From Colorado To Louisiana

Continuing to write stories from my past to take my mind off the things that make me depressed I will write on about how I came to live in Louisiana...my grandchildren's home state.

From Colorado to Louisiana

As a college student, I moved to Lafayette, Louisiana in the fall of 1965  to live with my older brother Gary and to attend the University of Southwestern Louisiana.  My younger brother Doyle who had been living with our parents wanted to stay in one place for his senior year in high school, so he was there, too, and enrolled at Lafayette High School.  We lived at first with Gary in an efficiency apartment off College Street on Bacque Crescent.   There was only one room and a bathroom The room held two sofas and a table in one corner and in the opposite corner smaller than the bathroom was a kitchen nook with an all in one unit that included the sink, refrigerator, a stove burner and a drawer and cupboard. 

When I got there we spoke to the landlady about getting a bigger apartment because ours was too small, and since there was no other apartment available, she said we could break the six month lease if we would clean the place thoroughly before we moved out.  Driving around looking at apartments in Lafayette, I saw White Real Estate offices near four corners and when I went inside, the secretary gave me my first contact with a real Cajun accent.   I’d heard that accent before, but never to actually speak to someone who butchered the English language so nicely and called me ‘cha’.

The secretary told me that Mr. White did indeed have apartments and houses near the college campus.  My two brothers and I rented an upstairs apartment in a fourplex that had two bedrooms a bath, kitchen, and livingroom and was only about four blocks from USL.  I got the bedroom with the full sized bed and the boys got the one that had twin beds.  The place was a terrible mess and we worked hard to clean it and make it liveable like my mother always did when she’d found us a new place to live near the warehouse.  We made it look so nice that while we lived there Mr. White came, looked and made arrangements for the livingroom floor to be sanded and restained and varnished and for the carpet to be replaced in the hallway.

Louisiana was a wonderful place.  It was the fall and it rained almost every day.  The raindrops were warm!  Gary and I had gone to college in Greeley, Colorado and the weather was completely different there than in Louisiana.  In Colorado the winter weather brought snow.  In Louisiana it was so warm I never needed a coat.  When it rained, I just got wet and even then didn’t feel cold.  The winter was so mild to me that I wondered why the locals were ‘freezing’ and wore heavy coats when it was only about sixty five degrees outside.  

Our parents moved their little one bedroom trailer to Houston, Texas and on some weekends we would go ‘home’ to visit them in Gary’s car.  Sometimes we stayed at school because it was midterm testing time or one of us would have some kind of project or report to do.  We'd met Bob Miers on Mardi Gras (see the story following this one) and he stayed with us some days when he was on his 7 days off from his work on an offshore drilling rig.  One weekend we went to Houston to visit my parents and Bob went with us.  (My father was very angry that Bob had come there and said that Bob was my 'boyfriend' and that I was simply not admitting it.  Today I realize that there were reasons why my Dad disliked Bob, but back then, once again I think I must have been so rebellious that I decided that I would make Bob his son-in-law because my dad was wrong.  Although it was awhile before that happened, eventually it did, not because I was angry at my father but because Bob told me that he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me.)

One Saturday night Bob brought us back to visit his parents because his father was cooking “the best steaks” ever outside over charcoal.  I remember that Gary bought a huge sirloin steak about two inches thick over for Bob’s dad Homer to cook…and Homer made it taste absolutely wonderful…even though he called it “almost a whole cow”.  And Bob’s mother Irene fixed corn on the cob and tater tots and the best tasting, most simple salad and the coldest most wonderful iced tea I ever drank.  Bob showed us around Lafayette and introduced us  to “the strip”,  Voorhies Roof Garden and the Brass Rail.  On Sunday Lafayette was dry and Bob showed us the places to go outside of town to Breaux Bridge, Poor Boys and Paul’s Place, Mulate’s and Pat’s where you could drink with your dinner or dance or see a fight break out.  Gary had gone once to the Bayou Club on the Lafayette/St. Martin Parish line but by the time Doyle and I got to Lafayette that place had burned down.  We paid our cover charge and danced at all the other Cajun dance halls from Church Point to Butte La Rose on the  Henderson Levee.

