DEMON ALCOHOL

It's Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, and
Paul has asked us to turn our thoughts
to drink ... in a creative way, of course.
I indulged in prose, and memories of
my mother.
Submitted to dVerse Poetics
February 20, 2018
***************

My mother was a tee-total-er to the nth degree.  She
would not eat in a restaurant if it had a beer sign in the
window.  I think the grape juice at church communion
was as close as she got.  She instilled in me such a fear
of alcohol that the first time in my wild youth I went with
friends into a pub in a nearby town I feared the devil
himself would rise up behind the bar and drag me down
into hellfire and damnation.  She also considered bowling
alleys dens of iniquity, and the first time I entered one
I fully expected Mephistopheles himself to be setting the pins! 

For all her long life we honored mother’s wishes, and there
was not a single drop of liquor in her home.  My husband,
who was of Irish descent, loved a nip now and then, so on
our visits he and my brother would often steal away to town
to “pick up something” and disappear for an hour or two.  
I have come to know that, somewhere between my mother’s
rabid abstinence and the drunken abandon of our young 
university students on Spring break,  there is a reasonable
medium where we can enjoy a glass of wine with dinner …
and a visit to the bar on Tuesdays at dVerse.