Babies, Benny Goodman Band & Baggage

Tonight's post is brought to you by the letter B. Upon sitting down to write, I realized that the 3 things I wanted to post about all had this wonderful letter in common.

Babies:
I love babies. But they can be a lot of work. Therefore, I am done having them (unless God does a miraculous reversal!) If I want a baby-fix, which most mother's do, I must borrow or babysit. Today I borrowed. This upcoming week I will begin babysitting. My nephew J.D. will be coming on Tues, Wed, and Thrs.'s beginning this week. Today, his parents were moving so I borrowed him for the morning. The kids wanted me to put him in the babyswing and within 10 min. he fell asleep. He slept for 3 hours!!

Bennie Goodman Band:
This afternoon PapaD. and I went with some of his "old guy friends" and their wives from his Lions Club to a concert at the Columbia Theatre for the Performing Arts. It opened in 1925 and is just a beautiful old theatre. It has been restored and is used for all sorts of things on a regular basis. Even went to a wedding that was held on the stage there once!

We saw "Swingin' the Benny Goodman Songbook" which is a group that consists of a singer, pianist, chellist, clarinetist and drummer. I like all kinds of music and really enjoyed this stuff from the 30's and 40's. It's just not something you hear everyday. It's a blend of jazz and swing. Fun stuff and not at all put-you-to-sleepish.

Baggage:
After the concert we went out to dinner with the old guys. It's quite funny, here we are in our thirties and everyone else is 50, 60, even 70 years old. I like older people and its always fun to talk with them because they are so friendly. And, of course they think my kids are cute, so if the converstation gets boring (which it never does), we can always talk about that.

Which, I must say, brings us to the last "B" word, baggage...or lack thereof.

Earl is a new member of PapaD.'s group. He is from Louisiana. To be exact, St. Bernard Parish. Now if you have watched the news at all in the last few months you know that St. Bernard Parish was hit EXTREMELY hard in Hurricane Katrina. Earl's wife talked to me for a long time tonight about their experience and how they are doing now. She comes from a big family and they all lived in the Parish. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAD THEIR HOMES WIPED OUT! Thankfully, they all made it out alive. Some of them barely.

Earl and his wife ended up here in this little S.W. Washington town because their daughter lives here. They never usually evacuate for Hurricanes, but this time they decided to. When Earl was carrying the ax up to the attic, his wife said, "I don't think so." So, they left town with three sets of clothes, their wallet and purse and drove away.....expecting to come back in a few days. What they didn't know when they left was that their house would be submerged under 2 ft. of water.

They never returned.

Thus, they moved here with no baggage, except the pain I could see in Earl's wife's face as she told me how much she missed her 91 year old mother, and the simplicity of the neighbors coming over to talk with her everyday. She spent her whole life there and never, ever expected to leave.

But she did.

They are almost done building a house here in town that is funded, in large part, by their flood insurance settlement. Fortunately, they had a lot of it because where they lived was considered a flood area and they had an outdoor pool. Both of these things required more than your standard insurance policy. Of course, it's not enough to cover the whole cost of their new house, but it helps.

Everyone else in her family, and Earl's as well, have decided to stay and rebuild. There are 10 family members living in one house. She didn't cry, but I could see her tears behind her eyes. I told PapaD. that if you were to just scratch the surface, that they were right there.

What I learned tonight, is that Earl and his wife left their home without any bags. No clothes, food, guns (Earl collected them), or special family treasures. But when they moved up here they still had a lot of baggage.

I could tell they still do.