We made our own fun

I have a new query letter for The World of Mirrors. This must be the 5th or 6th. Quite different, so we shall see what happens. It can't be any worse. First letter goes out tomorrow.
Yesterday I wrote a little about smoking and how much I always liked it. The very last people on the planet to quit will probably write Smoking Memoirs. Have you noticed how many drinking memoirs are out there now? Must be right up there with the drug memoirs. I haven't read any of the drinking stories, but I can't imagine how a whole book of someone's boozing (and presumably rehab) would be too entertaining. I mean, how much can they remember?
My mother always used to tell me that when she was a girl, "we made our own fun." Today I was trying to think what that meant. It didn't mean that as a girl she drank or that they made moonshine. She grew up in a small Kansas Mennonite town, a farm community, in the years right before the depression. It was a very straight-laced place, I remember from my own youth. For example, if you played outside on Sunday, you could not make noise. Mom was not a Mennonite, but many of her friends were. They didn't drink or smoke or dance or play cards or even go to movies. The problem is, when mother said, "we made our own fun," I probably stopped listening. Willful mother. Willful daughter. You say it's black; I say it's white. I do know that the girls and boys ran around together, and there are lots of photos taken in front of someone's old car. They dressed up a lot. The fun? I think they gathered around the piano and sang while someone played. "You are my sunshine." They laughed and joked and kidded around. Maybe there were so many chores and duties--lots of church, don't forget, that any leisure time was "fun." Wish I knew. Wish I had listened.

I grew up in a small farm town in Colorado and we made our own fun, too. Mostly we went out and got drunk in the rec. room of someone's basement or at Nicks. Nick had a bar in Snyder, Colorado, population less than a thousand. He had a brother John. I remember John, standing there in a white apron drying Pilsener glasses and leering at us. We were 16 or 17 and cute by the standards of the day. The dive had a bar, booths, a dance floor, a juke box, and a bad reputation. Nick served under-aged drinkers, and why he never got caught, I can't imagine. We drank beer with tomato juice in it. Don't ask. I can't remember. We danced up a storm. I don't ever remember a crowd there. Once there were some people from out of the area, and I danced with a girl's boyfriend. She followed me into the john and threatened to beat me up. I apologized and made up a large lie about a boyfriend in the Air Force, blah blah blah. We sort of became friends for the evening after that. My god, did we drink! Binges, parties, tequila, beer, gin, malt liquor. Yuck. I got sick on cherries and gin on an empty stomach and don't drink gin to this day. When I turned 21 I pretty much stopped drinking. The fun was gone. Maybe it was never that much fun to begin with. So that is my drinking memoir. We made our own fun. Still love the girls I drank with. Hey, we all turned out o.k. Where's the moral in that?

All this drinking and smoking confessional stuff is leading into tomorrow's post, which will be the Man Burning at Burning Man, from the standpoint of the narrator, who is, you guessed it, rather drunk. In the meantime, cheers!