remembering a booze story about my mom

When I moved into my Victorian, gut-rehabbed duplex, the one I sold to finance my daughter's college education, my mom came to Minneapolis.

I had had movers move in all the furniture and put the boxes marked kitchen in the kitchen but I had all the other boxes placed in the full basement. That basement was fitted with pipes for a bath and kitchen, and had been studded to add a third apartment. The previous owner had been the developer of the whole role of rehabbed houses but he had lived in the house I bought so, everyone on the block said, it had many more features. Only I had an atrium with skylights in the second and third story owner's unit. Only I had a cement-block basement instead of the stone basements that the other late 19th Century, wood-framed houses up and down the block had. Plus I assumed a mortgage that would have been paid off in, I think, 2004, the year my daughter graduated from Cornell. It was a sweet, income-generating house. The two-bedroom rental was easy to rent, given our proximity to the University of Minnesota and downtown. And now, a light rail station is just a couple blocks away. Cherry real estate. I digress.

So on moving day, after the movers were done, exhausted, we went out to eat. On the way home, mom asked me to buy some liquor. My mom was an alcoholic, although she never admitted she was one. When I told here that all liquor stores closed at 8 p.m., and since it was after 8 p.m., we could not buy booze unless we drove thirty or forty miles east to Wisconsin, which I was not prepared to do, my mom called me a liar. She said "You just don't want me to have a drink." So I drove around to several liquor stores to show her they were all closed.

As we drove around, I did mention that in the many dozens of boxes in my new basement, there was some booze. A year or two earlier, mom's company, the one she inherited from her second husband, had been part of its industry's annual convention, which was in Minneapolis that one time. Mom had rented a fancy hospitality suite, as her then-deceased husband always had. And the suite was stocked with a ton of booze. When the party was over, everyone in the company, which was my stepfather's kids and my mom, were flying home and could not haul home a ton of opened bottles of all the kinds of booze one stocks for an open bar. I had several partially used bottles of just about everything, but all packed away in boxes. I had taken the booze home somewhat blindly. Mom urged me to do so and the stuff had to get removed from the suite or else they would be charged.

And then that booze just gathered dust in my cupboards, because I have never been much of a drinker. Along with the hard liquor, there were also some booze mixers like creme de menthe.

I had had that liquor in my apartment for a couple years and never given it a thought until I packed it for the move. And when, after my mother finally accepted that all the liquor stores were closed, and i foolishly reminded her that I had hauled away all the leftover booze from her big company party at the convention, she said "well, go down and get it."

I pointed out that I had no idea which boxes the booze was in, for I had labeled the boxes based on where I thought they should be unpacked, not by their content.

Dang if my mom didn't trudge down to that basement and spent an hour or so tearing open all my boxes, disregarding the mess she left me, for she had frantically removed and thrown around the basement things on top of boxes looking for some booze.

She found some. She came up stairs, red from the effort but also, I think, from the anger. She complained that I had no right to have packed 'her' booze. I didn't point out that a gift once given belonged to the recipient. I didn't really care if she took the booze. And she did pack as much of that left over booze as she could when she went home that time. She was so angry.

I had no mixers in the house so she drank whatever booze she had found, for she stopped looking as soon as she had found one bottle of alcoholic content, straight. As I write about this scene, which took place around 1992, I feel her vibrating anger.  I also feel, in a more suffused way, my own anger. I had not gone down to look at the mess in my basement but I knew that she had been down there a long time, tearing open box after box. I knew my packed belongings were now a big fat mess in my basement.

I had long believed my mom was an alcoholic but, not living near her since I left home for college, and only seeing her for a few days here and there each year, it had been easy to ignore her drinking. Plus she was an at-home sozzler.  I realized the day I moved into that house that my mom was an alcoholic.

This story reminds me of the day I realized my ex-husband was also an alcoholic. In the leftover collection of booze from our wedding open bar, there was a bottle of creme de menthe I had moved that bottle of creme de menthe a couple times, never even tasting it. There had been other leftover booze from the wedding but my ex had drunk his way through that pretty quickly.

One night, after we had been married awhile and owned a house, he wanted a drink. In the city we lived in during that short marriage, the liquor stores, at least back then (I don't know how late liquor stores stay open in these Midwestern states now), did not stay open late.

There were states, at least back then, that were 'dry' on Sundays, when you couldn't buy liquor anywhere. I think bars remained open on Sundays but you couldn't buy bottles of booze. I know this because when we drove from my home city to my grandparents who lived a few states away on the Great Plains, my aunt Margaret would urge mom to stop driving on Saturday to pick up booze because the state we were in was dry on Sundays. I wonder if those states are still dry on Sundays. I don't really care, just wunnering.

I think the tradition of closing liquor stores early dates back to Prohibition and represented a futile attempt to slow down drinking. I think there was some kind of rationale that folks who prudently planned their booze purchases before the liquor stores closed at 8 p.m., or whenever in other states, magiclaly lead to less alcoholism. Nonsense, of course.

Since I did not drink much myself, my ex and I did not have a habit of cocktails at home.  I don't really know when he worked his way through all our leftover wedding booze but one day, with him desparate for alcohol and no place to buy it, except bars. As far as I know, my ex did not go to bars, not while we were married anyway but who knows?

Anyway, when I said the only booze in the house was a mostly full bottle of creme de menthe, which does not have a high alcohol content, he drank the whole bottle, telling me it didn't taste too bad.

Yuck, right?  I was fairly certain that only an alcoholic would drink a whole bottle of creme de menthe when it was the only alcohol available.

After my mom has torn through my boxes of household goods and found her booze, I took her to a liquor store the next day and she stocked up.

I am blessed not to have the drive to drink booze.  My dad was a teatotaler. My sister will drink socially but she does not drink much.  My daughter seemed to be moving in the direction of being an alcoholic. I believe she had drug or alcohol abuse problems, which were enabled by her former boyfriend Michael. Michael used drugs, had been expelled from two elite prep schools for drug use. I wonder if he got her on heroin. I know she has dated a heroin addict, altho she dumped him. I know about him because he wrote to me. And when I could see her FB page, which she has now blocked me from seeing, I saw that many of her FB friends were in 12 step programs.  I hope she never slid into heroin but if she did, I hope she has found recovery. She seems to have.

My mom didn't see herself as an alcoholic because she didn't buy booze. She often said she didn't need to drink, she only drank when my brother, who she lived with a long time at the end of her life, provided it so she drank. Without it, she was fine.

But the way she tore through those dozens of boxes in my basement, scattering my belongings helter skelter while she rushed to find some booze showed me:  my mom was an alcoholic.

I had packed the bottles of booze separately, tucking them into boxes that had something to cushion a glass bottle so the booze was not all in one place. I remember, as I packed those disparate bottles of booze, questioning why I was moving booze that I never remembered existed, that I never drank.

Now I think I packed that booze so I would see my mom clearly as the drunk she had become.

And that creme de menthe night:  most definitely, he was an alkie.