Pickle Juice?

     Although the majority of my family is very eccentric, my mother's sister is a tad more extravagant than the rest. And not in the sense of fashion or wealth, but more so in the odd and very detailed memories she always shares with our family. So she was, of course, my first choice to interview.
     My Aunt Jeanie is fifty one years old, and clinically diagnosed bi polar. But while she is a little out there the majority of the time, if you catch her at a good moment, or just happen to be her favorite niece, you can find very valuable and interesting information from the array of words that spew out of her mouth.
   When interviewing Aunt Jeanie, I asked her to recall one of her favorite past times. And that she did. She answered me with a thorough and lengthy story about where she spent her weekend nights as a kid during the winter in Chicago. It began normal enough, her meeting up with her friends at the local frozen over pond to go ice skating. But she did not specify any of her friends, which boys she thought were cute at the time, or even an incident when someone fell through the ice. What she told me was about the concession stand right down the path from the pond, where her and her friends could buy the refreshing beverage of pickle juice, served in the exquisite outer skin of a tomato. You heard me right, pickle juice drunken out of a tomato. People actually payed money for this!
     So while the majority of the interview was based on this unusual phenomenon, I learned from my Aunt Jeanie how easily it is to remember one aspect of an event or past time extremely vividly, and the rest can easily be just a huge blur.