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.