Jewel

I saw my Aunt Jewel today. At least she could have been Jewel, but my dear aunt has long since passed. Every family has a Jewel, I think, and ours was the real thing. My first memory of her was sitting on my uncle’s bed, brick red hair and blood red lipstick. She had a cigarette holder that was longer than the cigarette that was in it, and a can of beer in her other hand. Now, I had never seen a cigarette holder except on TV, and I didn’t know any women who smoked (after all, this was the 1950’s). Add the fact that I had never seen a can of beer before, and it was all in all a very memorable sight. Her voice was as loud and raspy as you would expect, and I learned over time that I was at that moment in the presence of the family’s blackest black sheep. That made her my favorite, and she never lost that distinction.
Jewel actually had the same teacher in the 8th grade that I had, 40-something years later when I was in the 7th, Mrs. W.W. Allred. Mrs. Allred was an institution in Collins, Mississippi, having taught both my parents a decade or so after Jewel, and a couple of decades before me. She was a hard taskmaster, and never showed us any sense of humor, but I still maintain that she was the single person responsible for teaching me more grammar than any other. She drilled it in, plugged the hole, and dared you to forget. I was afraid of her, and can still diagram sentences and discuss gerunds, largely because of her.
But she and Jewel didn’t have the same relationship. You see, Mrs. Allred had this habit of demanding attention from students, and when she thought she was not getting it, she would throw things at the offenders. It would usually be a piece of chalk or an eraser, but with Jewel it turned out to be a shoe. Apparently she ran out of chalk. Jewel’s response, though, was not to pay attention, or even to throw the shoe back. She got up, went to the back of the room, jumped out the window, and thus ended her education, then and there. Yep, black sheep.
I don’t know a lot about her life, but a few good stories leaked out from time to time. Probably the best was about a framed certificate I saw on her wall the one and only time I visited her in Texas. Apparently there was a time when unescorted women in Mexico were believed to be women of the street looking to ply their trade. They were routinely rounded up, hauled to the local hoosegow, and charged with public prostitution. Now let’s set the record straight right now. Jewel was not that kind of woman. But she and a couple of her friends cooked up a scheme which resulted in their being in a restaurant in a Mexican border town, sans male accompaniment. Sure enough, they got rousted, hauled away, and locked up.
Archie (how that man put up with her, I’ll never know) and his friends waited long enough, then went down to bail the girls out. Prostitution was legal, but controlled. The fine for practicing without a license (yes, the pun is unintentional) was more than the cost of a license, which is what Jewel and her friends had counted on. You can figure out the rest. For the rest of her life, she had a license to practice her art in Mexico. Go figure.
I stayed long enough with her to wreck her golf cart (she made sure Archie never knew too many of us were riding way too fast on it), and to learn her daily routines. She wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but would pop a top on a diet Crème Soda at the crack of dawn. She sipped those things all morning long, and left a trail of Crème Soda cans behind her. At the stroke of noon, though, everything changed. She had a big wall clock that chimed the hour, every hour, and when 12 o’clock came, it never got past the third chime before I heard the sound that Hoyt Axton made famous for Busch beer. I can’t write the sound, but I can approximate it -- ke chew’ -- Jewel popped the top on her first Pearl of the day. From there on Crème Soda was just a memory, and the Pearl cans took their place. That’s the Jewel I knew and loved.
I saw her today, but she was 50 years too young, her hair wasn’t near red enough, and she’d lost the cigarette holder. Okay, maybe it wasn’t her, but the woman I saw sure triggered a lot of memories in me, and just for a little while Jewel was right back with us, smoking, drinking, cussing, and having a heck of a lot of fun. It had been a while since I had thought of her, and I realized that I miss her. Everyone should have an Aunt Jewel.