10 Years Ago: Opelousas: Death in Black and White

 

So, 10 years yon, how goes the disparity between Black and White life expectancy? 

Missouri: 

"In 2022, Missouri’s life expectancy rebounded from 74.6 years to 75.4 years having fallen steeply immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the 2022 life expectancy is still about two years lower than our state’s life expectancy was in 2019 and remains about two years under the national life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022. Further, the disparity in life expectancy between white and black/African-American Missourians remains substantial, with white men living 8.5 years longer than black men and white women living 4.4 years longer than black women.

"Pregnancy-related death rates among Black/African American mothers were three times higher than white mothers.42 Of the 68 pregnancy-related deaths, 57 (84%) were preventable.  

"The infant mortality rate among Black/African American residents was over double the rate for white residents (11.7 versus 5.1)."

I don't have comparable stats for Louisiana.

 

Friday, December 4, 2015

Opelousas: Death in Black and White

 

Myrtle Grove Cemetery, Opelousas, Louisiana.

There's a good chance that if you're brown and you live in Opelousas, you'll die 15 years sooner than your white neighbors.

How do I know this?

Soon after I moved to Opelousas, a couple of events got me looking at local obituaries.
I looked at the obituaries of two local funeral homes: Sibille and Williams. The first thing I noticed is that Sibille is the funeral home for white folks and Williams is the funeral home for those of color.

Over time, as I periodically visited the obituary listings, it seemed that the ages of death over on the Williams obituary page were notably younger than those at over at the Sibille page. This was odd.

To test this perception, I looked at all of the obituaries at Sibille and Williams for the people who died in October and November 2015: 

• White: average age of death = 79.36 years
• Brown: average age of death = 63.67 years
• 79.36 minus 63.67 = 15.69 average difference in age

OK, what about outliers? Brown people who died extraordinarily young and white people who lived well into their 90s? They skewed the average for these two months, yes?

I crunched the numbers again, this time tossing out the oldest white decedent and the youngest brown decedent. Results:

• White: average age of death = 78.24 years
• Brown: average of death = 65.0 years
• 78.24 minus 65.0 = 13.24

In this adjustment, Opelousas residents of color died THIRTEEN years younger than their white neighbors, still shocking.  

Now I needed a control group, so I looked at deaths in central Missouri, whence I came, using two funeral homes there: Millard Family Funeral Chapels and May Funeral Home. Unlike Sibille and Williams in Opelousas, there is some integration of services at Millard and May, but there is still a strong bias in the clientele served. Generally, Millard's clients are white. Generally, May's clients are brown.

Results for October and November 2015 in mid-Missouri: 

• White: average age of death (served by Millard) = 72.85 years, after excluding the oldest and youngest decedents
• African-American: average age of death (served by both Millard and May) = 60.17 years after excluding the oldest and youngest decedents 
• 72.85 minus 60.17 = 12.68 years average difference in age upon death

So from a slice of mid-Missouri, African-American decedents died an average of TWELVE AND HALF YEARS younger than their white neighbors.

Note: In the Missouri sample, there was what seemed to be an aberrational number of infants who died (at least I hope it was aberrational), both white and black. So for the Missouri comparison, I excluded the oldest individual and the youngest individual in both white and African-American groups. 

Side note: Jesus. Why are mid-Missourians, generally, dying so young? And it's astounding to compare the average age of African-American deaths in mid-Missouri to average age of white deaths in the Opelousas area - almost TWENTY years difference!


Centuries of institutional racism have a long, long reach.


But maybe you think that I happened to choose two months in a particular year that were non-representational of the facts. Wonderful! By all means, please dig deeper. Please do.  

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Listening

 

I'm not talking about listening to a guided meditation, although those are certainly good. 

I'm not talking about listening in a way that I might pause to note the travel talk of geese as they fly north in the spring in their arrowhead formations.

No, I'm talking about this → for five minutes, with eyes closed, I actively listen, with the intention of meditation, to the ambient sounds wherever I am at the moment:

• In my bedroom.
• In a coffee shop.
• In the woods.
• On the beach.
• In my parked car. With the windows up. Or the windows down. 
• In my yard, my patio, my porch, my balcony.

