Sobering Addiction

One could say alcoholism is a scourge that has plagued mankind since the first beer was created in Egypt, or the first wine in the Caucasus mountains. Not everybody falls into it, but those who do create a hell on earth for those surrounding them. My mother's father was a victim of that scourge.

It has always been normal to drink wine from childhood in Spain. Every household in every village has at least one grape arbor that will make at least one barrel of wine. Until the last fifteen or twenty years every household picked their grapes and made their wine between September and October. Now, though, wine drinking has fallen and not everyone makes wine. Those with better vineyards sell their grapes. Others have taken them down. But it used to be the norm that everyone drank wine, even the children. Children would get a few drops in the bottom of their glass which would be topped by water or gaseosa, a soda similar to Sprite or 7Up. However, drunkenness has always been looked down upon. A drunken person is a person that has fallen in disgrace. It's just simply not funny. That's one of the reasons binge drinking by teenagers is abhorred. Aside from the fact that they're hurting themselves, people from a certain generation on up consider getting regularly drunk to be something deviant from normal behavior and inacceptable. The acceptable is to be able to drink wine with food or an apéritif and remain upright. It doesn't matter if you get a little garrulous on a feast day or at a wedding. It does matter if you become a drunken lout. 

Alcoholism doesn't occur with greater or lesser frequency than in other countries where people don't grow up with alcohol on the table. But it does happen. My grandfather didn't know how to read or write. His father did, but sometime in the past, his family no longer had enough money to send their children to school, so my grandfather had no formal education. He dedicated himself to buying and selling wood. If he had studied, he might have risen far with a little help. He had a prodigious memory. He had been taught math, and could do enormous sums and subtractions in his head. He knew how many logs he had bought, at what price, to whom he had sold them, what profit was made, and the precise date. Business was good and he was respected for his honesty and memory. He made money. But the money rarely made it home. My grandmother was forced to go with her eldest (my mother) to the woods to collect pine cones, which they would then carry in baskets on their heads six kilometers to town to sell. She was forced to sell the eggs the hens laid to buy some cooking oil or save up for an article of clothing. She sent her children to school (which wasn't public and free then, but a teacher who boarded at a house and was paid by the parents). My mother liked it and learned well, but after a couple of years she had to stay home to help out. My grandmother's intention was that my uncle, being the only man, should study as much as was possible. But he didn't like school and refused to continue after he had learned to read and write.  At one point he was weak and got sick and my grandmother splurged on the doctor. He told her that my uncle had anemia and needed to eat eggs. So then she would cook one every day for him to eat. My uncle would make fun of his sisters because he got to eat eggs and they couldn't.

The money didn't make it home because my grandfather would stop at the tavern and drink it. He invited everybody to rounds, and sometimes when the bar closed, someone would have to help him up the hill to his home, where my grandmother awaited, feeling anxious and ashamed. My mother said that my grandmother had once told her never to marry a man who drank. Sometimes my grandfather would bring home some money, but the real provider was my grandmother. However she could, she would eke out a coin from under a stone for her children. It didn't have to be like that because my grandfather made good money for those days. But he spent it all in taverns and on his friends.

She was in her fifties when she had the first stroke and became bed-ridden. By that time my mother was married and living in the village because she didn't get along with her father, blaming him for the life of slavery her mother had had to lead. My mother would go and help her mother every day, and once saw some oranges by her mother's bed. Her father had brought them for her mother. My grandmother complained to my mother that now that she was at the end, he gave her presents. And while she had been healthy and working her arms off for him and her family, he had ignored her. Some time later my grandmother died.

My grandfather kept carousing until he was thrown out of the family home by the husband of my younger aunt. He went to my parents', but he was thrown out from there, too. He then left for another parish, where he married a woman he had long known. He died there, over ten years after my grandmother. No, they're not buried together. They're in different parishes. Every All Saint's Day, in November, my grandmother's tomb gets flowers from her descendants that live nearby, my aunt and me and sometimes a cousin. That day we go and visit the different cemeteries. For years when we visited where my grandfather is buried, I noticed no one ever took flowers. A couple of years ago I began to do so. Despite what he put his family through, he was sick without realizing it. He was an alcoholic.