Everyone has secrets: some large, some small, some devastating, some exact. Some would pin you to the wall or land an ‘innocent’ in jail.

Everyone has secrets: from their family, from their spouse, from themselves. It was a key learning point to my novel development: STASHES of family secrets revealed…I’m about to reveal one of mine –

My husband and I served hotdogs at the Beer Olympics at Purdue, several years running in the late ’70s, which were sort of the ’60s in the Midwest.

Without Health Department certification. The Beer Olympics wasn’t an officially sanctioned event.

While we charged money, it was nominal and Larry and I never profited. It was a ‘public service’ to ragingly testosteronal former college athletes, most with necks, arms, and legs like tree stumps. Bowl-winning football players gone to belly fat. Who were in our party crowd. It makes me cringe to consider it now.

The events included a shot put of sorts, using a hardened cow pie, I think. There may have been a 100 yard dash. I think I’ll try not to recall it clearly. Because: when an athlete won each shortened event, he chugged a beer. A pre-cursor to Solo Cup Beer Pong, if you will, with full body contact desired.

There was lots of unseemly upchucking, thankfully out of sight – but not out of sound, in the shrubbery lining the outlying meadow.

My younger sister broke up with her longtime beau when I related that he’d been a valiant, decidedly drunk and unathletic participant. Perhaps it was the tipping point: she didn’t say.

She gave me a Purdue tee-shirt as a gift recently. Coincident to this recollection?

I gave the tee-shirt away. It was a fadey gray – just like this secretive memory.

What secrets are you willing to share? And, with whom?

Make it me, please. Do tell.

You bring the secrets; I’ll bring the beer.