At the end of our school year in May, Doyle had graduated and gone back home.  After Gary had a car wreck, he left Lafayette.  Bob, without Gary's transportation, wasn’t around much any more.  He did manage to get rides and introduced me to his friend Dukie that he'd gone to high school with, and I met his brother named Homer Sidney that everyone called Bunn who came from Las Vegas.  I got to know Robbie who married his girlfriend Jackie because couple lived close by at her mother's house.  And I met others of Bob’s friends including Virgil Dinsmore and Jerry (Dugas I think) who had a water well drilling company.  But it was quiet on the home front which gave me space to finish writing papers and study for final tests at the end of my junior year.  On the day of my last final test, Bob’s mother brought him by my house and he told me that he was going to go overseas on a drilling rig to Cameroon in Africa.  I gave him my address in Houston and the next day went with him and his mother to see Bob off at the airport.  School was finished and I packed and went to ‘home’ for the summer. 

Back in Houston, I did tell my mother that I was expecting to get a letter from Bob so I would know where I could write to him overseas, but it was quite awhile before I heard from him.  I went on about the business of getting a job at Reserve Life Insurance Company in the heart of downtown Houston and helping with a building project my mom was working on to attach a "cabana" room to the front side of their small trailer.  My brother Stan was there and Bryan, the baby but Gary and Doyle went to work for the summer on the pipelines.  After a few weeks, my mom and the baby went to join my dad on a job in Beatrice Nebraska and Stan stayed there with me.

It was a long summer but a fun one.    I was working every weekday, but it was never dull because Stan was ten...lots of fun to be around and he took good care of me and of mom’s house.  He always cleaned up after himself before he went to visit around the trailer park.  When I'd get home in the evening I’d find him over at a friends house or just coming in from his 'fishing hole'.  I cooked sometimes, but most of the time I tried to bring home some fast food or Stan and I would go out to eat.  On the weekends we'd go see a movie or go check out some fun place.  Some days we’d go visit my Aunt Denny and Uncle Narb, in fact some weekdays I’d go to work early and drop Stan (and his bicycle) off to visit while I worked the day then went back to pick him up in the evening.  I had grown up fun, reunited with a childhood friend, Jimmy Newbould who took me out dancing or sometimes or I would go dancing at one of Houston's clubs alone. And I wrote letters to Bob, who sent back one sentence letters to me, telling me what it was like living on a rig 14/7 or having his days off in a war-torn African country or making friends with the 'chef' who cooked for the men on the rig and the two of them deep sea fishing because he was bored.  He told me that he missed me and that when he came back to the USA he wanted to see me.  I don't remember him saying that he loved me, but I do remember him telling me how badly he wanted to be near me. Both his almost love of me and his life on the rig were exciting to hear about.  Bob worked for a company called Global Marine.  I have a picture of the rig he was on and will try to find it and make a digital copy and post it here.

At the end of  the summer Doyle let me know that he was coming down from Nebraska on a motorcycle he’d gotten and would be going to Lafayette to start college at USL.  He planned to be there for Memorial Day weekend.  Bob had been working overseas offshore from Cameroon and Nigeria.  On the very same weekend that Doyle was due to arrive, Bob came back from overseas and called me to come get him at Hobby Airport so he could visit with me on his way home to Lafayette.  When Doyle arrived the next day on his motorcycle, Bob was there.  

Doyle was so beat from his ride that he went to sleep.  Bob tried to teach me how to ride Doyle's bike, but I was not good at it and didn't know how to brake and almost clotheslined myself in my landlady's yard before he yelled at me how to stop the thing.  Needless to say, motorcycles have scared me ever since then.  When Doyle woke up, he complained that he never wanted to ride his motorcycle again. Bob had been trying to convince me to take him to Lafayette for the weekend instead of taking him back to Hobby to catch a plane home, so I suggested that Bob ride the motorcycle and I would take Doyle to Lafayette in my car...which we did.  I was supposed to be back to work on Monday morning even though it was a holiday for most everyone.  (My boss had promoted me and didn't want me to miss a single day of work because I had much catching up to do to be able to do both my new job and my old job.)  

