Mixed drinks as a child that led to in Old

As a kid, my best friend lived across the street from me. He had more cool stuff than we had such as fruit juices in cans. All my family had was Kool-Aid and sometimes some very cheap soda pop. Mostly the store brand. The kid across the street had stuff like real Pepsi and Coca-Cola. That high class stuff. I would Go over to my friends house and we would act like adults drinking by mixing odd combinations of nonalcoholic drinks together. Looking back, I realized it was a sort of gateway thing to my leader drinking. It was fun, putting all these odd combinations together and pretending to act like adults at a bar. I’ve realized looking back that on the television and films of the 60s there was a lot of drinking going on. My mom liked her martinis. My dad, bourbon, whiskey and beer. The cheap stuff, but it did the trick. It was just part of that adult world in which alcohol was such a big part just like smoking was back in the 60s. It’s amazing how much smoke I inhaled without being a smoker in those days. Both of my parents smoked and I think my dad inhaled more cigarette smoke than air. There was often a cloud of smoking the house, and that was just normal to me. I can still remember playing with the smoke walking through it like I was walking through clouds, seeing it move around me.

The drinking age was 18 when I turned 18. They raised it since then. I wanted to act like one of those adults doing adult things by drinking and I did a bit of that during high school and in high school, which was genuinely some of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. It did give other people wild stories to tell about me even 50 years later. Discovering alcohol and being able to do like the adults, did my parents, other parents and those folks in the movies and TV. Like a child mixing fruit juices together sometimes with soda pop, I indulge in those wonderful alcohol that was available. What flavors you can mix with a hard stuff. Only thing you can mix with beer was food, but that’s one after the other.

Recently, I ordered some pure, no sugar added tart cherry juice because I read about the health benefits of it. Tonight I was savoring a half cup of this delicious drink, and it made me go back to my childhood savoring those weird concoctions, my friend, and I made. But this time it won’t lead to stupid stuff like I did with alcohol. Having been sober for quite a while, I think drinking alcohol. I would have the same reaction I had when my dad gave me beer and other things to drink as a kid. Yuck! But it is amusing that I can drink pure fruit juice now and savor it without desiring to drink like an adult. Or an adult of my youth. This adult now drinks things and wonders OK what health benefits are in this? Had my parents been doing that it would’ve been very very, very weird. And maybe too I wouldn’t have had so much fun swimming through the clouds of smoke in my house.

It’s amusing to me, remembering the fun I had with my imagination and that other other kids because of a big rusting old roll of fencing that a tree had grown up through the middle of. I believe it was an elm. My friends and I would go to this one guys backyard that had a lot of junk in it and that roll of fencing was so much fun because we used our imaginations and it became so much more than that. It became a spaceship. A submarine with Conning Tower a periscope! A place to play like soldiers. I wonder if that’s how people become actors. They remember rolls of old fencing, and how their imaginations ran wild with such simplicity and the peril of getting ripped up by Rusty fencing.

Sometimes I think I can’t remember shit but then I remember something about my childhood that was actually fun even meaningful now. To such memories, I raise a glass of no sugar added nonalcoholic tart cherry juice.