Greg...would you like a phenobarbitol?

 Greg...would you like a phenobarbitol?





It was a line from a situation that seems absolutely impossible at this time but it did happen and our young man repeated the line in the proper voice to great merriment for decades. In our youth we longed to explore this great land of ours and from the earliest Greg years he connected with cousins to form a lifelong bond. His relationships with Kevin, Michael, Evan, and Christine Tassano were deep and filled with love. They are also a group with good senses of humor. It is easy to make them laugh and they are skilled at telling a tale. I believe that the young fella was in his college years and was jonesing to get up north to Concord where cousin Christine (sometimes known as "the big C") would be entertaining her cuz and having a blast in the NorCal scene. The opportunity arose that Greg's elderly, conservative Aunt Edith would be motoring north and somehow Greg hitched a ride with this highly unlikely source. Aunt Edith, the oldest of the formidable Kenmir sisters had survived a not terribly satisfactory marriage but was comfortable in her dotage. She showed Greg her rather high-strung nature during the journey piping loudly as a truck almost hit a stray animal, shouting "Oh Doggie Look Out!" Little did she know the sentence would be repeated by Greg, Kevin and even myself whenever we saw any stray dog or any dog period. Even after her description of heroic farm worker organizers as "Chavez' Idiots" the expedition went well until they ran out of steam and stopped somewhere in rural California. They rented a motel room and agreed on continuing the journey the next day as the sun set on this one. Now, the young Greg was acclimated to hitting the hay around midnight with maybe a bit of pot smoke or a sip of the fruit of the vine but the old Aunt was ready to turn in at rest home bedtime. The kid politely took his place in a nearby twin bed four or five hours before he normally went to snooze.  He tossed and turned and tried to get sleepy but it only made him more alert. It was at this  point he heard a reedy voice call out from the other bed "Greg...would you like a phenobarbitol?" He foolishly said no and then regretted it for the next fifty years. While not a barbituate user the kid would have made an exception for a drug that causes sleepiness with a tad of euphoria. Once again, the sentence remained in Sheehy's Book of Quotations and was used many times well after Aunt Edith took her final nap.



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