The trip was too hard on my car, though, so on Saturday I ended up trying to find a mechanic who would fix it.  I did, but the mechanic wanted to keep the car until Monday afternoon.  I called my boss on Monday morning to tell him that I could not make it in to work until the next day and he told me that I was, of course, fired for not coming in to work...then informed me that I would still need to come back in to train someone new to take my job.  I called my parents and told them that I was in Lafayette and cried because I had gotten fired.  My father was very angry.  He informed me that I should not have taken the car he gave to me, his car, out of town, let alone across a state line!  He was very upset about Bob and told me that I should just give the car keys to my brother and not ever go back to the trailer in Houston.  

My dad sent my mother to Houston to go and be with Stan and she came over to Lafayette to get the car.  Instead of her taking that car back home, she came to Bob's house, talked to his parents and to me about whether Bob and I had been sleeping together and whether we were truly in love.  Bob told her that he loved me and that he would ask my Dad for my hand in marriage if he had come instead of her.  After that Mom drove me back to Houston and I took her to Hobby to fly back home.  (She had done what my Dad told her to do, but she didn't want to be long away from baby Bryan.)  From Houston, my mom said I needed to take Stan to Beatrice Nebraska so he would be able to start school there.  He and I drove for almost two days to get there, never stopping except to eat and get gas.  I remember reading in the paper the day after I got there that the roads we traveled had been closed due to flash flooding.  It had rained much of the trip, but going thru Nebraska the night skies were pretty clear...and we didn't see any flooding at all.  

My dad was still very angry at me and told me I should either denounce Bob or just get out of his house.  I retaliated by telling him that Bob and I were in love and were going to get married.  Bob had, after all said that he loved me and wanted to marry me, right in front of my mother.  Dad simply stomped out.  Then he sent my brother and my cousin over to ask me out to a dance.  The next day was just about the same only at the end of it he sent my sister to come and talk to me and tell me how I should not get married.  The next day was not quite the same.  My mom, apparently having had enough, and having decided that my dad's wishes were not going to come true took me shopping and bought me a pink lame suit and a white blouse and a new purse and shoes that matched then took me to the bus station and bought me a ticket to Wichita where she told me that her sister Leila would pick me up and take me to the airport to catch a flight back to Houston and on to Lafayette.  She paid for it all and let me know that I was not to tell my dad anything about the plan.  That night I simply went to bed early.  I don't know what she said to my dad...she never said. and the next day I took the bus that went to Wichita.

I have been advised to direct my story telling toward a specific end...a goal.  Thinking this advice over, I have decided that I want to try and write down some things I remember from my own past.  I am hoping that one day I will be able to pass these stories down to my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, so that the history of their mother, their grandmother and grandfather will not be lost.  I think that perhaps the first story I ought to tell is:

When Bob Miers and Myra Maggard first met.

It was 1966 and I (Myra) lived in Lafayette, Louisiana with two of my brothers (Gary and Doyle) in an apartment near to the USL (University of Southwestern Louisiana has since changed its name to U.La La.  Ooolala!??!!  The University of Louisiana at Lafayette!) where I was in my 3rd year of classes.

Mardi Gras in 1967 was on February 22nd!  Lafayette doesn’t have the weeklong celebrations that New Orleans is known for and begins the celebration on the weekend before plus the Monday and Fat Tuesday.  My brothers and I were looking forward to a real Louisiana Mardi Gras!.  It’d be a first for me and Doyle, but my older brother Gary had been to a Mardi Gras celebration a few years earlier in New Orleans.

