This is about the day I said, "no more"... the day I vowed to never drink and drive,
ever again in my life.
Am I an alcoholic? No. A heavy drinker? never.
Like alcohol, like the 'buzz', the 'high'? sure thing.
I also remember being, maybe 15 or 16 years old, looking at some family photos, of some relatives... photos older than myself,.... there they are...members of my family... They partied. Hard. They are posed with 'ear to ear' grins, behind a table... that table, I am guessing, is about 4 feet long and 3 feet wide,..approximately... that table is completely covered with glasses and bottles -alcohol bottles: beer, whiskey, who knows what. Those people behind the table...my family,... aunts, uncles, grandma... they are damn proud of themselves, standing behind that table full of booze.
At 15 or 16 years of age that photo disgusted me. I was ashamed of those people in the photo, of their happy, proud faces. I love those, long gone people, they are my family. That was, of course a different era... and I had had some experiences with a person who drank too much sometimes.... It was my own memories of another persons alcoholism that made me feel disgust at the smiling faces behind the booze table.....
Flash forward more than a score of years.... I am an adult. I do not drink much, I rarely drink and drive, because I don't want to hurt other people,.. I don't want to get into that kind of trouble.....
I am in a kitchen-dining room combination. It is a beautiful day out, as I can see through the large windows at one end of the room. My mother sits at the table, eating her breakfast, I open the newspaper. And that is the thing, that newspaper....Sunday, August 22, 1999,... the headline story in our local newspaper... broke my heart.
Four people were dead, a fifth air-lifted to a distant hospital,... lives shattered. DUI. A man so drunk that he was driving on the wrong side of a highway that had a 15 foot wide median.... he murdered a woman and her three children. And then he got out of his wrecked car and lit a cigarette while he waited for the police, ambulance, whatever. He leaned against the wreckage and smoked a cigarette.....
I knew people who worked at the hospital.... the place they first took this drunken man.... the drunk was belligerent, unruly, and insisted that he had done nothing wrong. He continued, for several years, to protest his innocence. How very sad.
Anyway, my heart just broke for the family that was killed. A mother and her children, on their way home from a day at an amusement park,... unsuspecting, innocent....
That morning, reading that newspaper story,....
I said it out loud: "I will never drink and drive again."
I stand by that declaration. I live by that declaration.
I still do drink, but I never ever get behind the wheel drunk.
and I rarely ever have more than one drink at a time, or in a day.
If I drink alcohol at all.
PLEASE DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE.
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sadly, today, while preparing to write this blog I learned that the man who killed that family has, again been arrested for DUI... thankfully this time no one was killed.
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