Sage Advice from a Midwesterner

One of my top goals for the vacation to the Midwest I took this past week was to reconnect with my two younger sisters. I tend to still think of them as roughly 11 and 7 years old, respectively, which is wildly inaccurate, as they're young women now. Middle Sister is 24 and quite the boozer, and Youngest Sister is 20 and decidedly pure and uncorruptable. And then there's me, with my, ahem, extremely social drinking and intermittent come-to-Jesus/I'll-never-drink-again moments. It's a wonder all three of us came from the same parents.

Being the near-alcoholics that we are, Middle Sis and I quickly became hell-bent on getting Youngest Sis to drink. And what sort of alcohol, pray tell, does one buy a young college-age woman who doesn't have much drinking experience? Say it with me now: Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine. Don't pretend like you don't know what it is.

Going to a liquor store in the Midwest is like going to a candy store for this New Yorker. First of all, everything is so cheap it's practically free, and they have every kind of liquor/beer/wine/glorified lighter fluid you can imagine. So I shouldn't have been surprised when Middle Sis and I strolled into the convenience store (called something like Kountry Kabinet or similar) and found no fewer than four flavors of Boone's chilling in a glass-doored fridge, as if they'd been plucked directly from Mr. Boone's farm especially for us.

"Oooh, they have it!" I literally squealed to Middle Sis. "What do you think? Strawberry Hill, yes?"

And then, out from under the fluorescent lighting of the store, came a hick voice to end all hick voices. Sitting in a plastic booth that could have been a furniture remnant from a McDonald's circa 1987 was a grizzled, portly gentleman with a Budweiser T-shirt and crossed eyes. We had no choice but to listen:

"You giiiiiirls are in luck. They haaaave your flavor," he said.

"I haven't had this in years," I said, trying not to look at him. But he wasn't finished yet. With a sense of urgency that can only come from one boozer to another, our new friend said:

"Well, git you some!"

And git us some, we did. Not only did we follow his advice, but that became the inside-joke catch phrase for the entire trip. And even though Youngest Sis only drank about 1/3 of the bottle before going to bed like the oddly angelic being she is, it was damn worth it to buy a perfectly chilled bottle of Boone's from the Kountry Kabinet deep in Nowheresville, Midwest, on the advice of a drunken stranger.