I have a lot of stories that include my sister, and I am very fortunate to be close with her still. She has been, and always will be, my best friend. Granted, we were little devils growing up, and yes, as her being older, I did whatever she told me to do. But we got along, and we were always very self-sufficient. We also were very good at entertaining ourselves.
This is a story of a time when we were left to our own devices. I was around seven years old, my sister probably eight or nine. When we lived in Southern California, after school, our Grandpa Larry would pick us up and we’d go play in his big house until my parents would get off work. Grandpa Larry was awesome. He’d give us ice cream, he would bring us autographs of Dodger players, he would let us run around the houses he was building. One Christmas my sister and I asked for office supplies (we were always jacking his because we loved paper and pens, my parents were convinced we were going to be attorneys growing up), and Grandpa Larry delivered! We got massive amounts of office supplies, 22 years later I still have that stapler. But most of all he let us be. My sister and I would rule his house after school, all the while he’d be up in his office working away.
You’d think with my sister and I, being as well behaved as we were, would sit quietly like nice, young girls and play with our Barbies, or do our homework. Oh, no. Not us. How did we repay our Grandpa Larry for our massive amounts of freedom? With mischief, of course! We would take the avocado picker into the back yard and pick dozens of avocados, obviously with no intention of eating them. We’d leave plastic spiders on the stairs for his wife, whom we despised anyway, she deserved being scared in the middle of the night. I think this was more me, but we’d call 911 from the guest bedroom, repeatedly. Then when questioned about it claim ignorance of even knowing what 911 was for. We would throw everything not bolted down into the laundry chute. I am certain that my sister would have thrown me down the laundry chute had I not been a screamer when I was young. We got into Nana’s expensive creams in her bedroom, we even found her coloring books from her childhood. These were like fifty year old coloring books that, not only did we find, we decided to color in them. Serves the old lady right for keeping something so silly.
With all of our wild ways, there was one thing we did that topped it all. We got into the liquor cabinet.
Now, we were teensy kids at the time, so no, we didn’t guzzle booze and barf all over the house. We did something much more awesome, something we didn’t let pass our lips until we were in our twenties. Grandpa Larry was well off, so the bar in his house was stocked with nothing but top shelf alcohol. Tons of it.
One afternoon, while my sister and I were running around, being the wild heathens we were, ran to the bar and decided this was the day we were going to experiment. We pulled out a huge, silver bowl. Made doubly sure the coast was clear then started pulling bottles from the shelves. We started with a base of tonic water. There were dozens of these little 12 ounce glass bottles of tonic, so we started opening them all up and pouring them into the silver bowl. Being careful to keep each of the bottles and the caps.
Then we moved on to the liquor. I’m not sure how many different kinds of alcohol we poured into this bowl, but the booze I remember the most was the Apricot Brandy. I remember this because it was a brand new, never been opened bottle. I remember my sister and I contemplating not opening it because we didn’t want to give ourselves away, but decided to go for it anyway. The smell of it was something I’d never forget as it made it’s way into the concoction of alcohol and tonic. The bowl kept getting more and more full as more and more booze got mixed into it.
So what would any normal kids do once they’d had their fun mixing the taboo liquids? Dump it out, obviously. Not us. We got out the funnel and carefully poured our mixture back into each of the empty tonic bottles. We closed up each bottle again, as tight as we could, to make it appear that they had not been tampered with, and put them back on the shelf. What was left in the bowl we then dumped. We cleaned up our mess, replaced the silver bowl and went on our merry way like nothing had ever happened.
My sister and I never found out what happened with those bottles of poison we mixed, as I had mentioned, it took us over a decade to tell our parents what we did. I can only hope that someone did sample it and think how divine it was, since naturally, my sis and I put so much love and care into this delicious beverage. We will never know.
Unihorn of Steel 