Welcome back everyone. I’m glad you decided to read on. Today I’m going to delve a little deeper into my time in the small community of Redgranite, Wisconsin between the ages of six and twelve and one person in particular who made that time special.
I’ve mentioned my cousin before, and she’s part of a lot of memories and experiences from that time, so I’m going to start with some of the experiences that she and I had over the years. One of her favorite stories to tell involves ice cream. I have mentioned the restaurant that my Mom worked at, Griff’s in my previous post. Griff’s had a side window in it that you could walk up to, ring the bell, and someone would come and server you ice cream or drinks out of it. It was primarily for the people swimming in the quarry so they wouldn’t have to get dressed to get some refreshments.
Quite often throughout the summer, my cousin and I would walk up to get a couple of twist cones. With everyone working there knowing who we were, those cones quite often ended up being far taller than they should have been. On one particularly warm summer day, we left with our cones and headed off down the street. In front of Elmer’s Pizza was a stone wall that had some lower sections that were in the shade. We decided we would hop up on this wall and enjoy our treats. Right before this happened, her ice cream slid off her cone and onto the ground. I of course, thought this was quite funny and started laughing as any kid would. She did not think it was that funny at all. Before I could offer to share mine with her, she grabbed my ice cream off my cone with her hand and threw it on the ground.
After my initial shock, I started laughing again and told her I would have shared. At this point, I can’t for the life of me remember if we went back and said our ice cream fell and got more, or we just dealt with it and enjoyed our cones. There’s obviously a lesson in there about patience, sharing, and friendship, but I’m sure we learned nothing that day. For some reason, when the two of us got together, our IQs seemed to drop a few points.
I also remember when we first heard the word “puberty.” We didn’t know what it meant, but we thought it was one of the funniest sounding words ever. We would say it over and over, focusing on the first syllable and stretching it out, “puuuuuuuuberty.” It drove her Dad and Stepmom so crazy, I thought they were going to kill us. Her Dad asked us what it meant, and I said, without missing a beat, “A stinky bird.” Oh, the childish laughter that followed that.
For a few years, she lived in a house by Pearl Lake. Across from her house was a tree filled hill down to the lake. One winter, after the lake had frozen, we decided we needed to sled down to the ice. After scoping out the hill for a while, we decided that there was a spot where it was a straight shot to the lake in between the trees. Out came the plastic saucer, and I was going to be first…of course. About halfway down, and after picking up some decent speed, the saucer veered off course causing me to lean to one side and slam into a tree saucer first. The saucer broke and my tailbone hurt a bit, but we were determined. A decision was made that we just needed to be able to steer. So, we grabbed the plastic canoe and some paddles. Needless to say, that didn’t end much better. At least we didn’t break the canoe in half.
When we were may be eight or nine years old, we decided to do a local bike-a-thon. I don’t remember what the charity was that we were raising money for, but we went around town and got pledges on a per mile basis. The route was about fifteen miles. We showed up on ride day on our BMX style, one speed bicycles. The only two people not on ten speeds. It was at that time when a small amount of doubt entered my head as to whether or not we would make the full fifteen miles. We started off and all was good. The route took us past Pearl Lake, and I’d ridden out to that lake many times, so that was a walk in the park. But this route kept on going, and going, and going. At about the halfway point, I believe she started blaming me for getting her into this stupid ride, and I was blaming me too. But we kept pushing. I kept telling her that at least we weren’t at the back of the pack because surprisingly, we weren’t. There was a car following to help anyone with mechanical issues, and it wasn’t right behind us, so there had to be more back there. About two hours later, we made it back to the start/finish line. Extremely tired with legs on fire, but we did it. And there were some older kids on ten speeds that finished after us. That garnered us a certain amount of pride, but we agreed to never do that again.
Speaking of two wheeled vehicles, I’ve been riding minibikes or motorcycles since I was five years old. They’ve been a huge part of my life. In my early years, I started on a Honda QA-50. A relatively small and slow minibike. Dad had even changed out the sprockets so mine only topped out at maybe fifteen or so miles per hour. Well, one day, she and I were taking turns riding my minibike on a small farm my Dad had bought. It wasn’t really a farm, but it had an old barn, silo, and a couple out buildings. She was riding along and decided that she couldn’t turn or stop as she was heading straight for my brother’s car. She got it to turn a little and ran right into a shed. I freaked out a little and she justified it by saying, “hey, I didn’t hit the car.”
She’s probably going to get a little mad at me for this, but I told you that story to tell you this much funnier one. When I was ten, I upgraded to a little Kawasaki KM-100. This one had a clutch, five gears, and would do almost fifty-five miles per hour. One day, I brought it out to her Dad’s farm, and we began riding it in the cow pasture. This was her first experience with the clutch, so I was teaching her and trying to keep her no higher than second or third gear. Well, she was doing pretty good for a while, then she came in a little hot, panicked, and yanked on the front brake. It just so happened, the front wheel hit a somewhat fresh cow pie, locked up, and caused her to lay the bike down. Not a pleasant landing for her as you can imagine. A quite humorous one from my standpoint though.
At around age twelve, we had our first alcohol experience together. We snuck some wine coolers up to her room and proceeded to giggle and drink them. Things went pretty good for a while, but then her gut started churning. Before I get to the inevitable conclusion to this story, I’m going to preface it by saying that part of our delicious dinner that night was peach slices and cottage cheese. At the time, one of my favorite little side dishes. I’m not going to get into the gory details of what happened next, but have you ever seen a whole peach slice come out of someone’s nose?
I’ll give you a minute to scrub that image from your mind. I’ve probably been a little mean to her in these stories, but come on, some of that stuff is golden. But I do love her dearly and don’t know what my life would be like without her. We aren’t as tight as we were back then, but we always know we can turn to each other for anything. Her daughter is my Goddaughter and I love her as if she were my own.
People say that your cousins are your first friends. I’d have to agree with that. The stuff you read today is only some of the highlights of a lifetime of friendship. We’re to, how should I put this, experienced to do many of these things today, but we’ll always have these memories to look back at. We’ve had some highs, and for sure some lows, but through it all, we know we will always be friends.
Looks like I’ll be turning Redgranite into a sort of mini-series as I spent this whole post on my cousin. Oh well. Now I don’t have to think as hard about what to write about next week.
So, until then, we’re all in this together. Luv luv.