Flashback Friday

It's almost the middle of June here in the 'Ville, and that means we're deep into the Catholic church picnic season.  Starting the last weekend in May and going until September, there are Catholic church picnics every weekend.  And when I say "picnic" I mean the usual Catholic picnic:  fried chicken dinners, beer, and gambling booths. 

When I was a kid, we loved the Catholic church picnic season because that meant extra money;  we would visit every picnic on Friday and Saturday nights and pick up the aluminum beer cans and then on Monday, we'd take them to the recycling center truck that would be in the parking lot of the shopping center to get some cash.

There is a certain beer smell associated with those picnics that to this day I haven't been able to replicate.  It's all because of the beer cans. As we were just kids picking up the empty beer cans with our bare hands and putting them in the big garbage bags, there was a certain smell of beer that I have to admit smelled good.  It was almost a sweet smell, and as I said, to this day I've never been able to get that smell.

We weren't afraid at those picnics; our family friends Dot and Bob would pick me up at about 7:30 on Friday and Saturday nights, and me and their sons Mark and Todd would scour the local church's picnic grounds and fill up the back of Dot and Bob's station wagon with bags of empty beer cans.  But we were enterprising even at a young age; before putting the cans into our bags, we would stomp them so we could get more cans into one bag.

We never made big big money from this endeavor, but we sure had a lot of fun doing it. I shudder today to think that not many young kids or teenagers would go to such lengths to make a few bucks.