Life in Dakar

We lived in Dakar from mid December to the last half of March.  Memories come flooding back as I think about living there.  In the beginning, I was lonely and scared.  Having a six month old daughter brought me out of that quickly.

The Dakar natives loved Eva.  They learned immediately that I did not understand what they said, and they'd turn to her to talk as if she understood.  They'd get her to laugh and smile.  Eva was very white with white blond hair and I think that was part of the attraction.  It didn't take long for my instincts (from having moved to lots of new places my life) to regain my self assuredness and curiosity and that motherly trait that made me protective and never showing fear in front of my child.

Eva and I lived on a city street above a dentist's office.  We had bought her an old fashioned walker and she took to it right away scooting herself easily across the smoothe stone floors at home.  Her favorite spot was looking down from the balcony at the back of our apartment.  A family lived down there and when any one would spot her watching, would wave and speak and even sing to her.  It was good she was occupied, because it was a lot of work there for me not having a vacuum, or a washing machine.  I swept with a broom and washed cloth baby diapers by hand and dried them on a clothes line I strung from the pillers of the balcony.  My stove was a single burner that used propane and left a layer of black soot on the pots I sat on it...especially the boiler I used to sterilize baby bottles.

There was a little store a couple of blocks away where I could buy french baguettes and butter,  There was a butcher shop that sold sliced meat and cheese.  We were within walking distance of a "plague des infants"... a children's beach.  There was a palace down that direction, too but the street was blocked off with guards in uniforms who waved us away from the palace itself.  We watched from the front balcony in the afternoons right after prayers when the changing of the guards rode horses on the street in front of our apartment to and from the palace.

There was an open market a ways away from us, a long walk carrying a baby but a nice way to kill time.  At the edge of the market was a group of boys who would follow me asking if I would hire them to carry things for me.  At first I told them no, but later on I figured out that if I would hire one it did not cost much and the others would leave us alone.  I never wanted to buy much .. a couple of potatoes. A few eggs.  Never more than a serving or two of anything.  At first it caused the stall sellers to show some anger toward me.  I think it was in part because I was not a "good" customer and partly because I was not able to argue and barter with them over prices.  But even there, a baby girl and a market "garcon" with me was all it took to decide they'd put aside any upset with me to smile and talk to Eva.  And the boy never seemed to mind walking me home carrying my groceries.  And flowers cost so little that I bought a bunch every time I went there.

When Bob came in from offshore two weeks later I knew my way around.  He had friends on the rig.  A cook he called "chef" sent food saying the amount was too small to serve to the rig workers...steaks and casseroles and cakes and even ice cream.  A superintendent sent me addresses to find his wife and a church group and a club for english speakers... and a rattle thing he'd made for the baby.

Bob was "friends" with a street salesman who called him Boss that he called Joe who brought us to different restaurants and to a movie house -not a theater.  You had to stand up to watch the show and it was pretty crowded but the movie was a Hollywood production in English with subtitles on the bottom.   Joe told us about the resort and the Artisan Village and Ille le Gorre.  He walked with us to show us the "garment district,"  and we bought fabric and chose patterns and ordered clothes to be made.  I have two jackets from there still today.  Joe "translated" for us speaking to the tailor shop owners.  He explained about how he could tell different people on the streets where they were from by the clothes they wore.  He told us one lady was very rich because she was big and round and her nails were long and polished, which meant she did no work.  He taught us how to say our address so we could speak to taxi drivers and they would understand. He laughed at the women who seemed to be fussing at Bob and explained they were angry because Bob was carrying the baby... woman's work!

Joe offered to bring me a "girl" to do my cleaning and laundry.  When he did, he brought me a gift-- a live chicken he had been carrying upside down by its feet.  The girl named Marie was from a jungle village staying with her father's sister in town.  She spoke Waloof and a smattering of French.  She and I communicated in French.  I spoke a smattering too.  Enough to tell her she was hired.  She left to go tell her aunt she had a job and I fixed Joe coffee.  Eva got tired of looking at the chicken in the box and rolled herself over to Joe holding up her arms asking to be picked up.  When he lifted her and sat her on the table in front of him she started rubbing his face then looking at her hand.  Joe laughed loudly telling me she was trying to rub his black off.  Then he reached out and rubbed Eva's cheek but her white didn't rub off either.  We all three laughed.  Even Eva.

When Marie returned, Joe left and I showed my new "girl" the closet where I kept the mop and brooms and Ajax and rags.  She went to work immediately!  As soon as she had pushed a rag over every part of the floors and furniture and even on top of the chifferobes, done the dishes, brought in the laundry and folded the diapers she came to say she was leaving.  I told her that if she could understand me, to please take the chicken with her when she left.  Apparently she didn't understand, because she left carrying a sack of trash with her.

Next morning Marie returned and first thing she went to see Eva, who was still sleeping.  She then went to work cleaning the same floors she'd cleaned the day before.  When Eva woke I showed Marie how I bathed her and dressed her and what I fed her and where to find everything.  I showed her the empties of those things I needed from the market and the two of us went out together.  She fixed a long strip of cloth around and under Eva like a sling with Eva as a counter weight.  Ingenious!  Later she taught me that trick but I don't know if I could do it today. .

We walked in a direction I'd never walked in before.  Marie showed me the hallway where she lived with her aunt.  I thought she was going to a different market than the one I usually frequented.  She kinda did...it was a big building with Bon Marche in letters above the door and inside a grocery store with shelves and aisles and baskets with wheels just like at home.   I bought baby food that had pictures on the label so I knew what it was even though the words were in French.  I bought vegetables and pasta.  I bought ground meet in the butcher shop.   I wanted half a pound but did not know the word so I asked for 1 pound, not realizing everything was sold in kilos.  I used the American sign holding up my forefinger for one, but in other countries the thumb means one and the forefinger two, so I bought nearly five pounds. Bob worked 14/7, gone for too long at a stretch, but I managed to stay busy.  I had a tiny refrigerator with a tiny freezer, but I had enough space to store a meatloaf I made and hamburger patties and a casserole I served when he came home. 

Because my spouse was the lowest "man on the totem pole" so to speak, I did visit the other wives of the crew he was on, but no one from the rig sought me out as a friend. I did visit my friend Callie Blackorby and she and Ronnie and Sissy visited me, too, but our houses were very far apart. 

