I learned more about life from the nine men in this photo than you could ever imagine
My grandparents' home was not very big. Truth be told, it was more the size of a shack than a house, but don’t ever let one of my aunts hear you call it a shack. To them it was their home, albeit a small one. How 12 children were raised there is beyond me. When the families of the eight married daughters descended on my grandparents' house, the noise would reach cacophonous levels.
Grandma did not allow alcohol into the house, which meant that at some point in the day the men of the family, the brothers-in-law, would sneak off, one by one to Mike and Em's, the tavern that was just down the road from my grandparents' home. The husbands knew that they were not really sneaking off, and the wives knew when and where their husbands were going, and everyone seemed comfortable with the charade that had had been going on for years—although once in a while someone would be asked to do a chore just as he was leaving. Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure it was just to make the husbands squirm a little bit.
I don’t remember what the outside of Mike and Em's looked like—the last time I was there I was only 9 years old, visiting when the family auctioned off my grandfather's belongings at his home—but the inside? That, I remember. Nine backless stools, bolted to the floor, covered in red naugahyde, lined up in a row in front of a counter. It looked more like a diner than a bar, with its gray floor and chrome-lined counter, and bright light from the front windows flooding the room.
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One by one the stools would fill with the brothers-in-law of the clan, with the last stool reserved for my grandfather. Each man would sit at the bar with a pokel of Old Style, Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, or Old Milwaukee in front of him. Mike stocked only one kind of pop, grape, which my grandpa would drink while his sons-in-law tilted more than a few beers back. This was their refuge, the one place their wives would not come and where if children tagged along, they sat quietly at a table off to the side sipping on a grape pop, having learned at an early age that if they wanted to tag along with dad, they had better be seen, not heard, and you damn well better like grape pop, because that was all you were getting.
It was a different time. These men came here to escape the "cackling hens" (their words, not mine), better known as their wives. Here the brothers-in-law told tall tales, swapped stories, and told dirty jokes, all of the things they could not do when their wives were around. But more than any other feeling, there was a sense of camaraderie. They'd all married into the family, they all held various blue collar jobs—truck drivers, mechanics, farmers—and a few served in the military during World War II. Their common bond was that they all married into the same family. After a few hours, and several beers, the brothers-in-law would walk back to Grandma's and Grandpa's house, often somewhat inebriated, much to the consternation of my grandmother.
After Grandma passed away, the brothers-in-law still went to the tavern, because bringing alcohol into the house just seemed wrong to them. Their wives would still sit in the house visiting and drinking tea, while the men were drinking beer at the bar.
When my grandfather died, my uncles stopped going to Mike and Em's, and the trips down home, as my mom called it, tapered off. The empty stools were all that remained. One by one, the men who occupied them left, never to return.
This past week the last of the brothers-in-law passed on. While I don't think there's a heaven, I do have this picture in my mind of Mike and Em's. All but one stool is taken, and as the door opens, the brothers-in-law turn to the door and say in unison, "Where in the hell have you been?"