During one of perhaps three (relatively short-lived)
sober bounces during his adult life, my father expressed to me his dismay that
some people suggested he might be an alcoholic.
“How can I be an alcoholic?” He asked somewhat incredulously. “I only drink beer.”
Obviously, he did not want me to answer that. In my father’s mind, alcoholics drank whiskey
directly from up-righted bottles. Real
drunks smashed wine bottles against alleyway bricks. They were not successful contractors. They did not live alongside beautiful rivers
in Western Montana.
I thought about that conversation with my father as
I read a Huffington Post article about a man in central Spain crushed to death
by grapes last week during the annual harvest in the wine producing region of
Castilla-La Mancha. The man apparently
fell into a grape reception bay at a winery just as a truck unloaded over five
tons of grapes in the same receptor.
A weird and somewhat horrific end for that poor man.
Thing is, my father was similarly crushed by
grapes—at least by beer hops—but one at a time.
The beer killed my father little by little—drunken tantrum by drunken
tantrum. Like a frog in water slowly
coming to a boil, he did not recognize his own demise.
--Mitchell
Hegman
