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DEAR ABBY: I’m a man younger than my age married to a woman who is older than hers. Ten years ago, we couldn’t get along, so we separated.
While separated, I met a wonderful woman, “Cynthia.” We became friends with benefits and fell in love.
A year later, my wife got cancer.
Since her family lived out of state and had lives of their own, I moved back in to take care of her.
After eight years of battling her cancer, she has recovered. She can no longer drive or do heavy tasks and needs a walker. Mentally and physically, she’s not ready for a nursing home.
I ran into Cynthia a year ago and we became friends again.
I explained how I was, for the time being, taking care of my wife and told her I looked forward to the time we could be together.
For 12 years, I had sex with no one other than Cynthia. Eventually, she wanted more. She has now shut me out of her life, which I completely understand. I miss her and think about her all the time.
My wife has no one but me to take care of her. What can I do? I get no affection at home, and Cynthia will no longer talk to me. Do I try to win her back, or must I be a caregiver for the rest of my life and suffer every minute of the day?
FOR BETTER
OR WORSE

DEAR F.B.O.W.: Before making any decisions, do more research about what options are available for your wife other than you being her caregiver or a nursing home. In many places, assisted living facilities offer help as needed on a sliding scale.
Your marriage ended when you and your wife separated. (You should have made it official at that time.) If you felt the need to become her caregiver after that, you could have done it on different terms. Actually, you still may have that option.
Once you know how to see to it that your wife gets the care she needs, check if Cynthia is still available. I can’t promise she will be. Twelve years is a long time to have invested in a relationship that didn’t move forward.

DEAR ABBY: My sister and I are estranged, due to her history of drama and stirring up trouble. She has recently begun sending me nasty voicemails and texts. She had a bitter divorce several years ago and no longer has a relationship with her daughter or grandchildren. Because she’s miserable, she is now trying to make me miserable. I’ve been ignoring her and not engaging, but I’m tired of it. Should I confront her? (She’s not someone who’s reasonable.)
SISTER DISASTER IN TENNESSEE

DEAR SISTER DISASTER: Tell your troubled sister that you are sorry she is hurting, but you are no longer willing to let her take out her frustration on you, which is why, if you receive another nasty phone call or text from her, you will block her. Then follow through.

***

Abby shares more than 100 of her favorite recipes in two booklets: “Abby’s Favorite Recipes” and “More Favorite Recipes by Dear Abby.” Send your name and mailing address, plus check or money order for $16 to: Dear Abby, Cookbooklet Set, P.O. Box 446, Kings Mills, OH 45034-0446.

CENTERVILLE — The St. Mary Parish School Board will soon decide the next step in its selection of a new superintendent. Members can either narrow the three-candidate field further with additional interviews or appoint one of the three educators who underwent nearly five hours of interviews April 30.
Discussion about the superintendent selection is on the agenda for Thursday’s School Board meeting at 5:30 p.m. at the Central Office Complex in Centerville.
The three candidates who were interviewed last week are Franklin Junior High Principal J Ina, Iberia Parish Director of Child Welfare and Attendance James Russell III, and interim Superintendent Dr. Rachael Sanders.
Two other candidates had applied but are no longer in the running. Emily Martin of Plaquemine withdrew her application, and Dr. Clarence Michael Robinson of Thibodaux did not submit the required documentation.
The remaining candidates were interviewed separately without being able to hear the answers given by fellow candidates. The 11 School Board members asked the same questions to the three candidates.
A video of the interviews is available on our Facebook page and the St. Mary Parish Schools YouTube page.
First up in the interviews was Ina, who described himself as a son of St. Mary Parish who has spent his three-decade educational career in the parish school system. He said his job as a middle school principal gives him a unique perspective.
“I understand the challenges coming from elementary,” Ina said. “I understand the challenges coming from high school.”
Ina, who also serves on the Parish Council, said the parish is approaching an economic renaissance. But the system faces declining enrollment, competition for new teachers, more school space than the parish needs, and a gap between the needs of students seeking college preparation and technical training.
“We’ve got some challenges that will be looking us in the eye,” Ina said.
Russell has spent 12 years in his current job in Iberia Parish after a stint as principal at Anderson Middle School. His career took a unique turn in 2012, when he entered law school. He was admitted to the bar in 2017.
He came to the interviews with a slide show focusing on the bridges over Berwick Bay, a metaphor for what he hopes to accomplish as superintendent.
Russell also spoke about challenges, including declining enrollment and the LA GATOR program that diverts state funding for public schools to families that can use the money to pay for private schools.
“We’ve focused on what charter schools are doing or what parochial schools are doing,” Russell said. “We have to concentrate on what our schools are doing.”
Russell believes “every student in middle school or high school should be part of extracurricular activities.”
He noted the recently announced plans for the Saronic shipyard to increase its workforce by 1,500 employees, which would have an impact on public schools.
“Saronic is on the way,” Russell said. “Are we ready?”
Like Russell, Sanders spoke about spanning the distance between groups. “I want to be a bridge for St. Mary Parish,” she said.
Sanders has been with the St. Mary system for 26 years, including services as Patterson High Principal and director of the district’s alternative program. The School Board appointed her to be the interim superintendent after Dr. Buffy Fegenbush stepped down in November.
Sanders said she has built good relationships with local leaders and hopes to build what she called strong structures.
“You have to be able to withstand the turbulence,” she said.
Like Ina, she said she hopes to bring together vocational programs that are now scattered across parish schools into one center to make technical education more efficient.
The continuing desegregation case is “going to be the battle of our generation,” Sanders said.
And she hopes to “defend things that bring students joy . …
“Real leadership is deeply human,” Sanders said.