My neighbor in the apartment that used the same staircase as I did was an American flight attendant from California married to a pilot from Air Afrique so she spoke French.  I showed her the supermarket and while we were shopping there I asked her the word for half... moite.  I was going to buy the more expensive  ground meet on the left because it was leaner but my friend told me that one was expensive because horse meat is a delicacy.  So I bought half a pound of the ground beef on the right.  It was too late to think about the already devoured "hamburger" that was already cooked and gone.  And I can answer yes when anyone asks if I ever ate horse meat.

When I went to the English speaking Ladies Club I had the address for, I met an Irish woman whose husband worked on the Global Marine Endeavor same rig as Bob.  She and I walked home together and realized her apartment was across the street from my own.  We visited and went places sometimes, but mostly, Eva and I wandered the city on our own.  We walked long distances and I lost a lot of weight, so I went a number of times to the garment district.  I found a church where English was spoken, but I didn't have a sitter, so often needed to leave services early to hush my crying baby.

I found a steakhouse near the house accidently when I was out after dark headed home and hungry, followed a couple through the doors.  It was a restaurant, but it was not right then open for business...it was a wedding reception and the couple I followed were the bride and groom. A young girl seated me got a high chair for Eva then sat down and tried to communicate with me asking questions in a combination of French and English.  When I realized what she was saying about the wedding party I tried to leave but everyone was talking telling me to stay and eat with them.  Eva fell asleep on the lap of grandmother in a rocking chair but I had a wide awake party with foods I never tasted before and wine! 

I could not wait to bring Bob there during his 7 days home.  We brought our friends Gary and Callie to eat there too.  The steaks were perfect!  Gary ordered well done and I ordered rare and they were fixed to perfection.

Gary and Callie went to the beach with us, too.  Gary had lots of tattoos and the children on the beach never stopped staring and getting close asking to touch him.  Once at the beach Bob and Gary dared one another to swim to an island a good distance away.  I had Eva so I asked a man with a boat if he would take us across.  When we got there Bob and Gary were sitting on the porch of a building with drinks in front of them.  Turns out the island held summer resort homes.  Bob and Gary went to what they thought was a bar and ordered drinks.  The people in the house just went and got them beers.  They didn't know any difference until they tried to pay for the drinks and the vacationers brought a fellow who spoke English to explain.  When we wives and kids arrived, the French people invited us to stay, too.  We asked the boatman to come back and get us in an hour and once again Eva stole the show.

Eva and I took taxis when the place we wanted to go was far away.  She and I took several tours  of the artisan village where people made carvings and pottery and wove cloth.  It was reallby interesting to me and I was always bringing home a mask or an animal or a purse or blanket.  Eva loved it there, too because everyone talked to her and played with her, young and old alike.  Bob went once but he did not like it much.  He spent most of his week onshore eating and drinking with the other Americans from the rig.  Eva and I went along on those outings, but I often had to go run an errand at the bank or post office or take her home while Bob stayed. 

One day Bob came home unexpectedly and told me the rig was on its way to Norway and we had 17 days before we needed to be there so we three packed our things, dropped off a few boxes of household dishes and towels at the Global Marine office and picked up airplane tickets to Frankfort, Germany to lay over there for a 2 weeks.  We planned to visit the places that Bob had visited years before when he was stationed in Europe as an Air Force mechanic working on NATO planes.  We wanted to see Holland tulip gardens and drink beer in the Dutch Cities like tourists.

Dakar in the midst of desert, mountains, jungle and ocean

When the loudspeaker voice calling prayers in the nearby mosque startled me from sleep the next morning I discovered after one night in Dakar Eva, 6 months old, was covered in mosquito bites.  Poor baby!  The taxi driver on the way into the city taught me to say mosquito in French.  The word sounds like moo-stee-k or moose teak.

The Global Marine office was busy with people everywhere coming and going, unlike the day before.  The secretary from the day before saw us and rushed up and took the baby.  Said she thought Eva had chicken pox.  (She said , she had them as a child and was immune.)  She gave us back my passport with it's brand new Visa stamp and sent us to a pediatrician...even called a cab that was waiting for us when we exited the building and the driver knew right where to take us.

The language barrier hit us squarely when we got to the doctor's office.  It was a matter of us not understanding what anyone said then following wherever we were led to take Eva's vital signs.  I guess if they needed any answers or payment they called Global Marine's office.  The doctor tried a few times and ways to tell me it was not something...probably chicken pox and that it was bites.  Good thing I understood "moose-teak".  He wrote a prescription and I think they tried to tell me where to fill it but I don't know.  The taxi driver understood pharmacy though and brought me to a store where I got it filled.  That was not the end of my problem though.  The pharmacist gave me an envelope with a dozen little glass tubes... the kind that had been used (a long time before 1968) to hold perfume samples.  The end of the glass tube was a bubble that you would break off to release a tiny bit, a little smell of the contents.  What to do with that, I wondered?  A taxi driver once again helped me.  He said it was an insect repellant to put nearby where the baby would be sleeping to ward off the moose-teaks.  Good thing I didn't use it as an ointment or an oral dose!!

Next stop, we went to see our landlord.  He was a roly-poly-smiley Lebanese man behind a huge desk in a bare office.  His name was Nasrallah.  His English was easy to understand and when he saw Eva he understood the problem and showed us an apartmemt downtown upstairs above a dentist's office and furnished in every room.  We spent one more night at the big unfurnished gated house this time surrounded by the smell of insect repellant.  One more evening call to prayer at night, and another alarming mosque call the next day.  The 3rd day in Dakar we moved downtown.

Bob and I had two more days of his 7 days onshore before he bagan his 14 day offshore hitch.  We spent them seeing the sights. We visited the bank so I could get money when I needed.  We visited the open market.  We were followed by hawkers and sellers with ebony masks and filigreed jewelry.  We went to a cafe and ordered off a menu written in French.  We visited a hotel where the unspoused workers stayed, La Croix du Sud.  I ordered pomme de terre frites with mayonaise and the waiter made fresh mayonaise right at my table.  I called a lady carrying a basket of flowers on her head over to offer her a dollar to buy a bunch and when she shook her head "no" I offered her 2 dollars more and she took the money and left the whole basket, all the flowers included. We visited a butcherie where we bought a pound of sliced ham.  We visited a bakery where we bought fresh croissants.  We went to a little corner store near the house and I found gerber baby food and spam and french bread baguettes.  We bought an old fashioned "walker" the kind that is a folding metal frame with a cloth seat.  We bought a handmade quilt for the bed and a handle pan for the stove.  Both days flew by and before I knew it Bob was gone and I had 14 days to fill, just me and Eva.

