I foam at the mouth whenever someone says that marijuana should be legalized. I think tobacco and alcohol should be removed from sporting events, including corporate sponsorships of sports teams, stadiums, and competitions.
My dad made it through military service without smoking. He didn't pick it up until he got in to law school, and he smoked then just to keep himself awake so he could study more. By the time he had kids, he was a "5 seconds from chain-smoking" smoker, meaning that there was only a 5 second lull before the next one was lit. He smoked Marlboros, the same brand featured on the sides of race cars.
He was a party guy in high school, and became one moreso in college. He drank in the military, but in the military its a sign of manhood if you can drink the hard stuff and drink it big. As he got older, he got better at hiding it. A plastic hipflask in his briefcase, a bottle in the trunk, a bottle in the garage workshop, the bottles in the kitchen, and a few at his office; he was never far from it. I just assumed that's what all parents did. Mom didn't get concerned about it until the IRS audit and subsequent investigation by the Bar Association regarding office financials and mishandling of escrow funds to cover expenses. Can't blame her, though. Her father had been an alcoholic as well, so she had grown up in that environment and didn't know any better, same as me. My dad lost his business license and an old friend got him checked into rehab the week after I checked in to my college dorm my freshman year. They divorced a year later, not so much out of animosity but as a way to protect my mom from financial ruin. We still took vacations together and spent Thanksgiving and Christmases together, but they kept separate houses and separate accounts. As my mom learned more and more about what my dad had been doing with the family money, she became more and more bitter about it.
He eventually had to close his practice when his clients left him - who wants a drunk for a lawyer? He went to work as a paralegal for a former law partner for 1/3 of what he had been earning, and that was still generous. I credit that partner for probably saving my dad's life.
Years of smoking and drinking caught up to him in his 50's and he started having periods of black-outs. Doctors weren't sure what the root cause was - either brain damage from the booze or respiratory and circulatory problems from the smoking. He had a fatal seizure in the parking lot of an ABC Liquors on a Friday afternoon in September and was rushed to the hospital where he passed away at the age of 56.
A few years later my grandparents (his parents) passed away. While talking about their funeral, my mom made the cryptic comment that my dad never really wanted to be an attorney, that he had only done it to please his mother because she had decided that her sons were going to go to the University of Florida and become attorneys. They did - my dad set up practice in Tampa and my uncle set up practice in Ft. Myers. My uncle kicked his booze and tobacco habit by trading those addictions for better ones: tennis and golf.
My grandfather had worked for the railroad, a demanding employer with a job that required long periods away from the home, working odd hours. My grandfather smoked cigars and spent the last 20 or so years of his life relying on a nebulizer (a glass tube filled with medicine with a squeeze ball on one end that vaporizes the medicine and shoots it directly into the patient's lungs). He died in his 70s. Like most couples that have lived together for long periods of time, there was a lot of shouting between my grandparents over things I considered trivial: the toast is overcooked, the bacon is undercooked, the tv is too loud. But they never argued with the grandkids, so long as we didn't break anything or hurt each other. Well, there was the time my cousin and I started mixing cleaning solutions together to see what would happen, but now that I'm older and know what's in those bottles, I can see that it was justified.
One day my mom mentioned that my grandmother had never approved of my dad's marriage to her. My mom came from a family of farmers with no money - her father was usually drunk or missing and her mother had to raise 8 kids. Well, actually 7 because my Mom spent the first 5 years of her life being raised by her great aunt because of her mother's indigence. My mom worked hard and got through college on academic scholarships. So here's my father, flush with GI Bill money with a solid middle-class background, who had been popular in high school, lettered in football and baseball, going through law school, and he's dating a backwoods lower-class girl in the low-income, low career potential nursing program. Its not hard to see that there could be some truth to my mom's statement. My mom got her Master's degree, plus 30 hours towards a PhD and became a professor of nursing, making good money at a community college. In the end, it was my mom that ended up saving the family.
So can I hate my dad, or my grandparents, or my mom? Not really. They showed me a lot of traps to avoid. Not just smoking and drinking, but of judging people on the surface, or creating false expectations, or restricting children from pursuing a career, or of not seeing the impact they have on others. But I guess that's just part of being human.
I'm currently employed by a telecom company as a contracts negotiator. I didn't go to law school because I didn't want to be a lawyer - I got hooked on computers after I graduated with my degree in Criminal Justice. And yet I still ended up in the legal profession with a law degree from the school of hard knocks. My brother ended up being a lawyer, complete with license, client base, and stress. He's also a party guy, a real social animal. My sister got her PhD in education and works for Georgetown University in Washington DC. She's a social animal, too. I guess to some degree we're all trapped by our parents' expectations the same way we get our personalities from our parents. Doctors say alcohol addiction is linked to chemical reactions tied to DNA inherited from our parents. They say a contributing cause is having an addictive personality. I just hope my siblings learned about the traps. I'd hate to see my nieces and nephews follow that same roller coaster ride.