Friday was show time at Bayou Vista's Fairview Cinema, where a ribbon-cutting reopened the theater, which had been closed since 2019. New owners Patrick and Christen Hebert were assisted in this project by their children and grandchildren. They were joined at the ribbon-cutting by Chamber Chairman Holden Murray, Berwick Mayor Duval Arthur and Berwick Police Chief JP Henry.

St. Mary Chamber photo

NEW ORLEANS -- So, what’s the big deal?
As a reformed sportswriter who once asked ChatGPT to plot out the best road trip for visiting national parks in Utah – and got what appeared to be a suitably Mormon answer in five seconds – I wondered how long would it take for the free AI analytical tool to create a reasonable redistricting plan for Louisiana that would map out six contiguous, right-sized congressional districts for the state’s 4.6 million residents.
In this case, about 3.7 seconds.
But, as with all things Louisiana, where politics is waged as 4D chess, checkmate is not that easy, says Greg Rigamer, one of those rare people with the ability to decipher and accommodate both the unswerving validity of mathematical equations and the relentless warrior mentality of politicians, for whom this take-no-prisoners game of redistricting comes down to: “Find me one more vote.”
Louisiana currently has six congressional districts, four of them largely White and Republican and two that are mostly Black and Democrat. Now, the burning question being debated in the back chambers of the Baton Rouge Capitol and in the Oval Office of the White House is whether that 4-2 tilt in favor of the Republicans will become 5-1 or even 6-0, given President Donald Trump’s desire to extend the Republican runway in Congress.
“The easy part is to divide 4 1/2 million by six,” said Rigamer, a New Orleans political data consultant whose facility with polling and statistical modeling is legendary in and beyond Louisiana. “It’s absolutely simple. But dealing with decision-makers is almost impossible because they want their mother-in-law, who lives on this street, in their district, but they don’t want the people on the next street over.”
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling April 29 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s current congressional map was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered – the significant legal sticking point was the creation in 2024 of a second majority-Black district that snaked its way from Shreveport to Baton Rouge – I wondered if AI was equipped in a “post-Callais” world to handle this simple task: “Can you develop a new congressional district map for the state of Louisiana using the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Callais decision as guides?”
ChatGPT came back with assurances that it would not just “draw a map of Louisiana the way a politician might sketch lines (uh-oh, that’s a real problem). It would follow a structured, data-driven pipeline with explicit rules and tradeoffs.”
ChatGPT’s non-negotiable “criteria” would be equal population (“one person, one vote”), compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act (where there could be no racial vote dilution) and contiguous districts (“no disconnected pieces”). It would use the most recent census data, parish boundaries, voting-precinct maps and geographic features such as rivers and bayous.
It also claimed it would take into account compactness (“avoid weird, snake-like districts”: Did someone mention Louisiana’s 6th District?), respect community lines, promote fairness and protect minority representation.
“Here’s the catch,” ChatGPT cautioned. “These goals can conflict (umm, yes). Algorithms must balance tradeoffs (e.g., compactness vs. minority representation).”
ChatGPT advised that an AI system likely would “anchor districts around population centers (New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport), ensure at least one or two majority-Black districts to comply with federal law, balance rural vs. urban populations across districts (and) minimize splitting parishes where possible.”
In 3.7 seconds, ChatGPT’s work was done, producing a map that looked, to the unpracticed eye, sleek and coherent. ChatGPT spit out a 5-1 Republican-Democratic map, with the Democratic district centered on New Orleans.
For his political clients, Rigamer has used a proprietary data-crunching program that essentially can identify what a person on a certain block had for breakfast Aprill 28. He also is a pro with the AI tool Gemini and adept with the data-slicing ability of DavesRedistricting.org, an open-source program with a state-by-state breakdown of voter information and district maps.
Still, Rigamer said Gemini failed the test for meeting his exacting standards.
“I told Gemini, ‘I want six congressional districts in Louisiana,’ and it spit out a map pretty quickly, but it was wrong on so many points,” Rigamer said.
Rigamer told Gemini it was “hallucinating” because some of the districts were not contiguous.
“There was a piece of a district here and a piece of another district here,” Rigamer said. “I think what it was doing was grouping communities of interest, irrespective of geography. It did fix that. Then I told it some of the districts were much smaller than the others. Districts have to be within three-quarters of a percentage point in total population.”
