by Isabelle Esteves

Created on: November 02, 2009

When I was young, I didn't realize there was anything unusual about our living situation. We were a regular family of sorts, with a father who was occasionally a heavy drinker and at other times very obliging.

We would be packed into the station wagon and go on bottle picking runs. There was a refund on bottles in our state and my father would drive us to all the back roads and we would go looking for discarded bottles. By the time I was ten I knew the hangout of every drunk in town. We would sit on the tailgate, my two brothers and me and jump off when we saw a bottle. By today's standards a very dangerous occupation but we never got hurt.

I remember one Sunday my father picked me up from religious education and took me with him to a bar. It was closed because bars were closed then on Sundays, no alcohol could be served. I thought it was very cool to be able to sit there and play the piano while my father did whatever he did. On Sundays at our house after our Sunday dinner, all sorts of people would stop by and visit my father. I didn't realize I was the daughter of a bootlegger.

This was the 1950's quite a carefree time. We had a black man named Johnny Smith who lived in our basement. He was the only black person we ever saw up to that point. He would go fishing down in the pond behind our house and to this day I have no idea why he lived in the basement.

When I was about 8 or 9 my father got caught bootlegging. He got sentenced to jail but in this gentler time he served his sentence on the weekends. On Friday night we would all pile into the car and drive the 20 miles to the county jail and drop my father off and on Sunday afternoon we would pick him up. If you think about it, this made pretty good sense because how would we have survived if they took him during the week and he lost his job?

I was very innocent in those days and of course as children you only know your life, you have no idea what is crazy and what is normal. For us it was normal to have a bootlegging alcoholic father and a mysterious man who lived in the basement.

Within a few years I began to compare my life with my friends and realize this was not the life I wanted when I grew up. I have no regrets really, I have great memories and if it was crazy at times it was also my life and I have embraced it.

Learn more about this author, Isabelle Esteves.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.