Dakar, Senegal, West Africa

I arrived in Dakar right before Christmas, but it didn't seem like it because below the equator the seasons are opposite of the seasons above the equator.  Also, West Africa has so many different religions that don't celebrate that particular holiday. There is little decoration and no Christmas caroling or music.  My memories from there are spotty because I stayed very busy the 3 1/2  months, December to April that I was there.  A baby grows and changes a lot during the 2nd half of it's 1st year.

When we first arrived, me carrying a baby and a diaper bag and pushing another bag along with my foot, we were put in line to go through customs.  At the window I could not understand what anyone was saying.  It was all French but with a thick accent-- then I heard Bob's voice behind a barrier so I could not see him, but he could hear me saying, ''I don't understand.'' And I heard him say, ''Tell them three days.''  Apparently I came in with a visitor's visa and the first thing we needed to do was take a taxi to the Global Marine office to give them my passport and visa to get it properly stamped.  The city seemed to be in the desert and on the long ride from Dakar's airport I saw stretches of sand and buildings that looked like they were made of sand and people riding camels and cars, many more cars than I imagined would be with us on that desert road.

Beyond the desert we came into a city with storied buildings that seemed to have popped up out of nowhere.  If it had not been for the buildings that were not tall enough to be called skyscrapers, I might have thought I was in Houston with the glass windows housing stores and shops of every ilk along the entirety of each city block.  It looked a little like New Orleans with balconies on the faces of buildings and locked gates leading to courtyards between the walls and the glass of the doors and windows.

At the Global Marine office there was one secretary behind a desk who took my passport and said she would take care of it.  She cooed over the baby Eva and told me where some American friends I knew , Gary and Callie Blackorby and their children Ronnie and Sissy, were living in Dakar.

The place Bob had rented was back toward the desert but I could see houses and businesses and a mosque.  He'd rented the main part of a huge adobe house.  We opened and entered through a locked gate in a rock wall in a silent neighborhood.  The house was mostly empty and so huge and so empty our voices echoed.  Bob said it was in the process of being furnished by the landlord.  There was a mattrass in one room, and a chest of drawers.

That first night Eva slept in a drawer next to our bed.  The kitchen was empty but had lots and lots of countertop and two cook stoves, a big one with an oven and another with two big burners, no oven, but a cupboard below that had a butane bottle inside. It was hot in Dakar, in our house, and tho there was a bathroom with a shower, the water was cold because we hadn't gotten fuel to light the little 5-gallon hot water heater.

There were windows but no way to close them and no screens.  Bob told me the landlord had sent men to install screens, and that they'd put wooden slats into the centers of the ledges around the windows.  As they were leaving and Bob was asking when they would return to install the screens, the foreman said to him, "Finis.  Finis."  I have seen that French word at the end of movies and think that it means, " The End."

Back to the Story 

Some days I feel like writing and other days I just can't do it.  I am writing these things about Eva and her father Bob Miers because no one can tell this tale besides me and when Eva died she was the last member of her father's family...him, his mother, his father all being gone.  Bob has a brother.  Homer Sidney Miers Junior who would be in his late 70's now and might still be alive.  Everyone called him Bunn.  He married more than once, but his first marriage to Monty he had a son that everyone called Butchie.  I don't know if that is his real name or a nickname and that family lived in Valdosta, Georgia so I never saw much of them and don't remember much.  When I met Bunn he was married to Pat and lived in Las Vegas but I never met her.  One time when Bunn had gone out to the West Coast and lived in Washington State he married a girl named Myra so her name was Myra Miers, same as mine, but we were very different.  Bunn would have been a great uncle to my grandchildren and Butchie would be a first cousin once removed.  Their grandfather Bob...when I left off,  (in about October of 1976) was riding a brand new and huge Global Marine Rig headed to the west coast of Africa and a home base in Nigeria.  Eva and I lived in a little quadruplex house off the Abbeville Highway in Lafayette just behind Brown's Thrift City Furniture.
     Getting to know Eva was the way I spent most of my time, following the pediatrician's orders to feed her only milk until she was about four months old...then begging the doctor to let me give her more.  He put her on a diet of a few spoons of baby food...simple vegetables first, then meats.   Never any cereal or sweets.  Eva sucked her thumb.  Not that it is a good thing, but when your baby can be quieted by finding its own thumb it is sometimes a blessing.  Irene had made Eva a lot of plisse blankets in different colors and Eva loved the feel of them and rubbing the top and bottom layers of the fabric together.
     Bob's drilling superintendent Gary Blackorby had gone along to ride the rig overseas same as Bob.  His wife Callie and their two children Ronnie (about 11) and Sissy (probably 10) moved to Lafayette to spend the time waiting to go overseas.  Eva was a hoot, at first just laying on a blanket on Callie's floor when I went to visit, then learning to scoot and to crawl and looking around she developed a fascination with Callie's painted toenails and would do her best to move over to them.  She finally made it all the way over to examine Callie's sandalled feet one day.  You know she put her mouth on those toes!  Ronnie and Sissy loved the baby and Eva spent a lot of time being tickled and played with and laughing.  When Callie left to go overseas she packed up the whole house into her shipment, flew to California to visit her family one last time and left from there  Global Marine told me that I could not join Bob until he was overseas six months, but in November when Callie left they let me know that the rig would be moving from war-torn Nigeria to safer waters offshore of Dakar, Senegal in West Africa and that I could join him as soon as I was ready or in six weeks whichever came first.
     I had to get a passport and shots and the same for Eva and make my reservations for a time when Bob would be onshore.   Talking on the phone to my sister Marjean, the two of us decided that I could fly to visit her and it would be easy for me to do the things I needed to do in Cleveland instead of Lafayette.  So I called Global Marine in Houston to arrange for them to pick up my shipment of household goods, moved out of my little house and in with Homer and Irene Miers at 128 Rena Drive, locked up my car and gave them the keys and stored my photos and sewing machine in a closet in Bob's old room there.
I was off on the first leg of my journey, headed to Cleveland.My brother Gary met me and Eva at the airport.  It gave me a great opportunity to visit with my sister Marjean and my brother Gary and Marjean's two little ones, Gary Bonar, age 4 and his little sister Jana Bonar, age 2.  Marjean's husband Frank was working out of town selling for Cleveland Trencher but Eva and I enjoyed visiting with everyone.   Marjean was working at a bank in Cleveland but she and I had a few late night shopping trips to the mall with it's Christmas decorations and Santa Claus with his elves while Gary took care of the kids.  Gary slept late in the mornings so I got to have full time fun visits with Jana and Gary until the afternoons when my brother took the kids to daycare, and in the evenings when Marjean took care of the kids Gary and I had a good time seeing the sights of  and checking out the bars in Cleveland even though it was cold and windy and the lake was frozen over and the streets were icy.  One of the things I remember most was that Marjean, when she moved into the house in Cleveland had put a huge chest of drawers down in the basement...and she told me to go thru it and find little clothes for Eva because it was full of things that Gary and Jana had outgrown.  It was a gold mine for me and so was the upstairs attic that was full of empty suitcases that no one cared if I adopted.  I was there for three weeks...a lot of it spent inside looking out at the snow falling or putting on boots and going out to play in the snow because I had not seen such a thing living in Louisiana for the past years.  On December 15, 1967 (Eva was six months old) I left Cleveland.  Frank had come back the night before and he took me to the airport.  When I got there, even though I had an extra weight allowance, my luggage held too much to pass inspection so I took one of my suitcases and filled it with heavy cans of baby formula and lots of baby clothes... because I didn't bring much of anything for myself...it was mostly all for the baby... to lighten the load.  When the inspector saw that I'd filled the suitcase I was going to leave behind with Frank, full of baby things he just passed it on and I didn't have to leave anything behind!  Eva and I  boarded the United Airlines flight to New York where I was to get onto an 8 hour Swiss Air flight to Geneva.

