ONE MORE FOR THE
ROAD

My parents both drank when I was a kid. My mom and Dad didn’t really do social drinking, they spent a lot of time at the beer joints, bars and dance halls. We three boys were pretty much left to find our own entertainment during these family outings. We would usually find some town kids to pass the time with as a we were farm kids. That was like we were aliens to the ones who lived in town. We would have to make occasional trips into the drinking place were our parents were for a candy bar or a pop, That would be our nourishment until we got home.

It seems odd that many women divorce a man because he’s a drinker or worse a drunkard. Then they get connected with someone who is usually worse and has other bad qualities to go along with it. My parents got divorced and my mother moved to town with us boys, we became the town kids. Latch key kids who had to help with everything while Mom worked. That was quite a change in lifestyle. She married a genuine looser and they kept the bar stools warm together. My brother and I ran away from home, but not drinking.

I never spent much time thinking about the drinking until I got into my teenage years and experimented with alcohol. I found out that drinking created quite a high for awhile on a clean young brain. I still look back at the drinking that went on when I was a child and I know I really hated it. But as I got older I came real close to developing a drinking problem. In the Military Service there is lots of access to low cost booze of every type. Some people claim alcoholism is in the genes. I think it is just a whole lot easier to continue drinking then to make the decision to quit. I was almost middle-aged when I decided no more drinking. Most of my mother’s family had all died of alcohol related problems by that time. My Dad continued drinking until his liver and kidneys failed. He called it his vodka dialysis program.

Most people mature and reach an age of accountability, if they didn’t learn right and wrong from parents, it can also be learned by trial and error, or daily encounters with others. Today it is popular to blame parents for screwed up lives. That is a bad rap in most cases. Isn’t anyone responsible for their own actions?