Gifts from the past

It’s just a little neighborhood on Houma’s east side, this place were Kevin Portier grew up, and where he harvested some treasures he says are keenly important to his life.

The houses are nondescript mostly ranch-style structures, a few wooden ones here and there, built before Kevin was a gleam in the eyes of his parents. They have well-tended lawns, mostly, and are a testament to the hard work of shrimpers and offshore workers who occupied them from the time they were built.

Kevin is 36 now and a strapping big example of bayou manhood; he works at an oilfield supply company and lives a life of simple pleasures. One of those pleasures is history, especially local history, and while he acknowledges that he is no scholar he maintains that he knows what’s important to him. And the history he has assembled came right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

“I learned what I did talking to the old people in the neighborhood,” says Kevin, who was around 8-years-old when he started chatting them up, these older neighbors who had lived through a lot and so possessed tantalizing secrets.

Cleveland Street, on which he grew up, was named for a guy named Cleveland, and nearby Agnes Street was named for his wife. Cleveland had a brother named Alan, and there is a street bearing his name in the subdivision as well. They were just a couple of guys from Bayou LaCarpe, from what Kevin knows. 

Riding a bike up and down the streets, Kevin would talk with the oldsters, and he marveled at their stories so much as they may have marveled at the bike. It was a special prize and it was colored like a Sprite bottle, green with all the Sprite decals, and perhaps someone’s memory of that will make Kevin an object of someone or other’s history jones as well.

The best stories, Kevin thought, came from a woman named Marie Jeansonne, who was once a Red Cross nurse but had retired.

She talked about the times back when there was no Grand Caillou Road to speak of, just a shell road that stretched all the way down the bayou.

She told him of the floods and the storms and the heroics. She also talked a little about herself, how she had joined the army and all about working at the Houma airport when it was a base for blimps.

“I used to come by, maybe clean her shed, and she would talk with me and two hours later I was still there,” said Kevin, who understands a little bit of bayou French but would like to know more. His parents and grandparents never really taught it to him or his brother, so that they could talk about them without the boys knowing what was being said. Now Kevin thirsts for the knowledge.

In the meantime he savors the lessons he has come to learn from the older people, and advises anyone who wants to know more about the world they live in to not be shy, and ask those who have lived it.

“The past is important to me because only through knowing what has happened in the past can we learn to avoid the mistakes of the past,” he said. 

Miss Marie is gone now, and so are most of the older people who shared their memories with him. Kevin is glad he is a repository for all of that knowledge. 

Kevin wishes he could share the thirst for knowledge of things past with people younger than himself, and figures one day he’ll be the person rocking on a porch while youngsters come by and ask about how things used to be. And if they do he will tell them, only too gladly.