You can try to break a man's pride, but he'll hold on to every part of it, even if it's broken. What is broken is destined to be repaired. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
New Orleans is like a china teacup that has been crazy-glued together once, twice, a couple hundred times. Where some people see cracks, and other people see scars, people in a New Orleans state of mind see laugh wrinkles. New Orleans has a crooked smile.
The man with weak knees is a widower. He was married to a genetic woman and they were very much in love. They fell in love shortly before they were married. It only took a month of getting to know each other for him to propose and her to accept. There is someone for everyone.
Here's a note to the young people out there, weak-kneed or not: When two pieces of a puzzle fit together, you don't need to force them and pretend that they do. What is meant to be is meant to be. Welcome to the authentic New Orleans state of mind where all sorts of permutations follow their natural destinies, everything falls into place when you let it. Let it be. Laissez les bon temps rouler.
Don't try too hard. New Orleans is great.
Bart Weekny, the man with weak knees, married a runner. She competed in triathlons. She was a swimmer, a bicyclist, and a runner. It kept her busy exercising, that's for sure, but she always had time for her family. In New Orleans, in all of Louisiana, probably everywhere that people have hearts, family comes first.
To this day, Bart Weekny, the man with weak knees, can barely do one squat, and that's while holding onto the edge of his dining room table. When he was growing up, his classmates called him a pansy.
Children can be so cruel but who cares? In New Orleans, they grow out of it. The subjects of their taunts grow out of it, too. Every New Orleanian is a friend to every other. The only thing worth nursing in New Orleans is either a baby or a bottle of Dixie. Nothing good ever comes from nursing a grudge.
When Bart Weekny, the man with weak knees, tried to join the US Army after graduating high school, he was rejected. He couldn't pass the physical exam because of his weak knees. Then, he tried to enlist in the US Air Force and they rejected him, too. He resigned himself to civilian life and he's very proud of what he's accomplished----he still is, even after New Orleans broke him.
You know New Orleans as The Big Easy, but a lot of people who know better call New Orleans The Man-Breaker. Welcome to Man-Breaker Month on the New Orleans State Mind Blog.
It's going to last all of September!
Bart Weekny's wife drowned in 2018. This isn't a happy story.
She was swimming in Lake Pontchartrain, off Lakeshore Drive. Officially, nobody is supposed to do it but all triathletes do it all the time for their training. There aren't any beaches to speak of in New Orleans.
It's not that the water is unsafe. Lake Pontchartrain is cleaner than it has been in decades, thanks to the advocacy of the Pontchartrain Conservancy. It's the shore here that isn't safe.
The south shore of Lake Pontrchartrain along the New Orleans coastline is entirely manmade. When New Orleans was founded, the south shore was all swamp. Nobody ever went broke investing in real estate so the swamp was filled in and now the shore of the lake in New Orleans is a series of concrete steps that lead into the water with expensive house lots as far as the eye can see from on top of the levee.
The steps at the lake aren't there for recreation. As everyone who grew up here knows, a walk down those steps is a walk to Davy Jones' locker.
Lake Pontchartrain is only about 12 feet deep but people who swim off the shore of New Orleans are often carried by the undertow under the steps and, unlike the topsides of the steps, the undersides are rough concrete, as corrugated as a 100,000 piranhas' upper jaws. Ouch.
The undersides of the steps will rough up a human body caught there into chum for the blue crabs and the fishes.
It takes a while for the tumbling action of the water under the concrete shoreline to reduce a corpse to nothing. It's never a pretty sight when the divers fetch a corpse from under the steps. The staff at the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office dreads these arrivals, and they see all sorts of gruesome stuff over the course of their careers.
The steps along Lake Pontchartrain are meant to disperse the overhead force of waves hitting the shore, preventing erosion, and, in the worst-case scenario, hurricane surge. This creates a strong undertow, an undertow so strong that only the strongest swimmers can beat it.
Sometimes, even a triathlete can't overcome the brute force of the undertow and he or she, in this case she, gets caught under the steps and gets tossed around over and and over, struggling at first, unconscious at second, and finally dead. Their bodies become as unrecognizable as---- I don't know----it's just unrecognizable and I take no pleasure thinking about it. You shouldn't either. Let's just get on with the story.
The man with weak knees had no choice. He had to look at what was left to identify what the coroner proposed was his wife's dead body. He fainted when they lifted the sheet. Don't even think try to imagine what he saw. It was terrible. Nematodes had already started to lay eggs by the time the police divers found the corpse.
We're not paid to look at these things the way coroners and their assistants are. The man with weak knees wasn't paid to do it either. His job was to look and say what he saw out of duty. It was worse than jury duty. He will never forget that trip to the coroner.
After he fainted, he had to look a second time to make a positive ID. His weak knees buckled but he didn't pass out that time. One of the assistants held him up. He didn't recognize anything about the bleached out, bloodless, tattered and masticated meat and bones on the slab but the concrete and the fish had left one thing on the body's left ring finger. You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. It was a wedding ring.
"Patrice!" the man with weak knees cried out in anguish when he saw the ring. Then, he fainted again.
Patrice Weekny is buried in St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery No. 2, on Louisa Street. It's the neighborhood cemetery. The man with weak knees walks there from their home every Sunday to visit her grave. It's not too far for him.
Bart Weekny, the man with weak knees, is broken but not beaten. His heart is broken. He doesn't know if he will ever love another woman again. Certainly not like he loved Patrice. No one could ask him to that.
He still has love in his life. He is raising three beautiful children, The fruit of their marriage, true New Orleanians, each one. They come from strong parents, even if their father has weak knees. When love abounds in a household, what can go wrong? He does what he can to be the best father he can be.
Bart Weekny is still bowlegged as a cartoon cowboy but everyone who knows him sees he stands tall. It can't be easy but he's doing it.
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