Chapter 4: It’s all relative

Today is our only full day in the Okanagan. It’s already 6:30 pm and we have steeped ourselves in medium big-city living all day and are worked, napped, and fed. Carol has an armload of treasures that she’s rescued from second hand shops plus a host of vegetation to take back home to spruce up the crib.

We have a big night planned… indoors.

Always thinking, Carol found two partial sets of scuba gear in the dumpster behind Oleg’s Used Sports Emporium. A quick rinse with acetone and ta-da we can now enjoy two meter contact with the kids without my long johns on. Carol has grafted a funnel to the top of the snorkels and if you can time your breathing just right you can savour a lovely chenin blanc virus-free. Plus, if you stuff about four ounces of camembert into the mouthpiece it will last up to forty-five minutes if you dig it out with your tongue. If we’re lucky and this pandemic lasts another year I could market this setup and strike it big. Making lemonade out of lemons indeed. I should donate my brain to science (after I’m dead).

Suddenly there is a new wrinkle in our plans as my niece and her husband have unexpectedly dropped by… with a large bag of beer. I will just refer to them as niece and husband until later in the story as they play a central part in the evening to come and I will be giving them aliases because of their conduct.

Because they are younger and bulletproof they are wearing modified masks upon their entry. The masks cover the area from below the eye socket completely encasing cheeks and chin (chins in his case) but they have installed a four inch straw into the mouth area so it waggles around quite a bit when they move their heads rapidly. It also gives them an Alvin the chipmunk sound to their voices when they speak. These are not Nobel prize winners either.

What exactly is a bag of beer you ask. Well in this case it is a variety of containers, some glass, most aluminum cans, of varying sizes. Some are of the tall variety, craft beer mostly, and then there is a handful of pedestrian fare that have names like Colt 45 and Beer Belly Extra. These two relatives are from the hipster/redneck gene pool.

They have brought 14 beer because they expect to stay more than an hour.

As distracting as their face gear is I can’t help but to laugh continually at their antics. They (him mostly) have an impressive hops saturation point. Not a syllable is missed when pop tabs and bottlecaps are ruthlessly extinguished by the non-party crashers as the minutes pass by. After fully emptying their road persona they casually ask if we would be interested in coming back to their place to terminate brain cells. … HELL YA! where do I sign up? I’m not 70 yet!

They live a mere 20 minute walk from our home base but Eddie has gallantly offered to chauffer both I and the husband to a liquor store so the remainder of the night should remain a blur. Both Carol and I, plus Rachel have accepted the invitation to enhance our libation quotient at niece and husband’s house. Eddie probably has plans to scale Mt. Everest in the morning so he graciously declines Thinking Are you guys NUTS!

So the three women are on foot and are in no hurry to make their arrival, but Eddie has reached his inebriated passenger limit and is eager to pass us into the next stage of our evening so he’s hustling us over to husband’s place. We arrive 10 minutes before the girls.

I will now unveil our host couple. In order to protect the guilty I will come up with pseudonyms for both.

The male component will be called…say… Brent. Yes, that will be the final answer. BRENT. Now his namesake might invoke thoughts of a privileged, white, male that grew up in a family of professionals who ate dinner by the kitchen table with witticisms, commerce, and politics as the conversation of the day. But alas, Brent being the black sheep was forced to sit on a stool by the counter with his plate and stare at his reflection in the microwave. There was a table for 6 and poor Brent was deemed number 7. This opened the door for his conspiracy theory affliction to appease his persecution complex. QAnon you say? A miserable soul to be sure. If only he could find his female counterpart to make himself complete.

Now Brent had the makings to be of the handsome variety but a couple of character flaws determined otherwise. Firstly Brent, as mentioned earlier, had a predilection for the alcoholic beverage made from barley grain. This immediately placed him below the rum, vodka, gin crowd. In fact he wasn’t even on the radar for the tequila, whiskey, scotch throng so it was no surprise to hear him brag about all the beer cans that he had crushed against his forehead. But you could see he had reached his limit more than once as he had a restructured nose from the many times that he had missed his cranium and the missiles were sent crashing against his proboscus. Still, despite his dim appearance, he was immensely entertaining.

His wife/my niece was a catch to say the least. What shall we call her?… Veronica, Irene, Wendy, no… Karen. Not the Karen of current meme fame. This was not the white middle-class woman, that exhibits behaviours of privilege, growing up in a traditional setting with one boy and one girl, a blue collar working father and a dedicated, working mom. And who aspires to live in a rambling house with a pool, with her own two perfect children and doting husband. No, this was someone else. This was a Karen that could drink a 6-pack of Lucky Lager and burp the alphabet while she’s watching Storage Wars reruns.

The combination of the two made for a memorable night. We were having animated discussions on why hot air balloons weigh more than three microwaves and why logging trucks should be able to park at the mall, yada yada yada.

The real star of the show though was a six pound, short-haired Affenpincher/mutt cross that was obviously just groomed by Sinead O’Connor as the poor thing was denuded of all his covering except the end of his tail, his four paws, and his lovable face. Oblivious to his farcical appearance was this high-spirited canine who we will call Cootie, … no Cody. Yes, that’s the moniker that best describes this dynamo of happiness.

Tongue lolling over his teeth, bushy eyebrows obscuring his vision, head whipping from side to side as he was constantly being stimulated by sounds, smells, and love touches. This was a four-legged cutie that had to be petted on the head, scratched under the chin, and rubbed on his bare flanks. He had that ridiculous dog grin that said I am your friend… and I just ate all of the poop in the litter box. There is nowhere in the evolutionary storyline where dogs inherit any more than the lowest rung on the ladder. If Cody was a human he would be a combination of Zach Galifianakis and Yosemite Sam.

I was really in my element; frivolity, liquid refreshment and a couple of people who couldn’t leave and go home because we were already there.

I have eleven interesting stories in my repertoire that summarize my life; five that are real and six that are enhanced to make me look good. I was just beginning story number two when Carol and Rachel, who can recite all eleven by memory, decided to pull the plug and enjoy a nice evening walk back home. An hour later the wine was gone and it was time that I took my leave. The merry couple tried to have me stay over and even profferred a rare potato liqueur (that nobody would drink) to sweeten the pot. But of course I’m too responsible to overdue my alcohol intake and I left with a hearty cheerio and promptly fell headlong into the hedge out front. Nothing a few bandaids couldn’t fix in the morning and off I went whistling a non-existent tune through a swollen lip.

It was a wonderful evening and a wonderful trip. Home to the tranquility of the Kootenays in the morning and back to my daily grind of hot tubs and naps. I wonder what other exotic locations we’ll encounter in Pandemic Year 2? Stay tuned.