Gregory Byrd                                                                                           

Bourbon (a monologue)

I just like to have a man in the house who drinks bourbon. 'Course I never could drink the stuff.  Dad used to sit on the back step there and swirl it in the bottom of his glass and look into it like he could see love or the future or something.

Knock it straight back and I'll get you another.

Sometimes he used to come home, knock one back and then go out to his garden.   That's why I keep the bottle under the sink, so he could reach it right before he headed out the back door.

You're a sipping man?  Well, that's all right, too.  Take come more for yourself when you're done.

You know, I remember, when I was sick as a kid, Dad soaking toothpicks in bourbon for me to suck on to ease my throat.  When I was older, he would make these hot toddies with lime and honey that would clear my sinuses straight through, burn my throat clean  of soreness and settle me into a quiet so I could crawl under a quilt and sweat out my fever.

I didn't think about him and his bourbon for a long time after I moved out until, a few years back, he called me, drunk on Wild Turkey, telling me my mom had finally moved out.  He would have liked a son to drink with then, or a best friend, but there was only me, so he called on the phone an cried and cried.

After his stroke last year, when he came to live with me, I gured the doctor would forbid his drinking, but he said the old man only had a little time left, and as long as I made sure he didn't drink whisky with his yellow pills, it wouldn't hurt anything.

And so here's the last bottle I bought for him.  Cost me forty bucks, but I don't think he realized it.  I can see him on the back porch, sitting like you are now, sipping his "whusky," as he said it, and looking hard for something.

Knock it back.  We'll kill the bottle together.

Macguffin 16.3 (Fall 1999): 104

(Copyright Gregory Byrd)