"It ain't the truth, but it's close enough." Swede Johnson.
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Every family has them; distant, or not so distant, cousins that seem to spring up occasionally like mildew under the carpet.
Our family had Cousin Doris. She intruded on my childhood like a case of recurring measles.
She lived over in Northeast Minneapolis, or, as the denizens of the area itself called it, 'Nordeast'. She had an apartment on Central Avenue directly above a Latvian delicatessen. She worked at the Polovny Cabinet Works -- makers of fine coffins since 1898. Her job, as I understood it, was to steam clean the red velvet interiors of the expensive coffins about once a month, and to distribute moth balls where they might be needed.
She was dumpy and her drab dresses always reeked of rancid garlic. She was the only member of the Torkildson clan to ever have a snub nose -- everyone else sported beaks of varying lengths and sharpness. Her moon face was permanently wreathed in a buck-toothed smile reminiscent of Mortimer Snerd.
The reason we disliked her so much was because she always insisted on being HELPFUL.
My mother had her over for Sunday dinner once every two months, and Cousin Doris was so grateful for this bit of kindness that she always looked for ways and means to help our family out -- with resulting calamities that shook our belief in a just God.
One particular summer Sunday when she graced our table she decided that we should have a batch of good, old-fashioned root beer -- the kind her mother used to make back in South Dakota.
She claimed the ingredients were cheap and handy, and the process was easy enough so that a blind simpleton could put up a dozen bottles in under an hour.
My mother tried to explain that at the moment we were plumb out of blind simpletons -- there were none to be had at any price -- but Cousin Doris was not to be put off.
The very next day she brought over all the equipment and ingredients and set to work, while my mother retired to the back yard with a brown bottle of something she told me was 'stress medicine', but which smelled awfully like my dad's breath when he came home late on a Saturday night.
Amazingly enough, Cousin Doris was true to her word, and the bottles were filled and capped within an hour. She then washed up and cleaned the kitchen to a spotless glare.
The bottles were lined up along the basement steps to 'work' for a week or two.
"Don't mind if they gurgle a bit at night" she told us cheerfully as she left. "That's just the yeast workin'."
The yeast turned out to have nuclear properties.
A few nights later the whole Torkildson household was rudely thrown out of their beds by a series of gushing explosions that emanated from the basement steps.
You guessed it; every single bottle of Cousin Doris' root beer had detonated like a sugary land mine.
And yours truly was deputized to clean up the bubbling mess toot suite by parents who obviously relished crushing a young boy's dreams of undisturbed repose.
Two months later, like clockwork, my mother had Cousin Doris over for Sunday dinner. As we sat down to pot roast, potato rolls, three-bean salad, and corn harvested straight from a Green Giant can, she asked brightly how we liked the home-made root beer.
"You'll never find anything like it in a store!" she exclaimed as we collectively scowled at her.
"It was explosive" my dad said shortly, as he jabbed the pot roast viciously with his fork.
"It does have a tang, don't it?" Doris replied. "Myself, I think there's a bit of alcohol formed."
That would explain the quasi-hangover I had the next morning, after inhaling the fumes while cleaning up the basement steps.
Nothing more was said about the volatile root beer as the dinner proceeded in sullen silence.
Afterwards, as Cousin Doris helped my mother with the dishes in the kitchen I could hear her telling my mother that pickling fish was a cinch, if the fish were fresh-caught. And since little Timmy liked going fishing all the time, she would be happy to help my mother put up a big crock of pickled crappie or sunfish . . .
At this point I sped out the front door as if my keister were ablaze.
Mostly because I didn't like to hear my mother swear.
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