Parties Just Aren't the Same

Parties Just Aren't the Same Q _ by Jane McClellan My hometown in the hills of Kentucky had no country club until I was a teenager . Then several enterprising citizens bought my grandfather's farm (I use the word loosely-he was an official with the coal company, and grandmother farmed the way other women hurl themselves into civic affairs: with enthusiasm, diligence , and an absence ofprofit) and converted it to a country club. The whole project was ridiculous. Water had to be piped in from town at a vast cost, for no one would drink the iron water we thought to be the sweetest in the valley. Then laying out a golf course in the torturous twists on the foothills took an Iowa architect almost a year. His elevation drawing of the projected course looked like an amoeba coming down a flight of stairs. Worse yet, the course had to follow the creek bed. So every spring when the mountain snows thawed, the freshets overflowed and swelled the creek to a river. Sometimes the course was barely dry in time for the Fourth of July tournament . Actually, golf was the least pleasure afforded members of the club. The raison d'etre, as the French would say (and French phrases seemed to arrive with the chef, wno was not a Frenchman but a Hungarian from Mud Hollow) was parties . Previously the town's only facility for large parties, the Masonic Temple, no doubt had its limitations. Alcoholic beverages were absolutely prohibited, and there was only one restroom for both men and women. So of course most 58 parties were held at home. With the advent of the country club, gone where the days when parties filled the house with scents of floor wax and chocolate. And gone were the days when parties included the whole family regardless of who was feted. Now children's parties were held on Grandma's old sunporch where strings of drying beans had hung and a bluetailed lizard had lived in a spineless cactus Uncle John brought from Mexico. No more could the children spread out from someone's homey porch to the attic and its chests of olden-days clothes or to the gloomy basement for a round of ghost stories. Teenaged girls learned to play bridge under the eyes of their mamas in the Card Room that had once been the upstairs den. An engraving of Dante's "Inferno " that Grandma forgot (perhaps on Eurpose) still reminded the too lightearted revelers of the consequences to come. Young adults, free from the Mason's temperance, could imbibe a whiskey punch and trip the light fantastic in the refloored and vastly redecorated barn where Grandma's cows had happily Redbone and Heaven Wine Old and gaunt, time-warped; he sat with crooked fingers pressed to frets, soft he sung the strings of tenor banjo, as night song lyric he sang-of well-bred hounds, raccoon and fox gone-of mountain men choked by carbon fumes. From night till dawn he sang his songs and bragged (past hunt tales for old wraiths gathered around jugged moonshine) of night wine and hound dog bay. And Io! At first sunlight the angels sang for him; a hunter's song of coon and fox and mountain trails, of redbones and blueticks, of Heaven Wine, of home with Him-and them. -Paul Lee wintered in years past. But unlike the homes in which parties used to be held, the artfully updated barn had no pantry for a quick kiss, no varnished floor too fine for scuffing feet (dancing in socks led to a caress of toes far more exciting than holding hands). Married couples had all to gain and nothing to lose from partying at the club instead of in each other's homes. No clean-up before and after sullied the shining time. The losers were their children . I still remember the childhood vigils I kept, peeping through the upstairs bannisters to catch a glimpse of my usually sedate father dancing with the tipsy wife of the town undertaker to the refrain of "Don't Fence Me In." And the next morning there were the tastes of leftover...