Wine Time with the Daughters

Mama Teeta and Papa Genn—Grandma and Grandpa to the kids—have this special time of day they like to celebrate:  wine time.  It could come anywhere from 4:00 in the evening on up, but it’s a time to de-stress, a time to decompress, a time to deliberate—and whenever the granddaughters descend upon their house, it’s also a time to decompose and fall apart after a day of busy-ness and chaos.  It’s not so much the “wine” as it is the “time” that is important, but the wine tends to be the means to an end, so to speak.

Here at our house, we’ve taken over the practice and made it our own, especially this summer.  After Jack gets home from work and once the girls get up from their naps and are full of energy but before dinner is served, we will sometimes venture out onto the deck and sit and sip and, yes, the girls will swing.

Just for fun this past week, I pulled down some old plastic wine tumblers someone once gave me along with some trite picnic basket, and I served the girls some apple juice—organic, mind you—in the tumblers so they could sit and sip on the deck like Mom and Dad.

And before you call up CPS and tell them to send someone straight over to Heidii’s house because she’s condoning—nay, encouraging—her kids to become lushes, drunkards, bacchanalian boozers and debauched drinkers, I will take a moment to tell you my philosophy on drinking and kids.

Growing up, my parents had this liquor cabinet.  This was the 70’s, and all households had the obligatory liquor cabinet full of all sorts of paraphernalia and accoutrement needed to become your own at-home mixologist.  My parents were not the exception.  They rarely touched the stuff, that I can remember, but it was there, ready to go at a moment’s notice when a guest stopped by.  There were vodkas and rums and tonics and all manner of seltzers (Collin’s Mix on the rocks was my drink of choice then and I still get excited when I can find the stuff in the grocery), but I especially remember the cut-glass decanters filled with myriad liqueurs.  There was this big antique silver tray, on which sat at least a dozen prismatic decanters, and the colors of the liqueurs was mesmerizing.  My favorite was the fluorescent green watermelon flavor.  I would ask my mother if I could look at the decanters, and I loved how they looked sitting out on the table with the sunlight shining through them.  I don’t recall that the alcohol levels changed much, so I’m guessing that the decanters and the liqueurs were more for looks than actual imbibing.

Now you might be concerned that a young, impressionable child would be so interested in, verging on obsessing over, her parents’ liqueur collection, but here’s the catch:  the more that alcohol was displayed and treated as just something casual and normal and not taboo in our house, the less exciting and enticing it became to me.  I was more interested in the way the liqueurs looked in their fancy decanters than I was in the drinks themselves.  Therefore, when I grew up—especially during my high school years when everyone and their brother was drinking and experimenting—I could care less about alcohol.  My parents had a healthy relationship—and respect—for drinking, and they passed that on to me and my brother, Cooter.  “Everything in moderation!” is one of my mother’s favorite mantras.  That, and “You are what you eat!” and “I trust you, just not the other people out there, Heidii.”  All right already.  And even in college the usual “wild time” for me lasted all of about five minutes, compared to others I knew.  It just wasn’t that exciting to drink to excess.

So, I hope that when my daughters see me or my husband or anyone else with a glass of wine—one glass of wine, not five at a time—they will learn that it’s not something to be tempted by or to be eschewed but something to be respected and appreciated.  Of course, let’s hope that that “appreciation” doesn’t come until they are 21!  In the meantime, it’s apple juice only for them!

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