Hey, remember your first beer? I don’t.
It’s not because of binge drinking and black outs, it’s because before the age of two, my dad started letting me have the last sips of beer to “help him finish” the can. It’s my sharpest memory of us boding as a tyke.
This practice continued until around age five or six, and on the weekend visitations when Dad actually exercised his rights to joint custody, I remember vivid instances of me jumping up and down, begging for the pleasure of the last sip swirling at the bottom of the classic red-trimmed Budweiser cans.
I’ll be damned now if I can remember how the practice stopped. I’d hope that either my dad wised up or my mom’s conscience prompted an ultimatum. Perhaps I stopped liking beer because I realized that Dad was an alcoholic and needed to quit. I saw beer as the reason behind his regular, sometimes yearlong disappearances and a string of disconnected phone numbers. Not knowing when or if I’d ever see my dad again was common to my youth.
The longest disappearance came after I turned 13 and my dad moved to Arkansas. The next time I heard from him was as a senior in high school.
Dad died a couple years back at age 63. We maintained a steady phone relationship in the years since our reconnection. He never did quit drinking permanently, especially since beer seemed to alleviate some of the Parkinson’s symptoms he fought in his final years. Yet I am still proud of all the AA medals he’d ever shown me, especially the one he received for being one year sober.
I dearly love this picture just as I dearly love my dad.
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Comments
If I ever get to the bottom of his arrest in Ohio for allegedly hijacking an 18 wheeler - for which there was insufficient evidence to make a case - I'll have to write that up.
There is something very endearing and nostalgic about the picture, I have to say I'm drawn to it as though it's a piece of fine art.
If I were to propose a caption for this picture, I'd use: Me, kicking back a cold one after a hard day of nappin'.
rated
G
Sneakin' the wine and beer on regular occasions by twelve, drinking & using on a daily basis by fifteen. Full blown alcoholic and daily drug-user by nineteen. Ah yes, the good old days...lots of fun in the beginning years, not so fun or productive in any real sense the last ten. Lots of wreckage.
Clean & sober since thirty-three, coming up on twenty years as an active member of AA one day at time. My fourteen year old daughter has never seen me w/a drink or take a drink in her life. Way grateful. Life is good...
Interesting story, could have come from the annals of my family history (we're full up on alcoholics who mean well).
We did the beer sip thing too until my brother and I stopped asking, not sure how old. The funny thing is, when we both hit our teens and alcohol was introduced socially, it was no big deal, and neither of us went overboard. I like to think that being introduced to it early made it seem less of a big deal later
Thanks everyone for their comments.
Your loving son, B by M B
In Praise of a Desperate Man by Tom Cordle