My younger brother Doyle went to Lafayette High School because our pipeliner Dad moved from town to town, warehouse to warehouse on the job and Doyle wanted to spend his senior year going to only one school.  He was, at the time, dating a high school girl named Shirley.  I think her last name was Arceneaux.    I do remember her nickname, “Chevrolet Grill” because when she smiled you could plainly see she wore silver braces on her teeth.  The girl wanted me to meet a ‘blind date’ friend of hers downtown named Robbie.  On Mardi Gras I walked to town before anyone else, excited to look at everything and watch the costume judging for children at ten and the parade at noon.  There were lots of floats in the parade with the people aboard throwing treasures out to the crowds of onlookers.  The one that stood out for me was from Breaux Bridge and the people aboard were throwing boiled crawfish out to the crowd.  I caught one, and the people around me must have noticed how excited I was because they gave me crawfish they’d caught.  I asked around for someone to show me what to do with them, what part was good to eat, but everyone was busy and no one answered.

 I went inside a barroom and the bartender gave me a paper cup to put my crawfish into until I could find someone to help me.  Inside the bar my brothers and Shirley came up.  She introduced the guy who was with them as “Bobby” and me, thinking it was my blind date and wanting to know how to eat a crawfish asked him how to peel the ones I had in the cup.  He immediately took one and zip, zip, zip had it peeled and popped it into his mouth.  *gasp*  I only had three!  I told him and he said that he’d take me out to eat crawfish that very night and he slowly peeled one of the two I had left to show me how it was done.  About then another fellow came up and Shirley introduced him as “Robbie” but I was so interested in learning how to peel a crawfish I never noticed the similarity of names.   The first fellow invited us all to go to his house down off the Abbeville Highway on Rena Drive. And there we spent the afternoon of Mardi Gras with Bobby Miers and his parents, Homer and Irene, talking and drinking beer, boiling and peeling and eating crawfish and listening to Bobby’s music and admiring his stereo and speaker system.  I didn’t realize until much later that the second fellow, not the first fellow was supposed to have been my blind date.  Bobby took an immediate liking to all three of us Maggard kids.  And when it was time to go, he rode back to our apartment and spent night there sleeping on the sofa.

We three students went back to our classes the next day and Bob stayed at our house and when we got home in the afternoon, he’d cleaned up our kitchen and he’d made sandwiches for us all.  I didn’t think I liked tuna fish sandwiches…my mother always made them using Miracle Whip and I always thought that was mayonnaise…but I tried Bob’s sandwiches just to be polite…and learned the difference between salad dressing and mayonnaise.  I don’t like salad dressing.  It’s sweet.  But I do like mayonnaise. 

Later in the week Bob left to begin his 7 days of working on an offshore drilling rig as a derrick man.  Our Mardi Gras partying took place during his seven days off.  He liked that we had room enough for him to stay with us.  He liked that Gary had a car.  Bobby had a car but could not drive it because his license had been suspended.  As soon as he got back onshore for his 7 days off he call us to party some more and he spent at least as much time at our apartment as he did at home with his Mom and Dad. 

A SOLUTION TO DEPRESSION

Lately I have felt sad.  Depression has hit me like a ton of bricks.  Every day I work a little to get past these feelings but it seems to be a slow process.  I feel better for a little while and then I fall back down into the dumps.  Someone suggested to me that I write it all down.  Someone else told me how much they loved my stories and how they wished I would write them down and tell them to more than one person.  Putting the two thoughts together, here goes...

I'll start with a story about the two black labs that live in our back yard.  The two of them look a lot alike, being black labs both female, both fixed, the 'puppies' now grown are the the offspring of Gypsy.

THE STORY OF GYPSY

The story Gypsy goes like this.  Gypsy is half German Shepherd and half Timberwolf.  My son Joshua got her.  He made arrangements with someone in Lafayette, Louisiana to take a puppy when the litter was old enough to leave the mother shepherd (who'd been bred with a wolf).  Before he and his new bride could get the new puppy, though, someone hit his car that had been parked on the street in front of his mother's house. The Lafayette policecould do nothing more than take a report and he had only liability insurance.  Since he had lost his ride to work he called his job and when he said he could not make it in, they fired him on the phone.  He made arrangements with his Dad to come to our house in La Porte, TX.  The last thing that happened before Josh left Lafayette was that the people with the puppy told him he needed to come and get his dog.  So in mid June of 1999 Josh and his pregnant wife and a six week old puppy moved in with us.

