The topic of this childhood memory of mine is about a barbaric ritual I witnessed numerous times until I was probably 12.

At least one night a month, I would go with my mother up to the old Cline homestead, then occupied by my aunt and uncle. Mom would join all my paternal aunts and a few of their older teenage daughters. One by one, they would take their turn stretching out on the living room sofa, their heads resting on a pillow in the lap of my Aunt Belle, who meticulously plucked their eyebrows.

The image is still crystal clear to me, even if more than half a century has passed. Chairs were placed in a semicircle facing the sofa, or in this case, the operating table. Aunt Belle used her tweezers with the same skill a surgeon used a scalpel, maneuvering her delicate instrument around the foreheads until she found a hair she didn’t like, then a big jerk with her arm, and the little devil was gone. The sprawled out victim tried not to yell, often without success.

The sight of this activity was more than I cared to witness, so I always ended up in my cousin’s bedroom.

He was five years my senior and never seemed happy to see me. Actually, he seldom was happy to see anyone. If anyone ever fit the description of being a loner, well, I hope you get the picture.

My cousin spent most nights stretched at an angle across his bed reading. He was a voracious reader. Not school textbooks, mind you, but if any story had a horse or a murder in it, he read it. He could quote passages from any Hardy Boys book Franklin W. Dixon ever wrote. But westerns were his passion.

Back in the late 1950s, every TV western series had its own comic book series, and he had every issue of every show. If I guessed he bought one hundred comics a month, that might be a low estimate. His bedroom was like a museum, and I would spend an hour every visit walking around the room looking at all of his stuff, to which I always received several commands of, “Don’t touch that!”

I didn’t really care about the comics themselves (westerns weren’t my brand). I was a Superman guy. But I always did like the full-color covers of James Arness as Matt Dillon, Clint Walker as Cheyenne and Richard Boone as Paladin. I would beg him to give me “just the covers-you keep the rest.”

I would have had a better chance of getting my driver’s license at age 11.

The one thing I was allowed to do while in his room was play records on his portable record player, just as long as I didn’t play the music so loud as to bother his reading. And he had hundreds of 45 rpms, every one country music. At first, I didn’t like this, because I was an Elvis and Ricky Nelson fan. But one night, I looked deep into a stack of his music, and I found an Elvis country music record. So I can say my appreciation of vintage country music began that night. I soon was enjoying Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Tex Ritter, Kitty Wells and many others from that era.

I would venture into the plucking parlor periodically to see who the current victim was – Aunt Frances, Aunt Katie, my mother, then the cousins.

Maybe they took their turns by age, I don’t know. But I can almost still smell the room, a combination of perfume, cigarette smoke and freshly percolated coffee. (Today we have coffee makers, back then everyone had a percolator, like in the old Maxwell House commercials.)

Now I don’t want to give the impression that these ladies spent the entire evening discussing world hunger, world peace or anything on that grand a scale. I was usually told to go back to my cousin’s room, but not without picking up enough clues to realize they were gossiping, yes gossiping, about every other woman who went to our church.

All of us Clines went to the same church and sat in the Cline pew as a mob. Actually, there were two pews because of the vast number of us. I don’t know any non-Cline female in our congregation who was immune to being discussed at the plucking party.

The highlight of the night for me was usually around 8:30 when I would check in. That was when my Aunt Ruth would say, “Mikey, go to the kitchen and cut yourself a piece of cake and pour a glass of milk.” She never had to ask me twice.

Would it be chocolate or coconut? My Aunt Ruthie’s homemade cakes were the absolute greatest. Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines weren’t permitted in her house. The blasted things were a good 8 inches high. Being very generous with my slicing, my belly was soon full, so I made my way to the other twin bed in my cousin’s bedroom, and the next thing I knew, it was morning and I was in my own bed at home.

I always loved going up to my Aunt Ruth’s house. She was the matriarch of the entire Cline family, even though she had married into it. She meant the world to me and was pretty much my second mother. Losing her in 1998 was very difficult.

But the great memories of spending time with her and at her house make me happy. I do laugh now, looking back at the plucking parties. The memory of a room of hens sitting around drinking coffee and talking the legs off the chairs.

Wait a minute, did I say hens?

Maybe this story was about poultry after all.