Alcohol and me

When I was growing up, we had this bar in every home we lived in. Here's a picture of it, with Norma Jean and her doll on one side, and Mama and me on the other. This photo was taken in either Puerto Rico, where we lived from the time I was three until I turned six, or in California. I started school on Ramey Air Force Base when I was five, so I suspect we got the bar while we lived in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s. In any event, it traveled with us from home to home, until Mama and Daddy retired in Fort Worth, where it had a place of honor in their retirement home, called Windswept. Over the years I remember the barstools that are missing from this picture, and I remember so well the glass on the top displaying pictures of family and cartoons that had been arranged underneath, protected from spills and remarked on, reminisced over, for many years.

As a military family, I think alcohol and its pervasive presence in our lives was not unusual. It seemed that every one of my parents' friends drank, and some of them drank heavily. My parents would host gatherings in their home after a day of golf when we lived in Puerto Rico. (I lived there as a small child and then Daddy returned again to the same Air Base when I was a teenager. The bar came with us wherever we moved.) Most times when I would go to bed I would hear the party going strong. It was somehow comforting to hear my parents enjoying themselves so much. Of course, at the time I didn't know how much the alcohol contributed to their merriment.

Even when they were up late, Daddy never failed to get up with us and get us off to school. He was a morning person and was awake while Mama stayed in bed. She was definitely NOT a morning person but stayed awake long after Daddy had fallen asleep. I remember many nights at Windswept when the kids would come into their bedroom to talk to Mama, and Daddy was asleep next to her. She worked on her latest knitting project and counseled them about whatever was on their minds. Daddy snored away, the lights on and Mama and the kids talking at a normal volume. I had already grown up and left home, which is a natural consequence of having their six kids spread out over twenty years. As the oldest, the only time I lived at Windswept was when I was leaving a husband and trying to start my life over.

Windswept was located on Lake Worth, and my three youngest siblings grew up on the lake. This picture of Mama taken on the dock shows her drinking their favorite beverage, martinis. I also think that martinis were part of the military tradition, but I only have my parents and their habits to go by. I am positive this martini was prepared by Daddy from the libations they kept behind the bar. Because I never knew anything else, I thought everyone drank martinis every night. I would beg for the olive, because I liked the mysterious taste of the gin it was soaked in. But I couldn't ever understand what they liked about the taste of martinis, which seemed pretty awful to me.

But as I grew older, I found that I did like a glass of wine, and when I started skydiving in my forties, the skydivers all drank beer after a day playing in the sky. When you accomplish something in skydiving the first time, it is your duty to buy a case of beer to share with all the other skydivers. This ensured that at the end of the day, we would all have plenty to drink. I bought so much beer as a newbie that I learned to drink it, too. And I enjoyed it as much as anybody.

It's interesting to me that none of my siblings drink to excess, although our parents did. Norma Jean and I have exactly the same amount of wine at the end of each day, and I only occasionally drink beer these days, since it tends to be more fattening than wine. One sister doesn't drink at all, and the rest of them imbibe at special occasions but not every day. I think Norma Jean and I are the only daily drinkers. None of us drink hard spirits like gin and vodka.

I asked Norma Jean the other day if she knew what happened to that bar, a particular focal point in our daily lives over many decades. She doesn't remember. When Daddy died, Mama moved out of the house on Windswept and built herself a home in Texoma. The bar wasn't there. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think perhaps it was cremated along with my father. In my mind, it stopped existing when he did. All those years of entertaining guests and sometimes watching my parents getting really tipsy, it just seemed normal to me.

I have overindulged in alcohol myself at parties and even sometimes in my own home. I don't do that any more, because I've found that when I drink more than my self-imposed allotment, I don't sleep well and I feel sick, hung over, the next day. It's just not worth it, and I've learned that a second glass of wine will NOT give me what I'm looking for.

These days, my contentment comes from many other sources, but the ghost of my parents laughing and singing along to their favorite melodies still echoes in the corridors of my mind. Perhaps it's the corridors of my heart.