Rigamer and other political experts said dispassionate math is one thing. Human maneuvering is another.
“This is not like medicine, where there’s a million different variables,” Rigamer said. “It’s just straight numbers. But where it gets difficult is the people who are drawing the map saying, ‘Well, I’m really popular in this area. This area has got to be in here.’ You get into those kinds of things that are personal judgments. You have all these things that come into play that have nothing to do with math.”
The redrawing of the snake-like 6th District in 2024 was steeped in political intrigue because it turned a Republican-majority district into one that was majority Democratic. It was widely viewed as Gov. Jeff Landry’s payback for Rep. Garret Graves’ endorsing Landry’s 2023 gubernatorial opponent, Stephen Waguespack, and also for Graves’ reluctant support for Steve Scalise for speaker of the U.S. House.
Graves chose not to run in the newly constructed district.
In his behind-the-scenes conversations with several Louisiana lawmakers since the Callais decision – both Republicans and Democrats – Rigamer said the upcoming redistricting battle will be how many of the state’s six congressional districts will maintain a Black voting majority. Currently, there are two. Will that shrink to one – or zero?
“A number of people I’ve been speaking to – and it’s been a whole bunch since Thursday – they’re really OK with 5-1, but out of D.C., I think there’s a real interest in the 6-0,” Rigamer said. “I can guarantee you it ain’t going to be 4-2.”
Rigamer said the Baton Rouge buzz is that Trump, to whom Landry has pledged unswerving loyalty, has made it clear exactly what he wants.
“I’m sure the White House wants six Republican districts,” Rigamer said. “You can do it, but it gets to be very challenging. I think what you would see happen – and I‘m not suggesting this, I’m just saying the math on this is such – is that you would have to put New Orleans with St. Tammany and some of the Northshore parishes where you don’t have any significant minority population.”
“Another reason I say this is because in Louisiana, the vast majority – 95% of African Americans – are Democrats and consistently vote Democrat. So, if you wanted to do a 6-0, you couldn’t really put New Orleans and Jefferson together because Jefferson is a large parish and 30% African American, and you can’t make that work. So, what you would do is grab African Americans from Orleans and put them with St. Tammany and Washington and Tangipahoa, where you have a pretty good population base but not a high number of African Americans.”
The political headwinds against doing anything that would redistribute voters in Jefferson Parish, Rigamer said, would be significant because Scalise has built an impenetrable base there.
Political consultant Ron Faucheux said the outcome of the upcoming deliberations is simple to predict.
“It gets down to what Landry wants and what (Attorney General) Liz Murrill thinks they can get through,” Faucheux said. “The simplest thing would be to just go back to what they had, in effect, when there was one Black seat. But with all these parties trying to kill the other side – not just picking up a seat here or there but just wiping them out – there’s a lot of talk that Trump and the national Republicans want them to go for it, to wipe out both Democratic seats.”
With all legal jargon aside, Rigamer said his reading of the Callais decision is that it gives the state “a lot of latitude in redistricting.” Even ChatGPT reflected that new landscape, given the recent Callais ruling.
I asked ChatGPT the Trump question: “Would a Louisiana redistricting map that establishes six majority-White congressional districts be fair?”
“In practical terms, states now have far more freedom to draw maps without creating majority-minority districts,” ChatGPT said. “So, would my answer change (from the situation before Callais)? Legally? Yes – dramatically. Before Callais, a 6 majority-White map in Louisiana would almost certainly be illegal under Section 2. After Callais, a 6 majority-White map is much more likely to survive legal challenge. Courts may accept it if the state says it was drawn for partisan, geographic or ‘race-neutral’ reasons.”
“From a fairness/representation standpoint? No,” ChatGPT continued. “Even after Callais, the underlying facts didn’t change. Louisiana is still one-third Black. Voting is still racially polarized in many parts of the state. A 6-0 map would likely result in little or no Black-preferred representation; outcomes that don’t reflect the statewide electorate. So, most political scientists, voting-rights analysts and AI simulations would still flag that map as highly unrepresentative; an extreme outlier compared to neutral districting plans.”
“The practical matter is, I don’t think people are looking for the most artful solution,” Rigamer said. “They’re looking for what they want. AI might give them the better solution, but it’s not what they want.”
Peter Finney Jr. was a sportswriter in New York for 12 years before going home to New Orleans to edit the Clarion Herald, the archdiocesan newspaper, for 32 years. He now writes a Substack column (peterfinneyjr.substack.com) and edits Statehouse stories for the LSU Statehouse Bureau. He can be reached at pfinney@me.com.