Stone Motel: Memoirs Of A Cajun Boy (Willie Morris Books In Memoir And Biography),Used

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their choreshandling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motelroom toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the bedsthey played canasta, an old ladies game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father.Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motels kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dads mission to fix his son, and Morriss mission to resistand survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. Theres also suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insiders take on a truly remarkable, notyethomogenized pocket of American culture.