Whitney

Saturday, November 26 (After Chapter 28 of Triptych)

WHITNEY: Hey-ya! Knock-knock. You Dr. Aroslav?

aroslav: Some people call me that. Welcome, Whitney.

WHITNEY: Thanks. You really want to know about this little old Bayou girl?

aroslav: No. I'm not really interested. There seem to be some people who believe you'll be important to the story sometime. They want to know about you.

WHITNEY: Well, as long as it's not just you. What do you want me to tell you? Do you mind my Bayou accent? I can change if you prefer. I'm pretty good at Midwestern, like yours. If you want me to be foreign but still understandable, I can do Western Canada. Really, Eastern Canada isn't that different from the Bayou, at least among my folk. What do you prefer?

aroslav: Do you have a native accent that is really you?

WHITNEY: It's closest to the Bayou, but when I'm talking to people I tend to adopt the same accent they are using.

aroslav: Well, let's make that part of our conversation. First, though, let's deal with the vital statistics so the readers know a little more about you. Name, age, and birthday?

WHITNEY: Okay, boyo. Whitney Acadia Lambert. There's a t on the end of that. Down in the Bayou it gets left off a lot. I'm eighteen years old, born on April eleventh, Easter Sunday. Mama never forgave me for her missing church that morning, but said she'd pretty much given up everything for Lent anyway.

aroslav: Religious family?

WHITNEY: Catholic's a religion? I thought it was our nationality.

aroslav: I can see your confusion. Have a passport?

WHITNEY: First time I tried to board an airplane I found out my baptism certificate wasn't considered identification. I went out and got a driver's license—even though nobody else in school had one—and a passport. Quite the day when that arrived. I swear we roasted a pig to celebrate and everybody in the neighborhood came by to see that silly little book.

aroslav: Whitney, are you pulling my leg?

WHITNEY: Not yet. Gimme time.

aroslav: So how did a good Catholic girl like you get from the Bayou to Seattle.

WHITNEY: Oh, you got it all wrong, Dr. Aroslav. I'm not a good Catholic girl. I'm a very bad Catholic girl. You should send me to your room. I mean my room. Riiiiight?

aroslav: Begs the point. What got you to Seattle?

WHITNEY: I take it you mean besides Air Atlantis or whatever they call that airline. I swear they've made more water landings than they hit the tarmac. Well, first of all, there's a good, liberal Catholic school called Seattle Cascades University.

aroslav: Wait, wait, wait, wait! I didn't know SCU was Catholic.

WHITNEY: Well, you wouldn't know it to look at it. It might be a little school when you compare it to Notre Dame or Villanova, but it's still Catholic and it has a good education reputation. See, SCU was founded a century ago by Jesuits, but they are a pretty secular lot when it comes to education and even though the grounds are technically owned by the Catholic Diocese, there isn't really much interplay between the church and the college. Things like the Social Services Committee still have a strong connection, but even they are independently run and funded. It was enough to satisfy ma Mère and Pop that I wasn't going to a den of heathens. Little did they know they were sending the heathen into the den.

aroslav: Tell me about what you are studying. Linguistics, is it?

WHITNEY: Linguistics it is. And don't go trying to hide your accent. I know exactly what part of Indiana you grew up in.

aroslav: That was a long time ago.

WHITNEY: Traces still remain. I'm no Henry Higgins, but I'm pretty good at American dialects until you get into that whole New Jersey/New York mishmash. I am not going to try to pinpoint what block of what neighborhood a person is from based on how badly he slurs his vowels.

aroslav: How on earth did you get into linguistics living in the Bayou?

WHITNEY: Shortwave radio. I loved to listen to music, but the radio station near where we lived only played zydeco. Don't get me wrong. I like my Creole, Cajun, and Louisiana Zydeco music. We didn't have much in the way of instruments out there, so when we got together a fiddle, washboard, and washtub bass was about all folks could make music on. But I once heard an opera recording in school and realized there was other music. I begged and pleaded until Pop finally spent thirty-five dollars for a five-band transistor radio that I listened to every night. AM was pretty worthless, and we were pretty far from most of the FM stations except the local and one that broadcast strong enough from Houston. The weather band only had one station I could find and it didn't help us avoid Katrina or Rita.

Now, I know you all think Katrina was the worst storm in history because, frankly God hates nawlins. But he'd always been kind to the southwest Louisiana Bayou until Rita came crashing in a month later.

aroslav: nawlins?

WHITNEY: [big grimace] New Or Leans to you all. Anyhoo. We all'da stuck it out if it was just Katrina, but most of the folk who ran north from Katrina hadn't come back yet when Rita wiped out pretty much everything. They say the surge was twelve feet high. Of course, we were hiding out up in Shreveport with Aunt Adelaide and when we came back, there wasn't much left. Pop is a stubborn old mule, though and the four of us, Pop, ma Mère, Stevie—my little brother—and me, lived in a tent for two months while Pop built a cabin on the old foundation.

Now where was I?

aroslav: Uh ... shortwave radio.

WHITNEY: So the other two bands were shortwave. So I became a shortwave DXer. I crept up and the shortwave band listening for any signal and trying to stay tuned in and understand what they were saying until I got a call sign and location. Then I'd creep up to the next. Course, everybody gets Quito, Ecuador, the BBC, and Grand Old Opry. But I kept studying exactly how folks talked in the different parts of the world and then the different parts of the country. I discovered I could identify regions by different inflections.

When my English teacher figured out what I was doing he got a whole set of English dialect CDs. Don't ask me where he managed to locate them, but the Feds were giving us money for just about anything and he didn't have any problem figuring those language CDs into the new school budget. I suppose Lougenia's little boy who's, oh, six now probably doesn't have crayons in first grade because I had those damn CDs.

aroslav: It strikes me that you taught yourself a lot.

WHITNEY: Oh I had teachers, too, but none of them were linguists. They taught me math and science and English grammar. I liked literature and music, too. I was valedictorian of my class.

aroslav: Impressive.

WHITNEY: Woulda been if there'd been anybody else in the class. Only other one my year was Armand and he can barely write his name.