it mattered almost, to his face.  Fortunately, her wit softened the accident.

"She didn't think she was funny,' says George, "but she had a dry, cynical humour that cut to the chase real fast."

Immune to criticism from a young historic period, George is confident in his artwork and in life's decisions.  In the years I've known him, he coveted only his female parent's approval.  Yet, in one of life'due south ironies, the harder he tried, the less likely her praise.  The saving grace, both at that time and at present, as nosotros reminisce virtually Marie, is the leftfield humour in her retorts.

"Well, did he accept anything adept to say?" she asked, after we gave her a rosary and a signed declaration from the Pope.

She wore step-insinstead of panties, passed a good time with her visiting relatives, went ridin' in the afternoons, had the en vie for chicken stew, and (unable to grasp the concept of reruns) marveled at how good Ed Sullivan looks for his historic period.

Unable to sleep, she roamed the business firm at night, checking doors and the fridge, one time locking me out in my nightgown at 5:30 a.m. every bit I picked blackberries in the backyard for a pie. (Thank yous again, George Parker, our neighbor, for your discretion and the use of your bathrobe and phone-)

For no reason at all, she stood barefoot on a railroad necktie in our driveway and sang the French National Anthem at the top of her lungs as George and I planted bamboo around our greenhouse.  Another time she and her niece Berta Lou yelled like Janes throughout the evening during a Tarzan marathon, feasting on Doritos and cherry wine, as George, the boys and I stared from the side by side room.

In the two years she lived with united states of america, she expected 'dinner' on the table each mean solar day at noon, shortcuts not allowed.  I repent here publicly to my stepsons for thinking that they finished off the cakes in the night, leaving me panicked nearly seven days a week for a new bootleg dessert.  It was the ceaseless roach trouble that alerted me to the truth, when I institute cakes and cokes stored beneath Marie'due south bed, hidden, she explained, "from all those kids…..and from Dickie (Hebert)!"

On the road, George called her everyday to reassure her that he was working.  He often recounts the time some friends from California heard her on speakerphone afterwards he explained to her that someone bought a painting for $50,000.

"She got existent quiet and and so said, 'How much?'

"So I repeated it slowly.

"'She paused again before she got mad: "For one of your pictures?  George, you give those poor people'southward money back right now!'

"She was more than worried nearly those 'poor people' than she was about me."

Without question, Marie softened with age.  She forgot about Andre's long hair and Jacques'south girlfriends.  She forgot that she hated Christmas.  And she forgot me birthday.  Unfortunately for George, she remembered that he took her motorcar and that she wanted to become home.  In her own style, a Mother'south way, she loved her son, and she reminisced until the end most his childhood studio in the attic and the style the other mothers cooed at him in the carriage.

While in her early nineties, Marie and George visited his begetter's grave in New Iberia, where a cousin left fresh flowers for what would have been his one-hundredth altogether.

"Those hussies," she snapped, "they're still afterwards him!"

And she never visited him over again.

For better or worse, Marie lived her after years (her last forty, according to George) in the by. Admittedly, the repeated conversations often brought tears to my optics,

"George, let'due south visit Lona," she said, dressed and set for the ride.

"Lona's expressionless," he replied.

"Oh yep?  Where'southward Caspa?"

"Expressionless."

"Well so, let'south phone call Romain…."

But they were all dead.  Finally we lied about that besides and spoke of ghosts as though they lived.  Nosotros explained that they would visit her next week, as we grabbed a hazard, a fleeting adventure, to make her happy.

Wendy

lippertreave1937.blogspot.com

Source: https://legacyarttour.org/2011/05/07/the-artists-mother-marie-courrege-rodrigue/

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