A gift from two brothers

You read it here, back at the beginning of the year, about how Dorothy Robichaux, originally from Chauvin but more lately of Thibodaux, was fighting cancer.

And you read here as well about Brandon Robichaux who has been re-acquainting himself with the trumpet he played at South Terrebonne and at LSU, because of a social thing for work.

And yes, they are related.

Brandon is one of Dorothy’s grandsons.

And it’s funny – not in the ha-ha sense – how different things kind of gel together in this life, how stories that don’t seem connected do end up connecting, how degrees of separation are sparse not only in terms of relatives and such, but just life events.

Dorothy, whom everybody knew as Miss Telou, famous for her gumbo and her holiday eggnog and a former clerk at a Chauvin convenience store, got carried back to Jesus by the angels last month. Her children and the grandchildren, everyone, wanted to figure out how best to say good-bye, what could be done that was right.

Some of the groundwork was already laid. Though she didn’t get to go see it herself, Miss Telou’s coffin was already picked out to her liking, hand-made by monks on the North Shore.

And everyone in the family knew that she would be in that coffin wearing her LSU socks, so proud she was of how the team works, and how doubly proud she was of that grandson, Brandon, who once played the horn at that school, used to get shooed away to practice by Miss Telou.

“Go practice,” she would firmly tell him. His dad, David, and his mom, Charlene, would tell him to practice as well. But Miss Telou had that commanding grandmother’s voice, just enough firmness and just enough love, to make no doubt that it would happen.

When the family evacuated Chauvin to be away from the path of Hurricane Andrew, Brandon practiced in his jeep while the storm blew, so hard had everyone gotten the message home.

He’s not the only musical guy in the family. His brother Davey played the horn and the tuba, and was also excoriated by his grandmother to practice. But mostly she enjoyed watching him play football for South Terrebonne while Brandon played the trumpet, rooting them on that way.

And then there is Cory, who teaches guitar in Houma, but is an accomplished musician himself. Cory also sings, and at holidays when the eggnog would bubble on Miss Telou’s stove she would watch with admiration through the years as he gifted her home with everything from Christmas songs to self-written compositions to “Dead Skunk In The Middle of The Road.” And she loved it all.

Davey couldn’t make it in from California for the funeral, with everything happening so quickly. But there in the church were Brandon and Cory, each with his respective instrument.

And as the priest began the Mass Cory’s fingers strummed the chords to Amazing Grace, while Brandon, who never imagined when he rescued the trumpet from the rear of a closet not so long ago that he would be playing it for such an event, blew the notes hard and long and sweet. The brothers, who rarely have performed together, blended their voices to Cory’s rhythm and a friend even helped out.

There were other songs, and there was the cousin of Cory, Davey and Brandon, whose name is Maia, spoke with conviction about the superiority of Telou’s gumbo, and the eggnog, and most of all how Telou is now with her husband, the late Joseph Bruce Robichaux, whom she missed and loved ever so much.

And if you could have seen Brandon’s face as he made music with that horn, and Cory’s reverent look downward as he shaped his chords, you had to know that Telou was being given not just a sendoff, but the great gift of music from two of her favorite musicians, and the gift of words from her granddaughter, and you know she was beaming in heaven.

It’s odd, the shaping of circumstance and consequence, how Brandon already had found and begun playing the trumpet just weeks before he was called on to do so for such a somber occasion.

But somber as it was, the gift of the brothers made for more than one smile on a day when so many who loved their grandmother cried so many tears.