One robot, one whiskey, one beer (and smoke!)

Pat Fule
Fule for Thought

 

I had the opportunity to try my multitasking the other night. There I was watching the reality show Moonshiners, while I was doing the downstairs vacuuming. It sounds impossible until you know that we have a new member in our family. No, we haven’t adopted, and we don’t have a housekeeper like Alice in The Brady Bunch, or Tony in Who’s The Boss. Nope, we have a new Roomba robot vacuum that we have named Jarvis. You see, I’ve always wanted a British butler, and Jarvis is the same name of Iron Man’s computer system … so it’s the closest I could get! We did have one before, but this time I convinced (conned) Deb into getting the new Deluxe 870 model! Jarvis has been amazing so far, and except for a few ‘dumb’ moments like getting stuck in a corner, he’s done a great job. He basically rolls along vacuuming and mapping out your rooms’ layouts, while you do something more important, like learn how to make moonshine in the back woods of South Carolina.
So, while Jarvis worked, I learned the art of whiskey making. It’s amazing how hard these Southern boys work to make illegal whiskey in the woods of the Deep South! They haul huge copper tanks, hoses, and bags of corn meal and sugar. Two guys decided it was time to go for a ‘higher class’ of shine buyers. They decided to use fresh honey in their corn mash, which is more expensive, but could lead to a lot more money. In fact, Chico was so impressed with this honey flavoured whiskey, he said that it “smelled like a honey bee farted out a lightning bolt!”
Now, I don’t know about you, but that kind of shine sounds a bit scary! It took me back to my days as a kid in Canmore.
If you remember, I had a kind of ‘wild’ Hungarian uncle who had his own still for making whiskey. He was the one who had to hide all his still equipment in our basement because the local RCMP were on to him. Yep, I was the 6-years-old nephew who hid in the vacuum closet, because I didn’t want to go to ‘the big house.’
Man, my dad was mad at him! As soon as things died down, my uncle hauled all that still equipment across the street to their house. Man, my aunt was mad at him!
My dad didn’t make ‘shine,’ but he did make his own beer. Well, he called it beer, and I was too young to know any better. However, even a kid knows that the lids of beer bottles are not supposed to explode off and shoot beer all over your basement ceilings! Man my mom was mad at him! I really do think that, God love him, my late dad made the worst beer in the world, or at least Canada! It almost always blew up, and the batches that did work, had a great deal of floating “stuff” in the bottles. Being a kid then, I never got to try it, which is okay because it looked a lot like porridge in beer bottles! To this day, I really don’t know how he drank it. But, he did make better homemade root beer, which he also put in beer bottles. We walked around the neighbourhood thinking we were rebels, with our beer bottle root beer. Man, my mom was mad at him!
Car trips to Banff for movies were always great fun. Dad, or Mr. Macenko would always drive, and you got a choice of two driving adventures. My dad’s was the blue haze of cigarette chain smoking from our door to the theatre doors. When you rode with Mr. Macenko, you got the lovely aroma of a pipe swirling around you and into your eager little lungs! The extra excitement of a ride with Mr. Macenko was that he really liked a warm car, and there was no way in January to find any fresh air. You couldn’t even crack a window. It was like being a trapped miner trying to find a tiny pocket of oxygen. We were the canaries! My older brother always had it the worst, we often ran bets to see if he’d hurl on the way to Banff! Luckily for him (and us), he never did, because that aroma would’ve gotten us all going.
The car trip bonding with my dad also gave him a chance to mingle in the King Edward Hotel, and have a couple of cold, refreshing beverages! Yeah, my dad’s timing was always right on with the end of the film. There he’d be smiling at the back curtains, maybe a slight sway in his walk with us to the car! Yep those were the days … a car ride home with a happier than normal Dad, and more cigarette smoke clouds to fill our little lungs. Man, my mom was mad at him!

(“Fule for Thought” is a slice of life humourous column that appears in the Strathmore Times, written by long-time resident, town councillor, high school teacher, coach, husband and father of two – Pat Fule. If you would like to get in touch with Pat, you can send him an e-mail at Pat.fule@shaw.ca)