The Good outweighs the bad
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11/12/2022
I’m from Florida but I’ve lived in the Lafayette area for thirty-five years. I’ve never known nicer people. It’s true that non-Cajuns can never integrate entirely with the Cajuns who expect the right answers to the questions “Who’s your mama, are you Catholic, can your make a roux?” but Cajuns are no longer a majority in Lafayette, though they still are in the places around Lafayette. But here you can make friends with people who wait on you in stores, with your pharmacist, people whose businesses you patronize, in fact with anyone you’re willing to talk to. I could never list all the people who, on slight acquaintance have inconvenienced themselves to do me a favor.
It’s also the most informal place I’ve ever been. I can go for a year or more without putting on a tie. Enjoying life comes first here: money, success, competition efficiency, getting ahead are only distractions. A local saying is laissez les bons temps rouler – “Let the good times roll.”
The food is to die for – from po-boys in holes-in-the wall to grand restaurants with varied menus that are cheaper than comparable restaurants in other cities. The food is spicy but not coruscating as imitation Cajun food often is. But if your palate is mid-western bland you won’t like it. The cultural scene is far better than you’d expect for a place this size. There’s the Cajun culture: music, dancing, and hundreds of festivals – who expects to go to a Frog Festival? But we also have hundreds of visual artists and craftsmen and a vibrant classical music scene. Do you expect to find a group that plays medieval music on authentic instruments in a small Louisiana city? Our NPR station is big on “world music.” With a half-way decent radio you can get the NPR station in Baton Rouge which has news and talk shows all day. You can easily run into intellectually stimulating professors form ULL without enrolling in classes. Sports are life’s blood for most of our people and hunting and fishing are essentials in Cajun life.
I have to acknowledge a hefty list of negatives but, however annoying they are, they don’t outweigh the positives unless you have children to educate and can’t afford private schools. We have some excellent private schools because anyone with two cents to rub together gets their children out of our public schools. Still, the gifted program at Lafayette High equals many of the private schools. Here’s my list of other negatives:
Roads and traffic: The soil here is the consistency of gumbo and you can’t pave gumbo. Forget about wheel alignment. Lafayette is basically a collection of subdivisions with too few arterial roads. That means traffic on those roads is extremely heavy. Everything I’ve said about the niceness of the people vanishes when they touch a steering wheel.
Climate: I’m from Florida but the hot and humid summer is worse here.
Aesthetics: Except where the rich people live and a few older neighborhoods this place is butt-ugly. I sometimes think I’ll scream if I see one more metal building. As for natural beauty, it can only be found in swamps and rural areas. We do have spectacular oak trees, but no one seems to be planting new ones.
Ignorance: With our public schools what did you expect?
Politics: I’m a progressive Democrat. My wife and I are afraid to talk politics between ourselves in a restaurant. People here forget their niceness when they enter a voting booth.
You have to put up with negatives no matter where you are. If you hate spicy food, if good architecture is necessary for your happiness, if you can’t endure heat, if you think driving should be a pleasure, if you require everyone you know to be knowledgeable about physics or history or literature this might not be the place for you. But if you want to be surrounded by warm, friendly people and like to eat out a lot (or do gourmet cooking at home for that matter), and even if you want a fair amount of intellectual and cultural stimulation, and certainly if you want to laissez les bons temps rouler, Lafayette could be a good fit.
Arthur White
Breaux Bridge, Louisiana
Arthur | Breaux Bridge, LA