My paternal side of the family recently had occasion to gather and as all families do, we began reminiscing about the good old days. The good old days were constituted by a slew of cousins including my younger brother and his umpteen number of childhood male counterparts. All of them, apart from one, were younger than us girls so they naturally migrated together and formed a happy gang of sorts who ruled and reigned Galvin’s Creek. To say they made the most of life would be lacking in description. Their antics were typical of boys back in the day, some only recently coming to light, and all could provide fodder and material for a new sitcom, or a box office hit at the least.
One of the memories that resurfaced went something like this. As an oilfield company man, my daddy often received Christmas gifts of bottles of expensive wine or whiskey. No one in our family partook of such finery or alcohol of any kind (or so we thought), therefore naturally he would store the bottles up in the cabinet, and over the years, had quite a collection. All was good and well, until my aunt got sick with the croup and needed a concoction of whiskey and peppermint. Daddy kindly sent her a bottle of the best from the cabinet collection. It was then discovered that all the labels on all the bottles had been carefully steamed off, the contents consumed and enjoyed, the bottles filled with water, and the labels carefully reattached. The culprits? It was concluded it was an inside job, and it wasn’t hard to figure out who the culprits were – and it wasn’t the girls!
Then there was the time the same gang of preteen boys were caught desperately extinguishing their cigarettes and trying to hide the evidence from Uncle John, who just happened upon the scene catching his sons and the others. As far as I know, my paternal relatives never indulged in smoking, so finding the boys doing it was a big deal and consequences were looming. My uncle was all broke up about it and approached my daddy to plan the punishment. “Garbo, what are you going to do to Clay?” he sorrowfully asked. “Not a thing,” daddy replied. “We did the same thing when we were kids.” The story goes that those consequences were delivered to my cousins’ rearends with a firm hand, with my brother’s backend intact, narrowly escaping punishment except for a few choice words from daddy. It must have done the job because he’s still nicotine free!
There were more thanafewlaughs,when someone remembered how the same gang of pre-adolescent males took a pair of old jeans and a shirt, stuffed them with pine straw, then hid behind the pine trees on the main highway in front of the house, and laid the stuffed ‘person’ in the road, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to come along. Come along, he did, and the snickering boys begin to pull the ‘dummy’ across the road with a rope they had tied to it. The poor motorist, fortunately someone the family knew fairly well, suffered more than mild heart palpitations when he thought he had run over and maimed a real human. There were a few sore rearends from that incident as well.
They didn’t learn much though, as a few weeks later, I was on a date with a fellow who had driven all the way from Baytown, TX, to court me. He and I were driving by my house on the identical road when I saw my brand new white Easter purse being dragged across the blacktop, tied to a rope, and being pulled by the young covey of culprits. Mad didn’t touch my reaction, and they ran like rabbits when we stopped, and I got out of the truck!
Back then, four-wheelers, sideby- sides, and other all-terrain vehicles were unheard of, so the boys all rode gocarts or mini-bikes. They would fire them off simultaneously, riding the dusty trails for hours between the pine trees or on the gravel road that served as the interstate highway of Galvins Creek, or ‘Baileyville’ – as we affectionately termed it. It was a sight to behold and hear – dust billowing from the backs of the bikes and carts and mini-motors revving up in a choir of deafening noise. I’m sure the neighbors were muttering a few choice words, but being the peaceful community that we were, endurance won out, and after a few years, they outgrew the need for such entertainment moving on to bigger and better things: mainly trucks with bigger tailpipes and louder motors.
The stories continued with everyone listening snorting in laughter and contributing a memory or two of their own. We all had that warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia as we celebrated life and family and connections that run deeper than the creek we grew up on. As the family dispersed, we packed up our memories and took them with us, anticipating and waiting for the next opportunity when the gang would gather again, drag them out and recount the good old days and the best of times.
