Hot June Friday afternoons always bring memories of happy family picnics at Baily Beach. Mom would get home from teaching around 3:30, have a short gin and tonic with a twist or mabe a sprig of mint from the garden, then, if the tide was going to be high that evening, drag out the scotch kooler and shove it full of those blue plastic ice things that sat in the freezer year round and stunk to high heaven. She'd pack all the fixin's for martinis...shaker, gin and vermouth....dixie cups, and... oh yes, some meat and salad and french bread. When Dad rolled in at 5:30, he'd change to shorts and get the charcoal and newspaper and lighter fluid and away we'd go. There were always 3 or 4 other gin-drinking families doing the same thing at the Bailey Beach picnic area (NO Food or Drink on Beach under penalty of death) and pretty soon the party was going full blast. Booze, food, dimes for the kiddies to go to the concession and buy popsicles. The fire had to be started and then there were false starts and smoldering newspaper and black smoke. When it did start, at least one hour had to pass for it to become a white hot pile of coals, so that dad could burn the hell out of whatever protein he was cooking. It was usually steak...marinated flank steak as tough as an old leather belt and dripping with red wine marinade. Never a hot dog or even a less proletarian hamburger. Never a bottle of ketchup or A-1. Nothing. We didn't know what was good, and we were reminded of that on a daily basis. I'd beg to go home, beg for dimes and nickles, beg to be allowed to start a little campfire on the ground. Sometimes if the sun was far enough over the yardarm, I was allowed, and once in a blue moon there was a bag of hard, deformed marshmallows that I could impale and incinerate, and finally scrape out of my hair the next day. Each summer, nothing changed. The alcohol, the scotch koolers, the crusty old lifeguard Art Ladrigan, the high tide picnics. Until 1960. With 24 hours notice, all plans were changed, and I was put in the back of the barely-running 1950 Ford convertible with my dog and rabbits, and driven to New Hampshire where Mom and I hid out and snarled at each other for 2 and a half months. What was that about? To this day, no one's mentioned it. The month we returned, the "family" what was lefty of it..moved to West Norwalk.

I only have these 10 miutes, but do you know about the women in the Rowayton Art Guild? Well it used to be called that, they were so so artsy craftsy, -ish women who did things at fivish and sevenish.. they always had Phil Booth "Hang Their Shows". He was one of the only men in Rowayton who knew how to operate a hammer, or a generator, or do anything more useful than screw in a lightbulb...the majority of men were in our little hamlet were, their wives cried, "just useless"....He was the man they ran to in Rowayton Estates when their husband, say, may have kicked the lawnmower blade while the machine was running, to loosten the clodded grass, and were lying on the lush green lawn gushing blood from a severed artery. He painted garish 10 x 12 foot murals of naked women reposing in front of mirrors to decorate the annual Fireman's Ball at Roton Point, and Mom always burned them the next morning because her son's little friends wanted to hang them on their 11 year old bedroom walls , next to the Little League pennants.
But one activity that Dad refused was the annual cleaning of the cannon. On the traffic triangle in front of Winthrop House, at the intersection of Rowayton Avenue and , a Revolutionary War cannon said, muzzle eternally at half mast.. black and sooty and corroding in the salt air. The -ish women mounted the cannon every April, and gripping with their thighs positioned themselves astride for most of a morning while they scrubbed and rinsed. It never looked any cleaner, and Mom would always drive by and out of the corner of her mouth hiss that they'd be better off with a man at home than perched on a phallic symbol on Main Street. I had to get clarification from Becky of course. She knew everything.....