 

 

 

Intent and action are the keys for me in a listening meditation. Intent: mindful meditation. Action: For five minutes: 

• Be still 
• Sharpen my focus on hearing
• Blur my other senses

 

 

Credit for this video:

"An eight-part series (Poetry of Perception) on representations of perception and sensation made for fundamentalsofneuroscience.org. "We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think." Oliver Sacks

Words by Walt Whitman
Animation by Daniela Sherer danielasherer.com
Narration by Peter Blegvad
Sound + Music by Skillbard skillbard.com
Produced by Nadja Oertelt nadjaoertelt.com"

Brought to my attention by The Marginalian.
 

 

10 Years Ago: The Church of Zydeco

This 10-year old post happens to feature Curley Taylor. He and his band re-entered my post-Louisiana orbit in June 2019, when they performed at Tucson's Monterey Court.

 

Monterey Court in Tucson, Arizona. May 2019. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

 

Monday, November 23, 2015

Louisiana: The Church of Zydeco

Performance center, Vermilionville, Lafayette, Louisiana. June 2015.

Every Sunday afternoon, Vermilionville hosts the Bal du Dimanche ("Sunday Dance") from 1:00 to 4:00. Usually they alternate Cajun and Zydeco each week, with the occasional "swamp pop" or blues thrown in to the line-up.

I love both Cajun and Zydeco, mind you.

But. ... On every Zydeco Sunday, the same strange phenomenon occurs: I walk into the gift shop, show my membership card, get my paper bracelet, walk out of that building and into the courtyard, pass by La Cuisine de Maman's, and as I hear the Zydeco waft from the nondescript Performance Center in front of me, my mouth begins to form into a smile. It's an involuntary response, I tell you.

The nearer I get to the Performance Center, the louder the music gets as it flows through the cracks of the doors, and the wider my smile becomes. Heck, it makes me smile just writing about it.

A pale, pale sample of this phenomenon is in the video below:

On this particular Sunday in June, the Most High Reverend Mister Curley Taylor preached, along with his holy men, Zydeco Trouble.

Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble. Vermilionville, June 2015.

We celebrants confessed our sins and were blessed for another week. Or until later the same day for serious sinners, who congregated at Whiskey River [now closed, following a fire in 2023]. Or again that night, maybe at Randol's or O'Darby's or Feed n Seed.

Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble. Vermilionville, June 2015.

When a Zydeco band gets into a special groove, and the band members are in the music, and they lead us, the audience, up the road with them, and we add our energy to the band's energy, and the entire room thrums with a soaring, transcendent force, it evokes to me a trance dance that brings euphoria, of connection with humanity of today and humanity going back, back, back all the way to our very beginnings.

It's not just Zydeco music that does this, of course. Any music can do it. I remember a singular experience at the Lupus Chili Fest in 2013, in a garage. I described the feeling like this:

Sometimes when you listen to music, live especially, it pushes against you like an ocean wave or like a force of air, where you feel exhilarated and breathless at the same time, where your head actually falls back a little from the strength of the sound coming at you.  

This is what it felt like in the Lupus Garage when The Harvest Season played, as the band's flow rolled up and back in small waves, then pounded the shore in a rush against the beach.

If they had been calling to people at the back of the church to come to Jesus, why, I might have been tempted to do just that.

Amen.

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: The Facial

 

Face From a Cosmetic Spoon. Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art

 

 

I'm good for a five-minute meditation. Five minutes is achievable for me; any longer and I'm going to put it in the category of a chore, thus less likely to fold into a daily routine. 

This month: a meditation of touch. 

I lightly move my fingers over the terrain of my face, staying in the physical moment, feeling the sensation of skin on skin, how my face receives the touch of my fingers, and how my fingers feel the touch of my face. 

I note how the texture of my lips differs from the texture of the skin on my chin. I feel how my eyebrow hairs lay. I linger over the ridged skeleton of my forehead beneath the skin. I notice the warmth or coolness of my fingers on my face. Along my jawline, are there stubbly bits or is all smooth?

During this meditation, I know that tender memories will arise of my mother caressing my skin when I was a child and of me, in turn, caressing my daughter's face. I'll feel these memories, but I'll allow them to float by as I return to the meditation of my touch in the present, letting go of all else.

10 Years Ago: Learning to Dance: The Pause

 

In re-visiting this post of 10 years ago, I remembered "Caroline" and the power of a pause. Caroline is the protagonist in the book, The Camel and the Scorpion, about a young associate professor pulled into the case of an American woman arrested in Israel for espionage in the 1970s. Despite her innate shyness, Caroline had been a champion member of a college debate team; she knew that the force of a well-placed and well-timed pause is an effective tool for debates, speeches, sermons, and calls to action. [Disclosure: I know both the book's author and the real-life person who Caroline is based on.)

