This Month's Story
PEGGY AND THE TWO-STEP DIP
Peg and El are latecomers to our street. They moved here only twenty years ago. When they first arrived, Stella, wanting them to feel at home, invited them to join us at a Nereid’s Carnival Ball. It is one of the highlights of the year—the all-woman Mardi Gras Carnival Krewe of Nereids holds a magnificent ball each year to showcase that year’s new Nereids King and Queen.
The odd thing about the Nereids Krewe at that time was that it was made up almost exclusively of Waveland and Bay St. Louis women. In fact, it was mostly Waveland women, and the Krewe ran their Mardi Gras parade through downtown Waveland (if the three short blocks on Coleman Avenue could be called a downtown).
At the end of Coleman, the parade with its festive floats and rain of doubloons and beads turned left on the beach road and marched east along the seawall a ways before turning north again and then west so that the parade made a large loop. All of this was a little over a mile from Heron Home and I would walk down the beach to where it passed and yell for the Krewe members (of whom Stella was one) to “throw me something, lady.”
In later years, Nereids moved their Mardi Gras parade up to Highway 90. There, the crowds were bigger and so were the Krewe’s floats, but the fun and the personal enjoyment that was part of the ambience of the beach was cut in half. Somehow, it lost the feeling of being our parade and became to many of us just another of the many Mardi Gras parades found up and down the Coast. It was still a very nice parade, but not ours.
The Nereids Balls were fun and the night that Peg and El joined us at our table was an exceptionally nice ball. The tableau that night was beautifully choreographed and the decorations and food in the hall afterward were excellent.
Peg was several years older than me and, as a new friend, I treated her deferentially. But after drinking my two allotted beers and since Stella was dancing with someone else, I turned and asked Peg if she would care to dance with me.
She said she would be delighted.
Peg was a delight—a beautiful, naturally graceful dancer. I twirled her, I back stepped, I shifted, I dipped, and she did them all and did them in a way that made me look good.
I could do no wrong.
However, I forgot that I had already had drunk a couple more than my limit. Unmindful of this, I twirled her, I back stepped, I shifted, I dipped, I double dipped her, dropping her head low to the floor.
And I lost my balance.
I dropped her. I fell on top of her. I lay there, not knowing what to do. I mean it isn’t like you can wiggle when you’re lying on top of an older woman. Peg was just as startled as I was, but she kept smiling. As I braced myself to somehow scramble up, I realized the music had stopped and people were coming off the dance floor.
I recognized Stella’s voice. Peg recognized Stella’s voice. We turned to look to one side, both still flat on the floor—she on the bottom, me on top, and Stella with her partner, talking continuously, stepped nonchalantly over both of us and proceeded back to our table.
I looked at Peg and she, still bravely smiling, looked back at me. I scrambled to my feet, helped Peg up and, as best we could, rejoined the table.
This was a long time ago and Peg and El have become very close friends with Stella and me over the years. We have gone many places together and done many things, but it has suddenly occurred to me as I write this, that Peg has always hesitated whenever I have asked her to dance with me again.
Let me tell another story about Peg.
Peg likes to tell about the time she was driving with a rather stolid friend and saw our three Weimaraners running loose on the road not far from us, up near the railroad tracks.
Knowing we weren’t home, and thinking that they somehow must have gotten loose, she stopped and to her companion’s dismay, forced them, with a great deal of growls and complaints, to get into the backseat of her car.
With the three large hounds carrying on in her back seat, she hurried back down the road to our house. She told me later that her woman friend was terrified and screamed whenever one of the dogs tried to climb over the seats and join them in the front.
“Lord, she made noise. She was worse than the dogs.”
As she drove up the driveway to our house, she was greeted by the sight of our three dogs peering inquisitively at her over our back fence. She turned and stared at the three Weimaraners in her back seat who, now quiet, glared back at her.
She later told me that she quickly put the car in reverse and took the unhappy Weimaraners back to where she found them. There, after some confusion, she opened the back door and she let them go.
Only after they jumped out of the car, did she (a five-time grandmother) realize the dogs she had picked up and tried to mistakenly return to us were all males.
Our three were females!