Transcontinental Travelers

The flight to and the airplane change in New York were uneventful.  The airline attendants took care of everything...reserved me the bulkhead seat so I had a little baby bed for Eva, put me onto the plane early before the other passengers, walked with me through customs to be sure I was not late for my flight.  On the plane, they served me supper first because the baby was napping.  Eva was totally content for the whole 8 hours.  I'd gotten her a thick blue fleece zip-up bunting out of the chest of drawers for when it was cold and she had pajamas with feet in them and she had her thumb and her baby bottle and blanket and her mommy and lots of things to look at.  I remember reading a book and thinking that flying wasn't bad at all.  

Early the next morning we arrived in Geneva.  Global Marine had given me a "cash voucher" that guaranteed payment so I could pay for whatever I needed and they'd bill me later if it was not a company expense.  I had an 4 hour layover in Geneva...and it was daytime.  I left everything but my diaper bag with my purse in it to be taken care of by my airline attendants.  Global Marine had made reservations for me to stay at a downtown hotel and when I arrived, the hotel's doorman took my voucher and used it to pay the cab driver, and again when I was in my room, used it to pay the cost of sending an attendant to come up and stay with my baby, and to hail a cab for me to go sightseeing in Switzerland!  I had a great time.  The cab driver spoke a little English and was able to point out some of the sights to me and he waited while I got out to read signs or go shopping for souvenirs, and eat a sausage lunch he'd recommended.  Then it was back to the hotel where I went to my room to relieve the babysitter and get ready to go the next leg of my trip.  I took a nap, and the hotel phone rang to wake me up for the trip back to the airport.  The doorman hailed a cab and paid for it with my voucher that he gave back to me to turn it in to the company.  At the airport, even though the cab driver had told me he spoke English, he began to yell at me in a language that I didn't understand.  I tried to find someone to translate for me and kept telling the driver I didn't understand until finally someone came up and told me that he was demanding money and saying that I had not paid him for the ride.  Me, carrying a baby and pushing my bag along with my foot sorting out my short time visa and my boarding pass understood the problem and told the cab driver in English...I only have American money.  All of a sudden he understood English again and asked me how much...so I gave him my last $7 which I guess was enough because he took the money and walked off.  I made it the rest of the way to the Air Senegalese desk and checked for my next four hour flight that would arrive in Dakar where Bob was supposed to meet me at 6 pm.  

The plane had one stop..in Lagos in Nigeria.  That country was in the midst of a war, but was supposed to be safe for travellers and it was a quick stop, not one where I needed to get off the plane.  When we landed in Lagos, though, the doors opened and about ten soldiers carrying rifles got onto the plane and walked down the center aisle and stopped.  The little boy sitting behind me asked his mom, "...are they going to shoot us?"  To which she replied, "I don't know."  I didn't know either, but they didn't.  They simply stood in the aisle looking at everything, everyone, then marched back off the plane, the doors closed and we were soon in flight again.  

On the flight, the attendant, a woman who spoke perfect English asked me, "Can I bring you something to drink?"  And I asked if she could bring me some milk.  She left and served everyone on the plane, but not me sitting at the bulkhead.  then she came back again and and asked me if I wanted something to drink.  I answered again, "milk" and she walked away again and came back empty handed half an hour later to ask me again if I wanted a drink.  I again asked for milk and behind me a young girl with an oriental accent said loudly in what I found out later was French to the Stewardess that I was asking for milk and that she had better bring it, too because the baby needed milk.  Eva drank formula.  The milk was for me, but the Stewardess brought me a small carton, so it didn't seem to matter that I drank it and asked for another.  In French the word for milk is 'lait' nothing like the English word.  Apparently the Stewardess for Senegalese Air could speak English, but could not understand it when it was spoken to her.  The oriental girl talked to me on the flight after that, telling me that she was a student and had been flying from her home in Indonesia to go to school but I never understood where.  I thought she was saying the name of a town in New Zealand but why would she be going on the same plane as me.  Maybe the School was in the Canary Islands or Gibraltar...don't they speak English there?  The girl's geography was much better than mine...I barely knew where Indonesia was...and I vowed then to look at maps and pictures until I had a better understanding of where places outside the United States were located and what they were known for.  I'm still to this day working on that one.  I have a cousin who lives in Belgium and I had to get a map to look and see if she was close to Italy and Sweden.  Since I am off track telling the stories about Eva as a baby I will stop my writing here and tell you about my arrival in Dakar at a later date.

