Between the Lines

I've kissed the wife good night and watched her climb the stairs. I have a small glass of absinthe with three ice cubes, and as such spirits do, it has clouded with the cold and the melt. I haven't been up this late or had alcohol at this hour in a week or more. It is my birthday.

It is also the anniversary of my grandmother's death, something my mother marks better than I. Today I remember it because earlier I had occasion to think of my grandfather. He was a tea-totaler. Now always. He had a glass of champagne at my aunt's wedding in 1967. Before that, 1938 or so. A man got on his bad side. That's the story, anyway, and as one might imagine, I only heard it once, so the facts are sketchy, and the retelling might be stumbling, not unlike a long flight of stairs after a powerful fist in the face.

(This stuff is made from wormwood yet? Artemesia? I imagine green gossamer, or catching a lacewing only to make a wish upon its release. A slightly indiscreet fantasy, but I must admit, the taste, although something like anise, has a strange, astringent aftertaste. an infidelity that cannot be undone.)

My grandfather. I bucked bales for him at twelve years but it was a mere eleven acres and two-wire straw. His father died when my grandfather was only eleven. He graduated 8th grade and went to the coal mines at fourteen; he helped build the railroad, a tie on each shoulder at a time, to that mine; and, as a challenge of strength at sixty-five, threw this seventeen year old like a wet rag from one end of the kitchen to the other. I know men like that today. I am not one of them.

He put an ax in his shin at seventy-two, and all of that history became all that he was for his last eight years.  I could say more but I instead encourage you to only contemplate the scar.

That is the German side of the family. The other half, absent of much of a history, is French. The incursion in reverse. As my gift to you, make of it as you are prone.

No, I thought about my grandfather in response to these times we live in, times I am grateful for his death. He loved this country. He read three newspapers a day and editorialized from his Lazy Boy. His heroes were John Lewis, FDR and Will Rogers. Those names carry little weight today. It is not that he would not recognize the world now, but it may have turned him again to drink.

I have finished my cocktail. A few slivers of ice remain. I remain unaltered, save a sluggishness in word choice. No hallucinations, save persistent delusions no doubt more readily identifiable to others. Perhaps I have divulged more than is customary, though degree has never been a issue, now, has it? I will leave you, then, with this incomplete thought: Two Flags Not Dissimilar.