As a guide for daily living, there is also the acronym STOP to help us respond instead of react to an emotional or physical trigger:

• S: Stop:  Remember to pause.
• T: Take a few breaths.
• O: Observe my emotional and physical reactions in the moment
• P:  Proceed with awareness, choosing our response

 Perhaps I will claim self-actualization on the day I conquer the art of the pause.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Learning to Dance: The Pause

Dancing La Marinera in Tularosa, New Mexico. San Francisco de Paula Festival 2013.

Last year, at the Feed 'n Seed, I danced with an older gentleman. A slow-ish song. About 30 seconds into our dance, he said quietly in my ear, "Slow down, we're not in a hurry to go anywhere."

This centered me right then, and for the rest of the dance, I could be in the moment with where my partner was going and which rhythm line of the song he was choosing.

Holi Festival 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Earlier in the year, before the Feed 'n Seed experience, at a Vermilionville Bal du Dimanche, a woman generously tutored me on a zydeco movement. I had taken zydeco lessons a month or so before, and I'd learned a basic zydeco shuffle in which every beat of the eight-count in zydeco was accounted for with a step or tap. But this woman was showing me something different. I didn't see the eight counts in her steps, I couldn't replicate her movements, and it confounded me.

I asked her about the step count, and she said - bless her generous heart - "don't worry about counting, just move with the music." I couldn't do anything with that information, so I asked her to keep demonstrating her steps until I could solve the mystery. She graciously complied.

Finally, I saw it.

On the third and seventh steps, she PAUSED. The fourth and eighth step were there, but "silent." Ohhhhhh.

When I excitedly shared my newfound understanding, the woman looked a little puzzled, and then shrugged, as if to say "whatever," apparently not excited as I about my tremendous breakthrough in understanding. I'm guessing she had so internalized her step movements, she didn't even notice the pause, and thus didn't think to explain it.

Feed n Seed, Lafayette, Louisiana.

These two experiences planted seeds in my neonatal dance mind, but they didn't stick until I took a new round of zydeco dance lessons this month.

The instructor informed me several times that I was going through movements too quickly. He EXPLICITLY directed me to pause. He hammered these points when I struggled to make turns correctly, so that I'd finish on the right foot at the right beat.

Finally, I got it. I have to PAUSE when I take that first turn-step.

The pause makes all the difference.

There is a maturity, an elegance, a sensuality, in the dance pause.

It's gratification delayed, it's listening and feeling, it's a breath.



Related posts: 

Learning to Dance: Solving for X
Learning to Dance: The Tao of Following

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Land Snorkeling

 

Caterpillar. Big Spring, Missouri. 2007. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

The title Land Snorkeling popped up whilst I was tunneling an online rabbit hole about something or another and it surely did grab my attention. I'm not gonna link that article here because its website throws up an egregious quantity of pop-ups into the faces of visitors in addition to making it too challenging to customize one's cookie settings. 

The founders of a different website, aptly named Land Snorkel, state they invented the term and its attendant philosophy.  

"Land snorkeling is taking the time to savor aspects of nature we ordinarily don’t see or pay attention to. Land snorkelers wander through nature with no real destination."

I'm happy to report to myself that I have engaged in land snorkeling for much of my adult life, although I didn't have a name for it. 

To make my foray a meditation, I abstain from phone use and earbuds, and slide up the volume of my senses: sights, sounds, smells, the touch of a breeze or the lack thereof. My focus is outward, not inward. What I mean by that is that I let go of self so that I can make room for other. 

 

 

10 Years Ago: No. Fifteen Years Ago: I've Gone Rootless

 

 

2023.0429. Cozy bed in Chez Prius. Ellis, Kansas.

 

September is the anniversary of my having gone rootless. 

It's been 15 years now. 

If all goes according to plan, I will re-root myself soon. But that's tomorrow and not today. 

In the meantime, a visit to my past: 

 

Flashback to September 2010: "I'm Going Rootless"

Gee whiz, it's been five years since I wrote my first post: 
 
 

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

I'm going rootless. 

I've sold my house. Move-out day is October 15, and, as of today, I don't yet have a forwarding address.

I'm going rootless.