I love my cousin Betty Ann. She’s a few years older than me but I warmed up to her just as my adolescent hormones started to bubble up as I visited her at her farmhouse in New Jersey years ago.
I pulled a John Candy-stunt when she was doing the dishes at the sink. There, she stood wearing a nice flowing dress, the type you might member from the 1950s. It was the type of dress that John Candy recalled looking beneath when he’d drop coins to the ground and looked up the legs for that heavenly site that all young boys dreamed of, but never had the nerve to dive into or seek beneath or between the opposite sex.
Candy did it in the movie “Splash” where Tom Hanks hooked up (pun intended) with a mermaid played by some blonde whose name I can’t recall now. (Darryl Hannah, you landlubber!)
Diving like a mermaid to discover treasure
I don’t know how long I had remained on the kitchen floor looking upwards. I don’t recall if I had tossed any coins toward the floor.
For the life of me, I don’t remember what I actually saw. It was too dark to really take in anything.
I just moved around a lot until Betty Ann kind of noticed me and stepped back. She was so kind and never scolded me or said anything cruel to me, even though I believe she kind of figured out what her young cousin might have been up to.
I’m truly sorry Betty Ann. Please don’t tell anyone.
And I won’t tell anyone about what me and Rosemary, your sister and my other cousin with the last name Lieb, did while she was visiting Philadelphia that one unforgettable lovely afternoon!
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