Dear Jimmie Dale,

I'm taking a break from preparing a series of financial reports for an organization here. Nobody else wants to do it and, as you know, it's not something I was trained to do. In fact, I can't imagine anyone less equipped for such work. It reminds me of a quote by Jerry Garcia, the late lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead.

"Somebody has to do it. It's just pathetic that it has to be me."

I wandered off to Mamou, Louisiana last week to spend some time tapping my toes. I left Paris early Friday evening thinking I would drive as far as Alexandria before stopping. Once there, I thought it would be smart to stay on the south side of the city so I could make a clean getaway the next morning. Turned out there was no south side to the city, it just stopped and gave way to small farms and fields. So I drove on until I reached a small motel just on the outskirts of Mamou and stopped there.

The room was vastly overpriced at $24. Because I looked trustworthy, the clerk waived the key deposit of $10 though she grew suspicious when I said I planned to actually spend the whole night and would be the only one occupying the room.

If they'd paid me a penny for every other living creature that shared my room, I'd be a millionaire. And there was more entertainment; some kind of air perfume machine which kicked off every hour or so making a sound like a broom handle raking across venetian blinds. The first few times, I jumped up to defend myself, only to feel greasy, perfumed air slowly settle on my head and face. It was about 3:00 a.m. before I finally located and destroyed the device. A half-hour later, the smoke detector let out one very loud chirp, a routine it repeated about every fifteen minutes or whenever I was about to fall asleep. Exhausted, my feeble brain finally realized it was crying out for a new battery. Instead of supplying one, I destroyed it, too, and threw it into the growing casualty pile established earlier by the perfume machine.

At 5:00 a.m., I decided to cut my losses and leave. I stood in the bathtub while water leaked down from the showerhead, dancing all the while to keep from crushing whole families of small bugs. Finished, I grabbed my stuff, returned my key and left the place to all those creatures with an earlier claim. After a short drive, I arrived in Mamou and drove around until I saw some lights and a small crowd of pickup trucks crowded around a service station. There, I bought coffee and stood around listening to sounds first uttered in the 12th century by the French people who later came to Nova Scotia and then on to Louisiana.

After awhile, I bought a newspaper and with the coffee carefully balanced on my lap, drove down the main street of Mamou toward Fred's Lounge. It was still dark though the dawn was beginning to announce itself. As I drove along, I noticed a dim light on in one of the storefronts. It was a barbershop and I saw that one of the chairs, in full recline, contained a very old man. I couldn't tell if he was alive but he was wearing a white smock so I assume he was...or is...the barber.

I parked on the main street, a few doors down from Fred's Lounge, opened the coffee and began reading the newspaper. Within a few minutes, I looked up to see a man riding a bicycle right down the middle of the street toward me. He was in his 50's, bald, wearing a red T-shirt that had been in place for a very long time. He had on old pants and tennis shoes and his bicycle was a vintage model. Whenever another car or pickup would approach him, he would shoot his fist up in the air and wave vigorously. He waved at me just so and I put a lot of energy into my return wave and then returned to my newspaper.

Thirty minutes later, I looked up to see him approaching again. He must, I thought, be making laps of the town. On the third such pass down main street, he rode by and then turned up on the sidewalk in front of Scooter's Bar, opened the door and went on in. Until that moment, I thought that Fred's Lounge, where I was headed to meet some friends from California, was the only bar in town that opened at 8:00 a.m.

Soon after, I was in Fred's where the crowd was as thick as the smoke and everyone was dancing up a storm. Fred's widow, Sue, white headed and wearing a holster with a bottle of brandy in it, was passing out slices of boudin in a cardboard box while boogying around the dance floor with one of the fastest moving 80 year old men I've ever seen. Right in the middle of the dance floor was a Cajun band that included an accordion player, a fiddler, a guitarist, a pedal steel player who kept a cigarette going the whole time holding it with his little finger between puffs. And there with them all, playing the triangle, was the fellow who been lapping town on his bicycle. I noticed that his clanger had been wrapped in duct tape so he didn't actually make any noise but he was jumpin' and jivin' and it was clear that whatever he lacked in musical skills was made up by his complete joy in participating.

Its just part of what I love about Cajuns. That....and I know when I am finally discovered to be a complete fraud on all financial reporting matters, they'll get out the duct tape and make a place for me in the band.

Hope you are well and happy.

Johnny Rose
Paris, Texas