I have BAD memories around these drinks. One year our entire teaching staff went on a 'booze cruise' on nearby Sylvan Lake where they fed us and poured way too many of these sweet drinks down my gullet. I got drunk way too quickly and needed to get some air so I went up on deck where I promptly threw up my supper over the side of the boat.
As I contemplated the poor decisions I made earlier in the evening and sweated out my eyelids, I saw what I thought was a log floating towards the ship. In fact when the hull of the boat hit this obstruction, it sounded like fiberglass hitting wood.
For some reason I looked down again into the water because something felt wrong. I had to call several people over to confirm that I had not seen a log but in fact had discovered a dead body that had floated, bloated to the surface of the lake.
The party was over at that point but we had to all stick around until the police interviewed us. You would have thought I would have been of prime interest to the cops because of my keep observation skills but after several minutes of my slobbering drunken incoherence, they thankfully let someone drive me home and never called me about the incident after that.
Stranger still was that I KNEW the guy who had drowned but did not find that out until reading the newspaper several days later. He was part of the same reserve military unit as my father. He had married a woman from Germany and it was her that killed him and dumped his body in the lake after they went on a romantic canoe ride earlier in the week. She claimed he had gone on the water alone and had drowned after swamping the canoe. She got 15 years in prison which is about the max anyone gets for murder in this country.
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7 comments:
Whoa, and here I thought you were going to be taken to the hospital with alcohol poisoning! No, it was a dead body and murder! I hope you weren't traumatized, Kal.
Do I seem tramatized, Belle? Why? What have you heard?
The funniest thing was the cops telling everyone that they would have liked to have my testimony because of all the details I gave but it would be useless in my current condition. He said it was too bad the jury couldn't see how entertaining a storyteller I was.
When I was very little in China, still small enough to ride atop the frame of a parents' bicycle, we came home one day in early evening. As my parents wheeled the bicycles through the driveway into the dusty courtyard encircled by many tall drab apartments, I looked down to my left and saw a dead baby in the ditch. It was naked. The gathering gloom of dusk wrapped the pallid form in ashen shadow but I could still tell how white it was. I looked and knew this was a dead thing.
Perhaps its family had had a miscarriage at home and were afraid to be exposed for a second pregnancy at the hospital. Maybe the baby had died shortly after being brought home from the maternity ward and the family was afraid of criminal negligence. It could have been an unwanted bastard, smothered before it knew the feel of a crib or a mother's succor.
This was the first dead body I ever saw.
Oh my lands! That is traumatizing! I would never want to drink again. Talk about being permanently upset...with bad dreams and all. Not sure I would go on the water again.
Holy crap! That's all I can say.
If it had come back to life at the moment I saw the body and came onto the boat with a machete...THEN I would have a reason for nightmares. This was just a piece of floating debris to me.
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