I'll make this part of the story short.  Gypsy was a ball of fur when she was a puppy, but she got big fast. Gypsy lived in the back yard of our subdivision house.  She loved it when anyone came into the back yard and gave her company. Gypsy loved to eat, but most of all she loved being petted.  Gypsy was trained.  She could  sit and shake and jump up to hug an adult or squat and reach out with her paws to hug a little one.  Did I mention that we had a little one at our house?  Josh's daughter was born end of August, 1999, and Gypsy was her dog.  The two of them were practically the same age.  My son, 7 years Josh's junior loved the dog too, and when Josh and his new family found another place to live, Gypsy stayed with us and became Uncle Sonny's dog...and eventually Gypsy became our dog.

ARKANSAS

In 2007 my husband and son and I moved to retire in Arkansas.  I will never forget moving Gypsy to our new home.  We had a huge U-haul truck and I was going to drive our little SUV.  Our granddaughters' stepfather had loaned us a dog crate that we hoped would be big enough.  Our big tall friend Ranzy was there helping us to pack the truck.  He and my husband decided to put Gypsy into the crate and then see if they could lift the crate up and into the back of my vehicle.  That worked but the cage was so big it went from side to side in the car and there was not any way to open the door on the end of it without taking it back out again.  I felt so sorry for the dog I left right then, knowing that I had about a 7 hour drive to bring Gypsy to her new home.

Gypsy was a wonderful passenger.  I was a bundle of nerves trying to stop and start slowly so she would not be tossed around in her crate.  I talked to her constantly, and Gypsy never seemed to be bothered but I was a terrible mess.  I got all the way to Atlanta, Texas, more than half the trip before I realized that I needed to stop and get something to eat and stretch my legs.  Gypsy made no fuss at all...she just sat calmly in her cage while I went inside a McDonalds to use the bathroom and get some french fries and some water.  Back on the road again, I got to the welcome center in Arkansas just east of Texarkana and thought I would stop again and maybe let Gypsy out in the dog park there.  But, when I was parking, I saw Mike's big old truck and hurried to catch up with him instead of stopping.  When we got to our little town, about an hour later, Mike had to stop in Bismarck to get gas.  I drove on to our new house.  I don't know if Gypsy smelled that Sonny was there or how she knew, but for the first time since we left La Porte the dog who had been so awesomely patient began to try and move around in her cage and make whining noises.  As soon as I got to the house I went inside to get Sonny and he and I lifted the cage out of the back of the car and opened the door and you never saw any dog so happy, not so much to be out of her confinement, but she sure did seem happy to see Sonny again after not seeing him at all for about six weeks!

THE STORY DOESN'T STOP THERE

The next part of the story takes place about two months later.  Our house in Arkansas has a couple of acres of land that goes with it and it is surrounded by trees that stretch for miles behind us.  It was a really big place for a dog who'd known only the back yard of a subdivision house her whole 8 years of life.   Too, we were worried that if we let her run, Gypsy would scare someone (she looked so much like a wolf) and get herself shot.  We tied her up, but her leash was short and confining.  We got a swivel and a long chain and tied her up to that.  Gypsy did everything she could to get loose.  If we put her near a tree, she would run around and around the tree until she had no slack on her chain then throw herself against it trying to get it to break.  Every morning it was the same tangled chain story and every day we would try to figure out a way to give Gypsy some freedom without having her take off running to explore her new world on her own.  In the end, we decided to fence the yard, so we got some of those metal posts that you push into the ground and some of that wire that has the big 3" squares in it and fenced her a yard.  After that, Gypsy spent most of her time lying inside the yard, in fact, lying in front of the french doors outside our bedroom.  Never once did it occur to me that the dog could get out of that fence anytime she wanted.

