Habits and Reflections

This is not a funny blog. I'll try to be funny tomorrow, OK? In fact, I am formulating an idea to talk about some of my personality quirks (and I am very, very quirky) and how that results in very few people really, truly knowing me. Other than Tom. And how he can know me as completely as he does, and not have buried me under the shed by now, I can't fathom. Ozark has been excavating under the shed for a few years now, though. Maybe Tom's just waiting for the hole to be deep enough!

Yesterday I went out to run errands. I thought I'd better go to the gas station, even though I was sure I had enough gas to get to and from work today. It's so cold here right now that I knew it was best to have more gas in the tank. If the fuel line froze, you can bet your life that I would never, ever hear the end of it. (That might've been the last straw, resulting in me ending up under the shed.) Plus I needed cigarettes. Gasoline and nicotine procured, I decided to go across the street to the neighborhood grocery to grab a few things. We were suffering a critical chocolate shortage at home which could only be remedied with chocolate chip brownie cookies. So I drove over to the next street. There are a couple of turns on the left, leading into a cluster of shops on the corner. On auto-pilot, I drove right past the turn into the grocery, and took the next left. Guess where that turn led?

The Liquorette.

I immediately caught what I had done, looped around and headed to the grocery, with barely more than a glance toward the Liquorette. I hoped my Liquor Store Guy wasn't looking out the window, seeing me whiz right past his parking lot. He must be missing me by now! ("Hey, how come I have 400 bottles of cheap Merlot gathering dust in the store room???")

Yesterday marked 21 days alcohol-free, but apparently some habits are hard to break. Somewhere beneath the surface of the thinking part of my brain, I still have a "rat in a maze" tendency to follow old patterns. This was a gentle reminder to me that while I feel I'm doing so well, not suffering any overwhelming urges or temptations, alcohol can still sneak up on me if I let my guard down.

Today would have been my father's 84th birthday. He died in 2000, at the age of 76. While he did have asbestosis and used a nebulizer to keep his airways clear, he never let that slow him down. He still worked out at the YMCA every day, just as he had since we got him a membership for his 50th birthday. That isn't what killed him. He died of esophageal varices, which is a complication of liver disease. Guess where that liver disease almost certainly originated? From a lifetime of alcohol abuse.

My Dad was the greatest man I ever knew. He had more integrity in his little finger than a whole roomful of other men combined. He was smart and funny, and generous beyond measure. But alcohol was his demon. You almost never saw him in an obviously inebriated state. Still, he drank nearly every day. Sometimes he would quit for a long stretch of time, but it always pulled him back. He could quit smoking merely by putting down a pack and never picking it up again, but he could never quite conquer whiskey.

Some of it was inherited, I'm sure, and some of it was a cultural thing. And some of it was that he experienced horrors during World War II that he could never fully disclose to anyone. He never, ever got over it. I have certainly never endured anything like that, but it's a sure bet that I inherited a tendency toward alcoholism, and I know I have what can only be characterized as an addictive personality.

Esophageal varices happens when the blood vessels in the liver are obstructed due to cirrhosis. Since the blood can't flow normally, the pressure builds up in other vessels, commonly the esophagus. One morning, those vessels ruptured, and he died sitting in his kitchen window.

I can't bear to think about it often, what it must have been like, or the fact that I'd talked to him the night before and he didn't sound "right." I thought he'd been drinking, but in reality he may have already had some slow bleeds and couldn't think clearly. I could fall to pieces right now thinking about that. So I don't think about it. But apparently I should. If I ever need a kick in the ass if I think about getting drunk again, I should think of my Dad, and how he died.

When I decide to quit smoking, I'll think of my mom.