By Kevin Chiri

I certainly love all the “Keep St. John Clean” work that is going on, and it’s nice to see the continued effort from businesses, to individuals, to the parish government to support it.

For that matter, I understand Parish President Bill Hubbard sent a letter out to all businesses in the parish and asked them to help out by simply picking up the trash in front of their business each day.

One businessman told me what a great idea he thought that was, and even though I know most businesses are going to do that anyway—at least if they want people to come to their store—it’s good to see the strong push from the top to keep this going. Good job, Bill.

That leads me to an incident that happened last week that has still got me steaming, and it’s the kind of actions that I honestly cannot even understand how to comprehend.

The wife and I, along with the 12-year-old, were heading down Airline Highway, just this side of East St. John High School, coming into town. The car in front of us was pretty fine—a fairly new looking beige colored Cadillac Escalade SUV.

So you can imagine my shock when I see the window roll down on the passenger side, and an arm come out as a woman flung a glass bottle, inside a brown paper bag.

The bottle flew a little ways, but not far enough to even make the grass—as if that would have made it better—and then the glass shattered all over the place on the concrete.

I was so stunned I hardly knew what to do.

My wife was the same. All I could think was to take down the license number of the vehicle and wonder if I could call it in to somebody and do something about it. I was so incensed to see such a thing that I didn’t even know what to do.

The whole incident was wrong for so many different reasons.

Here we are trying to clean things up, and we still have people who don’t think a thing about throwing their trash right out the window on a busy Saturday on Airline Highway. I guess it rates right up there with the people who think it’s fine to dump their ashtrays out in the parking lots.

So for whatever it’s worth, I hope the person who was involved in this incident might see this. Maybe they might actually acknowledge what they did was wrong, but it has been my experience that people who do things like this will go to great lengths to just get mad at me for having the nerve to write this. Never mind what they did….it’s all someone else’s fault.

Unfortunately, we’ll never be completely successful in cleaning things up until we teach our children how wrong it is to do things like that, since some folks still think it’s just fine to throw a glass bottle right out the window, so it can smash right in the middle of town.

Still hearing a little something about that “fabulous” column I wrote a few weeks ago about how amazing bananas are for you.

It was something cute my wife sent me, but it detailed—in quite serious fashion—the unbelievable benefits you get from eating bananas.

It was just last week when I was coming out of Matherne’s Supermarket early in the morning when I looked a little in front of me, and there was my buddy Wayne Jones, our illustrious sheriff in St. John Parish.

I yelled hello to him, and when he saw me, he immediately lifted his bag of goods from the store and showed me that he had bought some bananas.

Wayne let me know that apparently he, and a number of others at the Sheriff’s Office, are now eating bananas everyday after reading the column.

Wow, didn’t know I had that much power!

Since the wife sends me so much good information, and some good jokes as well, here is the latest “medical news” from her.

When you’re stressed, your heart is racing, your nerves are frayed, and your brain is working overtime. A study conducted by the University of Virginia reveals that when you reach out and grab a hand, the parts of your brain that mobilize your body, tell it to calm down.

A husband or wife’s hand apparently provides the greatest relief, but if you’re unattached, anyone’s hand will do. If you want to feel better fast in a high-pressure situation, remember the following.

Your brain can get a break when someone is there to help you cope. If you’re not married, grab the hand of a friend.

A couple more messages in church bulletins:

“The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.”

“Don’t let worry kill you off—let the church help.”

“Miss Charlene Mason sang ‘I will not pass this way again,’ giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.”

“For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.”

“Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.”

Kevin Chiri is Publisher of L’Observateur and can be reached at (985) 652-9545 or at kchiri@bellsouth.net