Tag: Jennings

Last night I had a dream.  I was at work and someone said to me, “Tell me about your fifth Advent.”

I replied by saying, “Boy, that’s an odd question.”

“Is that too personal?” he asked.

“No, it just wasn’t expected.”  I knew that he was talking about my fifth Easter, which would have occurred in the spring of 1965.  Yes, I know that Advent is the season before Christmas and Lent is before Easter, but in my dream it made perfect sense to me.

When I woke up I tried to remember what my fifth Easter looked like, but I couldn’t quite picture it.  The picture that came to mind was a photo of me when I was actually three years old.  So I went to my computer and found the photos from my “fifth Advent.”  The photos in question are from April 18, 1965, in Jennings, Louisiana.

I had previously edited this photo with the idea that I would share it on a Throwback Thursday.  But then my dream intercepted that.  I’ll go ahead and share it since it is the Easter weekend.  This is a photo of me and my siblings sitting around the dinner table that we had back then.  From left to right is Jodie, Al, Jamie, me (Van), Rob, and Karen.   This was in an old two story house that we rented the first two years we lived in Jennings.  It was on Highway 26 just north of Interstate 10.  Recently after this we moved into town at 758 Lucy Street. 

This is the other photo that I have from that 1965 Easter.  I really liked the look of this photo, but it needed to be cleaned up and enhanced.  So my dream inspired me to finally get around to fixing it up.  In the words of Brett Waterman, “Do you like it?”

This is my mom when she was just a few weeks shy of her 32nd birthday.  Betty Lou Bucklin from Hathaway, Louisiana, married Robert Joseph “Bob” Landry, Jr. on November 1, 1952, and the rest is history.  They had six children in their first ten years together and the fifth one was me.  You can see that she was wearing her finest Easter dress.  As appropriate for the time, she was wearing head covering since we were going to a Catholic mass.

You can also see a painting that she had painted a few years before.  When they were first married, they moved to California in the Mojave Desert.  At the edge of the Mojave Desert, where it meets the Colorado Desert, is Joshua Tree National Park.  It was definitely a different environment than the small Louisiana town that she grew up in.  It obviously inspired her to paint that unique landscape.  The painting was always displayed in their home and I’m not sure who has it now.  I’m sure it is still being enjoyed.

I was about to close, but then I remembered that I left something out.  Not really.  I had typed it all out and then hit “Control Z” to Undo, but this program doesn’t respond the same way as most of them do and it was all lost.  I had to redo a lot of what I had said.  What I left out was the fact that we were sitting around that old table with all of our chocolate Easter bunnies.  I think that was probably the last time that that happened.  Some of us probably graduated to World’s Finest chocolate bars at the next Easter.  I couldn’t find an Easter photo from 1966 to verify this.  Can you believe it?  I don’t have a photo to document that event!  It’s a good thing my coworker in my dream didn’t ask about my Sixth Advent.  I wouldn’t have known what to do!