Baja St. Martin

I spent last weekend in Orlando, Fla., primarily to see/hear my granddaughter play in the Symphonic Cinema concert of the Central Florida Community Arts organization. Her concert was wonderful. She plays violin in a 155-piece orchestra and the concert featured movie music – “The Magnificent Seven,” “Superman,” “Titanic,” “Spider Man,” “Up” and more.
The venue was a gigantic church in Winter Park, Fla., where she lives. We spent Saturday morning at a Farmer’s Market there, drooling over the crafts and foods and plants. I guess it was lucky I flew there and couldn’t carry much home with me, because I surely would have filled my car with flowers if able.
My Allegiant flight home was delayed over an hour while the flight attendants seemed unable to make the passenger count come out right. I still don’t know if they thought there were too many passengers or not enough, but for an hour they checked, and rechecked and checked again, read over the passenger list, called us all by name and made everyone move back to assigned seats even though we’d been allowed to move about. Maybe it had something to do with the shooting at that Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Wasn’t that a horrible thing? Shooting and killing all those people. And to think the killer was a security guard and had just legally bought his weapons a week before he used them. I cannot understand why assault rifles need to even be manufactured. What would anyone want with one except to show off and/or to murder someone?
To a more pleasant subject, crawfishing is mostly over in the Basin and swamps, although on Hwy. 3127, en route to New Orleans, I passed a number of ponds filled with crawfish traps. Now I’m hearing that crabs are moving into the marshes below Morgan City which means crawfishing there is over.
Whether there will ever be crabs in the river or spillway remains to be seen. I can remember when we caught big, blue crabs in Belle River to sell. We had a holding cage off the dock and used remodeled crawfish cages for traps a lot. But that was many, many years ago.
Food for Seniors will be June 23 in the usual places, usual times. Before that on June 21 will be Bingo at the Belle River Community Center with birthday cake brought by Humana. Following all this, when the center is empty for a few days, the company which built the place in the beginning will come and install some sort of acoustic ceiling which we’re hoping will improve the sound quality in the meeting room.
And of course, on June 24, our best friend, Grover, will be getting married. I’m so glad we’ll be seeing him the day before with the commodities.
A Belle River camper, Sonny Brogan, just underwent heart surgery at Ochsner in Baton Rouge. We’ve learned that he had five cardiac by-passes which was two more than expected. The Brogans don’t live full time in Belle River yet but will one of these days. Sonny is building a huge camp next door to me and when it’s finished, I know he wants to move here full time. He is a Vietnam vet, having served two tours of duty. Nicest man you’d ever want to meet.
Florida certainly is getting some bad publicity lately. Now I’m hearing that a child was grabbed by an alligator in a lake near Disney World. Of course, all you hear on the news now is criticism from all sorts of people regarding the response to the shootings from presidential candidates. Either they didn’t call or didn’t use the correct terminology or didn’t say anything immediately or they didn’t express enough sympathy, etc. Everybody is getting their two cents’ worth in.

Teche News’ Lower St. Martin correspondent, Linda Cooke, can be e-mailed at lindacooke1939@gmail.com.