In a previous post, many visitors to the NESTER enjoyed Carole Gibb’s seventh letter to her sister Mary. In these excerpts from her memoir FISHING FOR COURAGE, Carole writes letters to Mary describing her challenging experiences fishing and living in Southeastern Alaska’s outback. In her eighth letter, Carole writes a rousing narrative about an evening in a bar in Pelican, the nearest town to her cabin.
The previous letters are available in the WRITERS category of the NESTER blog.
Her memoir, FISHING FOR COURAGE, is available on AMAZON in both book and ebook formats.
TIME IN TOWN
WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO
Dear Mary,
You asked in your last letter what I’ve been up to. I’ll fill you in, but first I’d like to sympathize with you about your hubby: I agree! Why can’t he take out the trash and put a new liner in the can, like you keep asking. Finish the job, guy!
Now, as for what I’ve been up to: Last night there was a gathering at the bar. While I was there, three people hit the floor and I talked to two guys with their flies down.
I get the impression this wasn’t an unusual night, as far as those things go. The atypical part of the evening was the fund-raiser, something called a ham bowl, which, I discovered, was an evening of bowling.
The prize was a ham and because we eat so much fish around here, people wanted that ham, and they wanted it bad.
Pelican lacks a bowling alley, so the “lane” was the floor of the bar, between the pool table and the bathroom. Plastic pop bottles filled with sand worked for pins, and the bowling ball was—get this—a Cornish hen. It started out frozen and slid like crazy at first, but got more sluggish as the evening wore on. (People adjusted their game accordingly.) The jubilant winner took home the ham, and the person with the lowest score got the Cornish hen.
It was an interesting night, conversation-wise, in between turns. Somehow we got on the subject of teeth, and Peggy (the cafe has one waitress, and she’s the one) leaned toward me and said, “After I take my turn, I’ll tell you about getting my sore tooth pulled.” She tapped her finger on the counter. “I was sitting right here, at the bar.”
When she got back from her turn with the Cornish hen, she said, “I had a couple of loose teeth, but this one molar was really bothering me. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so I couldn’t afford the $250 plane fare into Juneau and back, plus hotel, plus the dentist.” She continued after ordering another beer. “I was in here on a slow night, just me and two guys in the whole bar. I said something about my molar and one of them offered to pull it for me. I asked him, ‘Got a string?’”
I shook my head in wonder, thinking that was the end of the story, but she said, “Unfortunately, he pulled the wrong one.” She laughed at my you-gotta-be-kidding look. “So after a couple more shots of whiskey, we tied the string again, and that time we pulled the right one.”
We were all laughing, drinking beer, dancing and having a good time!
So to answer your question, sis, ham bowling is what I’ve been up to.
And just for the record, none of those people who hit the floor last night was me. And those boys I saw with their zippers down? They weren’t trying to scare anybody, they just forgot to finish one thing before starting another . . . kinda like your hubby forgetting the trash can liner.
Okay, well . . . stay tuned.
xxoo
Carole
To read &view Carole’s previous post, LETTERS FROM ALASKA 7 – click here
