Eulogy for Leah

By Warren Bratter

​

Compared to what you have just heard from  Dale about Leah, I share only a spark in time with her compared to Dale’s never-extinguished pilot light of living and sharing.

 

Leah was 73 and I 66 when we first met.

We should have met sooner.

For we had walked the same Sea Cliff streets for 41 years

And yet, if I could cause Leah’s lips, which sleep now, to speak

She’d tell me that she was always there, and that I, I was too polite to greet her.

 

In New Orleans, not Sea Cliff, though I learned how Leah rolled

On a January night, five years ago, but in memory time —just yesterday

On a January night, at a joint you’d only find in New Orleans—A Bowling Alley fitted to a Dance Hall,

where locals rolled spares and strikes in the lanes

where every night friends and neighbors strutted a Cajun fai do do

and where the tumbling bowling pins were percussive accents to wash board driven tunes

And on that night, that January night as Chubby Carrier’s thump thump thump accordeon spun a six count zydeco beat

Leah, 78 year old Leah, her baby sister Dale and I hit the dance floor

The pins kept dropping in the lanes. Cajun French and Bayou English crackled all around us.

And we stepping, bouncing, hip swiveling, waltzing, two stepping, sweating, jitterbuggers

with turkey and andouille sausage and jambalaya croquets bouncing in our bellies never missed a beat.

and though the crowd cried out for more, Chubby’s botton accordeons bellows drew breathe no more

and Leah, 78 year old Leah smiled a biblical smile as we swaggered into the Mississippi River breezes of that January night.

And as we drove NOLA’s streets back to Leah and Barbara’s Cajun Cottage, streets as familiar now to Leah as Glen and Franklin and Littleworth,

 

I knew that this Leah, made in Queens was a now blooming Creole gal