We have family reunions every summer on my father's side, which unite the English and French Canadian descendents again. I got tipsy for the first time at one of them in Maine, as a preteen. My aunt asked me if I wanted "white" or "red". I thought she meant wine, something my mom kept in our household. I wasn't sure what to pick, so I hesitated. She laughed, "It's 'Moonshine', honey! It's homemade." She held up two clear glass jugs for me to choose from, swirling the liquid in the bottom around for me to see it. It tasted awful. She laughed looking my expression, knowing I wouldn't like it, "Tastes like turpentine, right? It'll strip the paint off of cars!"
I also found out on that trip that we had a cousin who ran a boat over the border to sell contraband, because I overheard my godfather asking him what he did for a living: "Oh, I sell pot to the kids over in Canada." My cousin smiled and raised his eyebrows, "Yeah? How do you do that?!" This distant cousin looked like an extra from the Deliverance movie set, with an unfashionable bushy beard, dressed in army fatigues. He laughed, too. "I run it over the border in a boat!" Naturally. How else would one run a small time international drug ring on the sly? "You can dodge the border pretty well if you know where to go." They proceeded to have a discussion about where he stowed the goods and what coves he hid out in to evade water patrol.
There was also a water fountain that had been rigged to pour beer. We went over to investigate. There was a keg hidden underneath, in the compartment where the water works usually went. "See?", one cousin opened the front panel and demonstrated it to us, "The beer comes out of here." An arc of beer shot out of the spigot. "Instead of water, it's beer!" How novel. Around dusk, we snuck over to this unmonitored miracle of science to pour sips of beer into plastic red cups that had held soda during the day. The adults were already blitzed by then, satiated from freshly caught lobster, hauled in from traps, off another speedboat that pulled into camp from the lake.
Another year we had the reunion at our house in New York. I was glad I wouldn't have to make the pukey car trip along the winding wooded back roads to Maine. Great! The party would come here. During the day, it was surprisingly dull. The adults were talking amongst themselves, smoking and drinking. I was going in and out of my house, bored by it all. Once I ate my fill and drank some soda, there was nothing for a kid to do. On one trip indoors, I was going into the house through the garage when my aunt (the same one who offered me Moonshine) pulled me aside. She asked me to get a band-aid for her, and I was concerned. She seemed subdued, which was rare for an ebullient personality like hers. She laughed, "No, I don't have a cut. It's hot out and I want to change into shorts, but I don't want anyone to see my tattoo."
Oh! I had never seen one before. We don't wear them in my family, which included my extended relatives, too. I went to the upstairs bathroom and got a bandage, returning to the garage. She waited there, with the shorts she got from the trunk of her car. She changed in the downstairs bathroom, and told me to wait for her. "I'll show it to you before I put the band-aid on it." I waited for her this time, in the garage. She came back in long white Bermuda shorts, and gestured me to the side of the garage, out of the doorway. "Come here". She pulled up on one leg of the shorts. "I got this when I was a 16 year old kid and now I'm stuck with it forever." It was really childish, I had to agree with her. It looked like something a teenage girl would pick out, even a really young artist like me could tell that much.
It was a silly, cartoony bluebird. She must have been a little bit tipsy at this point in the party, because she laughed and told me a joke that I would hear again in adulthood, when I could fully appreciate how wonderfully smutty she was. "I still have the bird, but no one wants to see the nest anymore!" I must not have registered much of a reaction, because she grew serious with me again, and gave me some incredible advice that I would never forget. "Promise me you'll never get a tattoo, Marie. Because who you are as teenager is not the person you'll be when you grow up." It was great advice, and I kept my word to her. God bless you, Aunt Marilyn. Rest in peace.
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| Nighttime at the Annual Jones Family Reunion |