Eva Miers was born June 8, 1967

It wasn’t really just the blink of an eye between Bob Miers and my wedding in September of 1966 and the birth of daughter Eva in June of 1967, but it feels like it now looking back. Life between me and Bob was hectic and busy.  When we were first married in September of 1966, Bob and I lived with his parents in Lafayette.  Neither of us had many possessions, so we had all the space we needed in one of the Miers’ three bedrooms.  I started looking right away and found a rental for us in a big old house that had been divided in half, located across the street from the public library in downtown Lafayette.   We were not there for very long, though because when I rented the house, the landlady met only me.   She thought I was quiet and since I was married to someone who worked 7 day and was off 7, she was pretty sure we could afford the rent.  She hadn’t counted on my oldest brother coming to visit me and staying on permanently.  She hadn’t thought that Bob would have lots of friends over the whole time he was on shore or that we’d have lots of cooking outside and loud music and just horsing around.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was when my younger brother came to visit and Bob decided he could ride his motorcycle up over the cement porch and into the back door.  That didn’t work, but the commotion was enough to bring the landlady rushing over to find me in the kitchen doing dishes, one brother in back folding laundry, another brother playing poker with a friend and with Bob.  She angrily told me that I would need to find another place as soon as my month was up because I had too many men friends over to visit and she didn’t even know which of them was my husband.  I didn’t argue.  I don’t even remember her name, but I do remember that she was a kind lady.  I just started looking for a new place to live.

 Places to stay and Jobs to do and Appointments to Keep

I remembered White’s Real Estate, and Mr. White who had rented me an apartment when I was going to USL.  Once again he had a place and rented it to me.  His secretary remembered me well enough that when mail came for me she saved it and gave me a box of makeup and a lot of magazines and records that I had ordered and thought never came.  Our second house was a real house with a yard and a carport off Old Highway 90 almost in Scott.  I found out that I was pregnant.  My mother in law was a nurse, an LPN and she knew all the doctors in Lafayette and told me that the best one for females was Dr. Hoffpauir.  I went there and he started me on birth control when I first got married in September.  In October I didn’t have a period and Dr. Hoffpauir said not to worry but to wait five days and start taking my pill again.  In November again I didn’t have a period and the doctor said the same thing, but he made me an appointment to come in for a checkup.  I left a urine specimen and a few days later the doctor called to talk to me and tell me that I was not pregnant but asked me to let him know if I didn’t have a normal period in December.  I didn’t.  Back to the doctor, Hoffpauir checked me over again and this time told me that I was going to have a baby.  I asked why, since I had taken my pill regularly, did I get pregnant and he told me that ‘birth control pills don’t always work on everyone.”    I had been sending out job applications, so when I got back home I changed my resume to read that I was due to have a baby in late August and added that I would accept a job that was temporary.  Can you believe it, I got a job.  Caliste Monceaux’s tax preparation office wanted me to work there during their busy season until April 15^th.  The job was perfect!  I sat typing in a back room, never even seeing the public or having anyone see me.  I had taken typing the year before at USL and was really good at it.  Fast and accurate.  I do remember though, typing just numbers was something I had to learn.  Mrs. Manceaux told me that accuracy with the numbers was the most important thing, so I should start slow making sure the numbers were correct and work up my speed over time.  After tax season, I stayed on until May in order to type the quarterly business tax reports.  Bob had put in his application to go to work on an overseas drilling rig, but no jobs came through, so he was working offshore of Louisiana.  Every other week I would drive down to a heliport in Golden Meadow to take him to work or to bring him back home again.  Meanwhile it was starting to show that I was pregnant.  We drove a metallic blue Mustang, a fastback so no one seeing me behind the wheel could see that I was pregnant.  It was a great car!  I think he bought it with the money he’d earned working overseas the year before.    Bob and I decided that we should move out of Lafayette for a shorter drive to take him to work and a chance to live in other places and ‘see the world.’  We found a place in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, about an hour closer to Bob’s work.  We lived in what had once been the servant’s quarters on the lawn of a big old southern style mansion.  Our house had one big room  in front and across the back, was divided between a tiny little kitchen and a tiny little bathroom.  The big room was our bedroom, livingroom, den and dining room.   The kitchen had a fold out table against the back wall that was smaller than the desk we used as a dining table in the big room.  We only lived there for about a month and half of that month Bob was offshore working.  Our view was of the Gulf of Mexico.  We were so close we could just walk down to the water.  Our landlord lived in the bottom part of the ‘big house’.  He was a clock maker and his whole house was filled with clocks ticking and whirring and bonging and clanging.  His sister, our landlady lived in the upper part of the big house.  There was a huge cement staircase going up in the front of the house with a porch and pillars.  It was beautiful.  I spent lots of time visiting with them when Bob was offshore.  The landlady had shingles and didn’t come out much.  The landlord fed flying squirrels and had feeding stations in the trees in the yard.  He told me that he ran an ad in Popular Science for a DIY clock..two clocks, actually, one that went clockwise and the other a backward clock that ran counter clockwise.  When Bob came back from offshore his mother came down to visit us.  She spent a couple of nights and let us know that she very much wished we’d move back to Lafayette so that I could have a “proper” doctor looking after me during my pregnancy.  Bob went back offshore the next week, and the following week when he was back ashore we moved back to Lafayette.

 Surprise!

