She Has Radar Eyes I Tell You.

19 December 2019

Thinking of Sugar

Things on the wire tell me that my Aunt Sugar, my mother’s sister, is in the hospital.  Weird blend of Buddhist and Lutheran that I am, I am offering prayers for her recovery and comfort.  Aunt Sugar is, and always will be, my other mother. She had as much a role in forming my personality as any person in my life absent my parents. Given how I have turned out, she may disclaim that thought in its entirety.

Two Aunt Sugar stories real quick. Once long ago I young, dwelling in the ages we would call preschool now, you know that time when most families with two working parents drop their young ones off to brightly colored places. These places for child storage during working hours  are called things like The Happy Place or Mr. Elephant’s Early Learning Center (and these parents fork over a good godly portion of their income to those places. Back then if a family had two working parents you looked for a relative to watch your brat. Aunt Sugar had me in her care. Both my parents worked, an anomaly at the time.  During those years I ran wild together with her sons Billy and Jimmie.  I can clearly remember her house in Penns Grove, not far from where the high school sits today.  

Aunt Sugar’s kitchen, and its smells and lighting, are as clear in my memories now as something that happened last week.  What I remember most is the clock on her stove.  You might wonder why I remember that clock so well.  Erh, the reason goes like this.  I was what you might call a precocious child if your were being kind, or a terror if you were not.  Aunt Sugar and I butted heads frequently.  When it was really bad, when I had frayed her last nerve, I would be placed in a chair near the stove. Aunt Sugar she would point to the clock on that thoroughly modern stove and show me with a sweeping motion how far the big hand would have to travel before my Mom got there and thus when I would get the beating I deserved.  I spent a far amount of afternoons watching that clock. 

Funny I also remember her bedroom.  This is where we had a couple of major talks.  I remember being gathered up in there with Billy and Jimmy to be informed that I would have a new cousin and they would have a sibling at some point in the not too distant future.. This inchoate being  would eventually become my cousin Dot.  Man did a baby did change the dynamic of the three wild boys.  Also in that bedroom that we got a lecture on running into the street.  One of our friends in the neighborhood had run into the street and had been killed.  Sugar was really broken up, and well we just didn’t understand. But she made up promise we would not run into the street.  Her voice had that adult tone that just writes on you soul, Do Not Run Into the Street, Look Both Ways.  

Aunt Sugar has never been a pushover and has always had eagle eyes.  Like there was that time, when her family and mine were staying a couple of blocks apart down by the beach in Ocean City, NJ.  Billy, her son mentioned above and I were now 18 years old.  At that time 18 year olds were legal to drink.  We could buy booze.  We could go into bars.  It was a heady time.  Problem was that Ocean City was a dry town.  

Well, one day Billy and I decided in our best right thinking mode, we should get something to drink.  Now my family and hers would not be happy about this.  We, being Baptists, were not supposed to drink.  There were some problems with this idea.  One of the things about Ocean City was that it was a dry town.  Nowhere on the island could you buy any beer, gin, or Boone’s Farm. If you lived on the north end of the island you would drive across a causeway and go to Circle Liquors.  If you lived on the south end you would cross over the 34^th Street Bridge and go to Boulevard Super Liquors.  

Billy and I were young.  We lived on the south end. Also, we had bicycles and the Super Liquors store did not seem like a long trek.  Plus, we had been saving our money up to get something, well anything.  We plotted out our strategy.  We would ride over the bridge get something to drink that night, ride back and hide it.  When night came we would drink whatever we bought and go roam the beach down at the waters edge. 

Our brain trust scoped out the hiding spaces around the area near the garage apartment where Aunt Sugar’s family stayed..  Bill and I  finally decided we would hide whatever we got in a little shed that faced out onto the alleyway.  This shed, maybe it was more of a lean to, existed to hold the garbage cans.  DPW trucks would come up and down the alleys one day a week and grab the cans.  Today was not that day. We would carefully wedge the booze behind one of the cans, out of the sight from the house side. We would be golden.

With our plan in place we headed off toward Boulevard Super Liquors. Ah, if only it was that easy.  What we did not count on was the height of the bridge.  Dude, that thing was like five stories tall and it went on forever.  If we had been crossing that bridge for anything other that grabbing some elixir of buzz, we would have said screw it and headed back to the beach to stare at girls.  But we were on a mission.  As I remember it it took nearly forever to get over there.

Teenagers are dumb.  We walked in to the liquor store with our saved up pocket change not having a damn idea about what to buy.  We didn’t want beer and liquor cost too much.  Ultimately, after some hemming and hawing we opted to grab a jug of Ernest and Julio’s finest red wine in the mega 1 gallon size. 

Teenagers are dumb.  As high and long as that bridge was on the way over it was twice at high and twice as long hauling a gallon of wine back.  We took turns walking our bikes and holding the gallon of vino until our arms felt like that would pull out of their shoulder sockets and off our bodies.  We, by the time we reached the bottom of the bridge coming back into Ocean City were sweaty and aching.  We would have been totally miserable except for the knowledge we had that the wine was going to taste good later.  

Once we were off the bridge we were very careful to travel back alleys and alternate routes so nobody in our families would see us.  We had planned this trip so no-one would be around.  We were making this journey in the mid afternoon, prime beach time when our mothers and the whole brood would be a the water’s edge.  

When Bill and I got to the little shed there was nobody in sight. Quickly, quietly, surreptitiously we stashed the bottle of red behind two big old aluminum garbage cans.  We had won.  We would be getting drunk that night when we both got off work from our jobs on the boardwalk.  We would be living the high life. 

Not so much.  Enter Aunt Sugar.

Things we fine right up until it was about time for Bill and I to peddle up to the boardwalk for our evening shift.  As we prepared to head off Aunt Sugar came up from the beach.  For some reason, and I should remember why but I don’t, she needed something from the drug store that was behind the house and to the north through the alley .  To get there you cut through the back yard, past the shed for the bin and turned left.  For whatever reason Bill and I went with her.  No big yank.

However, the trip back was a lesson the visual acuity of my Aunt Sugar’s eyes.  As we headed back to the garage apartment Aunt Sugar looked at the garbage cans under the little shed that was their home.  I have always assumed it was the late afternoon sun that tipped her off,  but for whatever reason she saw a glint of glass where, in God’s green earth, there should not be one.  

I can still hear her voice, “Jaybird, what is behind that garbage can?”  My response, “Um, I don’t see anything Aunt Sugar”.  “Jaybird I see glass back there, it looks like a wine bottle.”  Me, “ You’re seeing things Aunt Sugar.”  Her retort, “Jay Todd, you go over there and move that garbage can, I bet you there is a wine bottle back there”.  You know what, she was right.  The following question still hangs in my mind, “Well who on earth would put a full wine bottle back there?”  My guess is that just like a law professor asking a hypothetical question Sugar already knew in her heart the answer to that question. 

Bill and I stood mute as our party in the big green glass bottle got scooped up.  We watched crestfallen as it was taken into the apartment for the use of Aunt Sugar and Uncle Bill.  Aunt Sugar has always had eyesight that was frighteningly astute.  This was not the only time a glint of light out of place put us on our heels, but it was the clearest example that Aunt Sugar was one almost supernatural fore to be dealt with in the battle between youth’s desires and the steady hand of adulthood.