6-Year-Old Booze

My father is a funny character. In the ha-ha sense, as in: an entertaining individual. He does things like wait 40 minutes into a Rosh Hashana dinner before whipping out an assorted pile of crap that has gone unseen by other eyes for more than a decade, chock full of mortifying content that would embarrass my brother and I were we not steely souls.

The above image is a colorful mish-mash of my own making, one that over time has become a legendary, myth-quality piece of amazing for my family. It made its magical return to the physical realm this weekend, prompting its appearance here.

If you reference the date in the top-right corner (yellow circle), you'll see that this master work was created on Jan. 22, 1990, thusly placing the artist at the age of 6 years old. The assignment was to recreate the contents of a drawer at home.

Which brings us to the awesome. That red circle highlights, in my then-unable-to-appropriate-scale mid-word line breaks, the red-hued words "Johnee Walker." Yes, among what appears to be a rainbow quilted Gatorade, a burned earthworm and a canister of Wilson tennis balls, I faithfully recreated a bottle of single-malt* blended scotch.
*Word to The Loveseat.

You see, each day after returning from work, my mother would take a tall water glass, stack ice cubes to the brim and drizzle a bit of Johnny in the bottom before filling the remaining 4/5ths with water. A routine that repeats five times a week is enough to make an impression on a six-year-old.

So we can imagine how surprised Mama BK might have been when Mrs. Willoughby called midafternoon, asking whether there was anything they needed to talk about, because one little Brooklyn Boy had handed in a most interesting assignment that morning.

Whoops.

She's never let me live this down, though we laugh about it. Yet we each thought the picture long forgotten ... until my old man came through in the clutch. It exists, and it is spectacular still.

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