Since we didn’t have a place to live, and since we had not told anyone we were going to come back on the day that we arrived in Lafayette, Bob and I went by to surprise his friend Dukie.  Dukie invited us to spend the night and the two guys proceeded to party.  I went on to bed…and in the wee hours of the morning my water broke.  I didn’t know that was what had happened, so I described it to Bob, who told me to tell the doctor.  I called the hospital and talked to another doctor in the group my doctor was in, a Dr. Morgan and described again what had happened…and the doctor told me not to worry but to just hang on until 5 a.m. and call him back.  He said if I felt uncomfortable lying down that I could just stand up or go walking.  It never occurred to me that I should have told him that my baby was not due for another 8 weeks.  When I called back at five, Dr. Morgan asked me how far apart were my labor pains.  Was I in labor?  Bob apparently had been watching me closely enough to know the answer to that question and told me that I had been grimacing in pain about every ten minutes…so Dr. Morgan told me to come in to Lafayette General Hospital when the pains were five minutes apart….so that’s what we did.  I remember thinking that I was not going to have a baby and being irritated that the doctor would probably just check me over and send me back home.  I was wrong.  I got to the hospital at about 8 a.m. and by noon I had a baby girl.  I remember all of it.  In those days the doctors kept a mother in labor as long as possible before taking her to the delivery room.  While I was in the labor room they came in and gave me 4 pills to take and told me that the pills were to stop the labor and they’d be back in an hour to give 3 and an hour after that two.  Apparently they forgot to tell me that they had given up on stopping the labor and that they were going to deliver the baby.  If I’d known, maybe I would have asked for Dr. Hoffpauir to come, but I didn’t’ realize I was going to have a baby until they took me into the delivery room…and in those days they gave a patient gas so I was completely unconscious during the delivery.  When I woke up, my mother in law was there and Bob and I had a baby girl, but I could not see her because they had decided I needed to be catheterized because of something to do with the anesthetic and they told me that the baby was in an incubator.  Everyone told me that the baby was beautiful and just perfect.  Bob, though, told me that he had seen her right when she was delivered and that she was terrible looking, covered in blood and white powder and screaming at the top of her lungs.  My mother in law had gotten a pediatrician to come and care for her, a Dr. Pavy.  When he came to see me he told me that Eva weighed 4 lbs. and 8 oz…and that was not a bad weight for a ‘premie’.  He said he wanted her in the incubator even though she didn’t’ need oxygen and was breathing on her own.  He wanted her to be kept away from the other babies and he wanted to control her temperature and to gradually expose her to room temperature.  I was pretty sick for a couple of days and slept a lot.  I always asked about my baby, and the nurses would tell me stories about how she cried loud all the time and how she pushed on the walls of her incubator to turn herself over.  They said she had white blond hair and blue eyes and that she was strong and healthy. When I started feeling better and asking when I could see the baby they told me that I could go home at the end of four days, but that the baby could not go home until she weighed 5 pounds at least.  On my last day in the hospital, when they put me into a wheel chair to take me to the car to go home, I asked to go by and see my baby.  I thought she was beautiful, but I could not hold her.  I could only look through the glass and my poor little girl was not put with the rest of the babies …she was all alone in a different room.  It was a lot for a new mother to deal with and I was going to go home to live once again at my husband’s parents house.  At home, though, I used the time to get ready to bring a baby home, shopping and cleaning and washing.   The baby was tinier than the smallest of newborn clothes.  The little tee shirts they put on her in the hospital were too big and the diapers I got had to be cut in half so I could fold them small enough for her little bottom.

Back to normal?  What is normal?

They gave me birth certificate papers to fill out with her name and Bob and I talked about naming her after my mother or my grandmother and finally we decided to call her Eva …Ella Verna Anna…the initials of my mother, my favorite aunt and my grandmother.  It was a name Bob approved of because it was easy to say, even for a baby and it was short and she would have an easy time learning to write it later on.  Her middle name was the first two letters of Bob’s first name “Ro” and the last two of my middle name “ne” to spell Rone.  On the birth certificate Bob put an accent mark over top of the “o” and said it was because she was from Louisiana and the name should be pronounced “Renee”.  I don’t think the State of Louisiana ever put the mark onto her official name.  Eva didn’t like Rone and always pronounced it Renee.  Back at home, Irene’s step mother (Mammie who'd remarried a man named Mike and lived in New Orleans) came to visit and she helped me resize my own clothes and clothes for the baby.  She brought me some lifesize doll clothes that were the exact size I needed.  Twice a day I would go to the hospital and ‘visit’ Eva.  She got out of the incubator on the 5^th day, but her bed was usually as far as possible, sometimes even in another room away from the newborn babies because she was not newborn anymore.  I still could not hold her or touch her but I did watch how the nurses took care of her.  They sat in a rocking chair whenever they fed her, so I got a rocking chair in my room at home so that I could do everything as much like they had done it at the hospital as possible.  Eva was there for five weeks and had gained weight up to five pounds and 12 ounces before I was finally able to bring her home.  Still a “premie” at home though, I watched her eyebrows come in and her earlobes grow.  I remember how odd it was that her head was so tenuously connected to her body that she could have turned it around backwards.  I remember how often she needed to be fed, in the beginning every two hours, and how little she ate, the bottles I used held two ounces and sometimes she did not drink that much before she fell asleep.  I had to send away to Evenflo, the company that made the nipples for the bottles I bought because the holes were too big…and when Eva would try to eat, the milk would come out so fast it would run down her neck and get her clothes all wet.  When she would wake up, the first thing I would do was change her diaper, then I would hold her and sit in a rocking chair and feed her.  At first all she seemed to do was eat and sleep and I needed to be right by her side because she woke very often.  Later she started sleeping twice as long and drinking twice a much formula.  I was glad that Irene and Homer were there, though, because I was not used to going strong on so little sleep.  Bob was there every other week, too and he was a big help, the two of us learning how to give our tiny little girl a bath.  He sang to her a lot.  He worked hard to get the baby to smile…and she did smile at him, too.  By the time she was three months old Eva had progressed into your normal three month old baby.  When she was four months old Bob and I moved out into an apartment off the Abbeville highway behind Brown’s Thrift City.  Bob got hired to go overseas on a new rig being built in Port Arthur in Texas and he left to ride the rig overseas to it’s first location off the coast of Nigeria in mid October.  They told me that I would have to stay in the states for six months before I could join him, but when I talked to the company they said if I got all my shots and my passport I could go in December when the rig changed locations to Senegal in West Africa.

To be continued...

This part of the story of the grandfather of my grandchildren has been the hard to tell.  Bob Miers would be a great grandfather today.  The baby in this story, my daughter Eva, too is deceased.  Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that I am the only one who knows it.  Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that there are things that I don't want to remember.  When Eva was born, my own father was angry and sent me a card telling me that I had barely made it nine months before giving birth.  It had already been about a year since my Dad had spoken to me and he didn't speak to me again for another four years.  That is part of the story that I don't really want to tell.  Even though it is truth, it is far in the past and things changed over the years.  Another part of the story, Bob's mother was angry at me for much of the time that her son and I were married, specifically because I was so good at finding a house so that Bob and I could move out of hers.  She loved my baby and I know Eva loved her grandmother.  Some things are better left unsaid and problems between kids and their inlaws are pretty much normal.  My heart is broken that Eva has died, and depression takes over when I think that she isn't and won't ever be here again...and that, most of all makes this story hard for me to remember and to write down.  I try whenever I can to use names and places to bring a little recognition and curiosity to the minds of the reader, who, I expect, is my granddaughter who missed out on knowing her grandfather.  Now that her mother, too is gone, it is up to me.  And so, when I am able I will continue with the story of going overseas when Eva was but six months old...