In late fall, right after Halloween, Gypsy started howling lots more than ever before.  We ignored her or sprayed her with water and made her quit, but apparently although unnoticed by me, after not having done so for years, Gypsy had gone into season.  Two black labs, one old and the other young came to visit her.  The young one was so spry that he could leap over that fence, no problem.  And he did.  When I would walk out the back door, that black lab would be over that fence in a flash!  The old one didn't jump.  He'd go around the bottom of the fence, pushing on it until he found a place where he could push himself underneath.  He didn't run when I came outside, though.  He just didn't budge, no matter what I would do.  I could scream at him, threaten him, hit him, kick at him and all that old dog would do is stand and look at me.  He would not leave until I went back inside.  Once I'd see him leave see the spot where he got inside our fence so I could take out the slack. I never saw either dog hooked up with Gypsy, but Mike told me that he did.  And after a few days, the black Labs didn't come back any more and not long after that, we put in a chain link fence that was nearly six feet high with real posts and locking gates.

In March, the tv weatherman predicted snow.  Mike's brother had said to let him know when it was going to snow and he and his wife would come up to visit us.  When he and his wife got here, we had a great visit the first night, going to get Arkansas barbecue and visiting the bakery and buying wonderful desserts.  On Saturday we went to antique stores and again had a good time...and when we got home, the temperature started to drop.  Gypsy was a mess, crying and whining and trying her best go go under our back porch, digging a huge hole under there to get out of the wind.  We tried putting her on the porch, but she didn't stop whining and crying.  Finally we decided that since she had not ever seen snow before we would put her inside on the sun porch and block off her entry into the house.  All was quiet, and we slept thru the night and the snow came down and turned the whole world white.

The next morning when I got up, Mike's brother was already awake and had poured himself a cup of coffee.  When I got into the kitchen, he said to me, "I think I hear more than one voice out there on that sun porch.  When I checked, sure enough, Gypsy was guarding a little black puppy, no bigger than her own paw.  She seemed excited for me and everyone else to see what she had done. She kept licking it and muzzling next to it and practically showing it off when anyone came to check on her and her tiny offspring.  Thank goodness that dog only had one puppy...I read where a wolf could have a dozen puppies and a shepherd could have as many as sixteen!  Good night!!

The next day, again my brother in law was awake before me.  And when I went down to the kitchen, he told me that he thought there were two puppies.  What??!!  Impossible.  It was over 12 hours that we waited for Gypsy to be finished with her birthing and nothing happened and she didn't seem to be in labor any more.  But out on that back porch, Gypsy had two little black babies!

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

And that's the story about how today we have two black labs living in our back yard.  It isn't the whole story.  I haven't told you yet that Gypsy died last year at the age of 13.  (There is a blog about that, but the date on it is far back from this one.)  I haven't told you that we call the black dogs Red and Blue--which is another story.  At first we'd named them Saturday and Sunday, but we could hardly tell them apart they looked so much alike.  Mike got them collars when they were about six weeks old.  The collars were red and blue, so we put them onto the puppies and renamed the dogs Red and Blue.

GYPSY'S PUPPIES WERE MOVED OUTSIDE.  THEY ARE SEVEN WEEKS OLD.

RED AND BLUE AT 17 WEEKS OLD

GYPSY WITH RED AND BLUE AT 20 WEEKS OLD 

RED AND BLUE AND GYPSY IN THE WINTER SNOW OF 2009

I haven't said that we nicknamed them 'our dog alarm' because they bark and run from gate to gate when anyone so much as pauses at the far end of our driveway and they don't stop until we come out to greet our company.I didn't tell you that we can now tell the puppies apart, or that Blue is nearly blind or about how just like Gypsy their favorite thing even above eating is to be petted.  

Cheerleader Princess

Homecoming Week.Favorite Team Day

Cheerleader Zoey

Homecoming Week Crazy Hat Day

Homecoming Princess

Football season has arrived and my great granddaughter Zoey is taking a cheer class after school.  She loves it according to my granddaughter and really looks forward to class.  She does her cheers all the time whenever and where ever she can, in the car, in the yard, in her room, everywhere.  Zoey is from a small town in southeast Texas.  When the high school in her town has homecoming, everyone gets involved and when they elect a king and queen, they also choose a prince and princess.  This year, on September 7th, Zoey was the Homecoming Princess!