My Aunt Marian was a big woman. Even though she was born in Germany and lived in New York before she was married, the first time I remember meeting her she had a heavy Southern accent.

The first time I met her was on a trip to Lousiana. The Porche family lived in Bourg in Terrebonne Parish. The big town was a few miles south or perhaps east called Houma.

Since there were seven of us in our family and nine in hers, it wasn't too feasible for the whole family to visit each other. So, it took my father getting a nine-passenger Dodge Dart station wagon before he was able to take us on a trip.

It was a 1962 model Dodge, so the first trip had to be in the summer of 1963. It was on that trip that we also went to the beach at Grand Isle, right on the Gulf of Mexico.

Grand Isle, like most Gulf beaches (I would later find) had a very shallow ocean. You could walk out into the water quite a way and still be standing on the sand. That was good for me at the time, because I had not yet learned how to swim.

My dad took all of the younger kids -- 10 of us, I believe and stuffed us into the station wagon for the trip. On the return trip, we stopped for ice cream or pops at a roadside store. When we left, we all piled in the car again and took off. Unfortunately, with so many kids, no one noticed that Linda Porche was missing. It took us a head count and some figuring to determine that. So we had to go back to the ice cream place where we found her waiting for us.

The Porche house was right across the street from a church and right next to a drawbridge over the Terrebonne Bayou. The back of the house was a dock right on the bayou. At the time of our visit, Uncle Herbert's shrimp boat was at the dock. Uncle Herbert worked for an oil company in the Gulf and in the off season went out on the Gulf to catch shrimp which he sold locally.

While there, I had my first meal with shrimp in it. Aunt Marian prepared spaghetti for us with a sauce that was full of very small shrimp.

While we stayed there, we also got to take the two pirous out on the bayou. We learned to paddle and went farther and farther up the bayou as we gained experience. We never went down the bayou because that was an area that commercial boats used. But going up the bayou became more and more remote with just people's private docks with little boats.

There were a lot of crabs in the bayou and we'd catch some. Unfortunately we left them in a bucket on the shrimp boat and when they died they stunk terribly.