THE MIERS FAMILY NAME

I am continuing with the story as I remember it about my my ex-late-husband, the father of my daughter, the grandfather of my grandchildren.  I said in a past post that he was an adopted child.  These things are what I remember I was told by him and his family during the fifteen years that he and I were married.

When Bob was a newborn, Irene said that Homer was a 'company man' superintendent over an oilfield and that she and he lived in oilfield housing in Silsbee, Texas.  They had an adopted son, named Homer Sidney Miers that hey called "Bunn", short for bunny because he had a thatch of soft white hair. Bunn had several wives, and when I met him in 1966 he was living in Las Vegas married to Pat.  Bunn and his first wife, I think her name was Jackie or Monty had a son named Butchie but as far as I know he had no other children.  Butchie lived in Nashville, Georgia.  I don't know what happened to any of that part of Bob's family.  Eva told me once that Bunn was there when Irene died but that years later she went to visit him where he'd lived on one of the streets off the Evangeline thruway in Lafayette and that his old house had been torn down. When Bunn was about four years old, Homer and Irene adopted a second baby.  

A doctor friend of Irene's who oversaw the home for unwed mothers and orphanage located at the Texas Women's College in Denton, Texas called her to let her know that there was a baby available because a 15-year old girl who was giving her baby up for adoption.  I think that means Bob's mother would have been born in about 1926 but I have no information about her. Irene told me that Homer could not go with her, so she drove from Silsbee to Denton alone to get the baby boy and bring the newborn back to his new home.  Irene said that she filled out the birth certificate before she left the orphanage and that she named the baby after Dr. Robert Bruce.  . 

Irene said that Homer had a twin brother I think his name was Floyd.   One time Bob and I drove to Daisietta and visited his wife named Flo. She had two children, Bob's cousins.  We stopped in Beaumont and visited his cousin Charles, and his sister Angela came over for a few minutes to meet Bob's new wife.  I see on my "find a grave" that a Florence Kathryn Miers of Liberty County is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Beaumont and I think she must have died.  

Homer was from Texarkana, TX and Bob and I went one time to visit the old 'homestead' which we thought we found from the address Homer had given us in southern Arkansas, but it was a tumbled down bare old shack and I don't know if I have any pictures of it.  I remember visiting with Bob's Aunt Drew in Texarkana but don't remember the names of the other Aunt or the Uncle who lived in Texarkana.  

I only little about Irene.  Her maiden name was Cupit and she was born in a little town in Mississippi. When she was just starting school, she said that her mother died and that her father remarried to a girl who was only fifteen, the same age as Irene's sister Christine.  I met Irene's stepmother when Eva was born.  They called her and her husband Mammie and Mike and they were from New Orleans.   Mammie had worked for years lining coffins with silk at a casket factory and she made some clothes for my newborn baby in the blink of an eye and she helped me resize my own clothes to make them fit after I had the baby Eva.  

I met Irene's sister, Bob's Auntie Chrissy once when he and I went to Union Church, Mississippi.  Her married name was Varnador and I remember meeting one of her sons, Rayford (I think was a "junior" and had his dad's name) who owned the one little store in the town of Union Church.  I met his teen aged children and his wife back in the mid 70's when Eva was in about the first grade.  Eva asked me about Rayford once and had me look in my journals from back in the day.  I thought she was going to try to find people who knew Irene, but she never told me anything more.  I remember telling her about meeting Irene's brother Tom Cupit and his wife Rosalee who lived in Beaumont.  I told her more about Irene's friends than her family because I'd helped Irene send out baby announcements to Alice and Howard Brock in Austin.  I sent letters to her friend Jo Boudreaux in Lake Charles and to another in Norman, Oklahoma named Maggie Thrailkill and she had a friend in Lafayette named Mary Foss. I remember Irene once telling me that her father had 13 kids, but I didn't meet any others.  Irene said that her oilfield 'family' was sometimes closer to her than her real family.  Irene told me stories about how wanting nothing more than to get out of Mississippi and that when Tom moved to Beaumont she did everything she could to be able to go stay with him and Rosalie until finally permission was granted.  Once, on a trip to Beaumont Irene and I went to a big old office building and Irene told me that when she was in her teens she was the elevator operator and that's where she met Homer because his oil company's main office was in that building and he rode the elevator and told her how beautiful she was whenever he got the chance.  Homer and Irene always seemed to be in love and she was very distraught when he died. After she sold the house she'd lived in for a quarter of a century on Rena Drive in Lafayette, she developed heart problems and Irene had open heart surgery and a heart valve bypass back in the day when it was a very new thing for a doctor to operate on a patient's heart.

I met Bob when he was 24 years old and I was 19.  Ours was not a love at first sight.  It was more like a curiosity about one another.  Bob was a good listener and asked me lots of questions about what it was like for me growing up.  He seemed to like hearing about my moving around from place to place.  Even though he was a man of few words, I liked listening to him tell me about growing up in Lafayette.  He showed me the house he lived in and the schools he went to and introduced me to lots of his friends.  He always made me feel like what he had to say was important because he didn't always have a lot to say. 

We married in 1966.  We drove to Orange Texas to get married because a 3 day wait was required after the blood tests were taken and the marriage license granted in Louisiana. Once the decision was made between us that we were going to get married, instead of waiting 3 days, we drove to Texas.  In Orange, the courthouse staff was happy to help us get the license and steer us toward a doctor who'd give us blood tests and they even helped with suggestions about what preachers might be available to perform a wedding ceremony. We were married in the First Methodist Church in Orange and the preacher's wife and the church secretary acted as witnesses.  We had not made many plans, so the honeymoon was a trip to Houston where Bob put in some applications to do oilfield work overseas and the wedding dinner was a trip to the White Castle.  We went by and visited my Aunt Denny and Uncle Narb in Houston though and got hugs and congratulations and we drank a toast to our new union.  Then it was back home to Lafayette, where we lived at Bob's parents' house while he looked for work and I looked for housing.

