I’m sorry for the cheap metaphor. Addiction is a bad poet.
My dad told me that you’re an alcoholic from the moment it touches your lips. I’m not sure what his father told him, or if he even knew he was an alcoholic. The shadow stretches long, but it’s the one Daisy was born into, and as she sits, cooing seraphically on the lawn before me, I have to decide what to tell her.
Maybe you can tell by my silhouette, but I am holding a beer, here. In my young journey as a father, beer has been a constant. I no longer get obliterated and harangued by all-day hangovers, but I have taken Daisy for a walk with a tallboy stashed in the stroller. I’ve bathed her with a can resting on the tank of the toilet. I’ve sung her lullabies with Lager on my breath.
My dad only drank for the first four years of my life, but I remember him sitting in front of the TV with a Budweiser in his hand. I remember the way the blue letters leapt off the white can, their shapes purposeful. I studied the dense filigree of the logo. I can still smell the spoiled sweetness of the empties I’d find in the morning’s garbage.
I have to decide what to tell her.
I want to tell her that when she was born, I was reborn. That her lonely calls in the dawn wake me with a purpose that fills me, and I have staved off thirst so I can wake and hear it more clearly. Maybe I’ll rehash the things I said when I wrote about her and Jack Kerouac. Whatever the words, I hope she’ll keep them, crystalize them. Remember my shape, not the one in my hand.