THE END OF THE LINE

DEATH MAY NOT BE PROUD BUT IT IS INTERESTING

Yesterday, while talking to my granddaughter, the granddaughter of my first husband, I realized that she didn't know where her grandfather came from and barely knew his full name.  Her mother, now deceased seemed to care very much about that branch of the family and used her maiden name, Miers all of her life.   Now I know I am on some kind of right path to delve through my memories so that there will be a little record of the things I know.  My first husband was adopted when he was a newborn so genetically speaking, I don't know very much about him.His name was Robert Bruce Miers (b.12/21/1941; d. 1986; buried beside his parents Homer and Irene Miers in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Lafayette, Louisiana.) There is no exact date of death in February, 1986 because the circumstances surrounding his death are not clear.  Because I had been divorced from him and had not seen him for five years, before he died, again I know very little.  Gossip, though, is a thing that people in southwest Louisiana thrive on, so I do know some things.

I got this tale from my sister in law who told me that her sister's boss' son found the body.  The boy was about 15 and was visiting someone who lived along Bayou Tortu in St. Martin Parish.  The boy borrowed a pirogue from the people he was visiting, and floating along down the bayou, digging in the water with a long stick, found a chain that he could not get loose, so he hung it over a branch and went on along the bayou exploring and fishing ...and later he came back to dislodge the chain he'd found.  When he finally got it loose, though, a hand floated up with the chain.  The boy was terrified, ran his boat up onshore and sprinted to a nearby farmhouse.  When the sheriff's department came, they loaded up the boy and his boat and took him home to his mother.

St Martinville sheriff's deputies travelled to Alvin Texas to give me and Mike a lie detector test.  They told me at first that I was their prime suspect in a murder.  I knew already about Bob having died because our daughter had called me.  I told them what I knew...that if I was their prime suspect that they didn't have much of anything to go on because I didn't know anything about it.  After Mike and I passed their test, the officers gave me a little more information saying that Bob had a bullet wound behind his left ear and that his body was tied to a cement block with a come-along around his waist and that his arm was thru the hole in the cinderblock.  After making sure I wasn't going to admit to murdering Bob, a Louisiana police woman told me what she thought, that Bob had committed suicide.  She said the reason they thought it was suicide is that before he died, Bob got his affairs in order and that he gave away a lot of his belongings and that those were the actions of someone planning to kill themselves.  I personally thought that was a typical Louisiana police explanation so that the case could be marked closed.   Eva never did consider suicide as the answer and thought always that her father had been murdered.  She said that a life insurance policy that she had seen many times was missing from his file box that had been gone thru by the police.  The police confiscated all Bob's valuables, guns, jewelry, coins and called it 'evidence' and would not give it back to Eva.  Also, something that made Eva think the police were no good was that they picked her up at Bob's 'visitation' and took her back to the St. Martinville Sheriff's office and grilled her, an 18 year old girl, for over ten hours before Tony, who was with her got so mad he made them let her go.  Eva told me that the officer who treated her the worst, not long after Bob's death retired from the department and bought himself a big chunk of land with a fancy house on it so she always thought he stole the insurance policy and collected on it before she had any chance to request a pay off.  I never decided.  Cajuns do thrive on telling tales.

In another tale from my sister in law, a different sister of hers worked in a dentist's office in Lafayette, and it just so happened to be the very same dentist whose records helped to identify the jawbone that was brought in as belonging to Bob Miers.  The body definitely belonged to Bob.

MAYBE IT WAS, MAYBE IT WASN'T

My current husband's brother who at one time worked for the Sheriff's Department in Lafayette called the St. Martinville Sheriff's department for me although I am not sure I wanted him to do that because I wanted more fodder for my Cajun gossip or whether I needed closure.  Either way, there was not much information. The cause of death listed on the death certificate was "bullet wound to the head".  The Sheriff's Department estimated that the death had to have been about a month earlier, and speculated that the bayou did not have much water in it when the death occurred probably the first week in January.  They showed my brother in law pictures of when the body was found, but he said that it was very had to tell anything about the position of the body after they raised it because the waterlogged skin did not hold together well when it reached the air and they had to be very careful not to make any new marks.  They speculated that the death might have been a suicide because they said Bob had wrapped himself with the brick and pulled the come along tight and pulled the trigger on the gun.  All the things found with the body belonged to Bob himself, including the comealong and the rope.  They didn't find any signs of anyone else having been there, but signs could have been erased by the passage of time.  They didn't find the gun either, but from the bullet that was in the wound they identified the gun as a 25 caliber which they speculated probably belonged to Bob.  Many months later my daughter said that they went back and looked at the site again and did find the gun and that it was indeed the gun that had belonged to Bob.  I  don't know if that's true, but I do know whoever killed Bob, himself or someone else, meant for the body to not be found any time soon.  And Eva called me a dozen times during January and February asking me to try to find addresses for anyone where he might have gone to visit.  She told me that he'd told her that he planned to go to Montana, but the people he knew in Montana didn't know anything about it.

My daughter told me that the initial identification of the body was made by Bob's mother Irene (b.12/4/1916; d.5/19/1988) and was based on the clothes taken from the body.  Bob was cremated, and the arrangements for his memorial and burial services were handled by the Delhomme Funeral Home in Lafayette and Eva said they were in the same place where her grandpa Homer's services had been held.  Irene, when I knew her in the early 70's was working as a 'sitter', a home care nurse and her job for quite some time was taking care of one of the Delhomme family's sons who had been in a major car accident, so there is a connection there.  I myself visited the cemetery where Bob and his parents were buried only once...when Homer died in 1967. While I was standing at the gravesite, Bob told me a story about another grave just above Homer's that was the final resting place of Homer's old bookkeeper from back when Homer owned M&M Rig Builders in the 50's in Lafayette.  Bob said the bookkeeper (I forgot the name that was on the grave) had embezzled money from the company and had absconded to South America and apparently only came home after he was dead.  Bob said that Homer was very likely unhappy with the fact that his grave was next to that of the bookkeeper he hated.  Like I said, tales are of major importance in Louisiana and I have heard some stories, me

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.