Drunken Poetry

My grandpa used to (and still does to some degree) drink a lot. He wasn't really a liquor guy, he would just spend hours at the local bar, Green's I think was what it was call, just drinking beers with his friends. As a kid I never thought anything of it, it seemed to me like he had lived a long, hard life and being able to put back copious amounts of booze was some type of reward. As an adult, I still believe that, but I also realize his friends and stories were in that bar, it was far more than simply drinking beer.

The tales of small town bars however should be left for another day, because as I often do, I have become side-tracked.

Now, again, as a child I assumed my grandfather's abilities to drink beer in large quantities and not seem to be affected by it had something to do with a power or skill he had acquired through his years. That also had a grain of truth to it, as do most childhood interpretations, but as an adult I know that it was because of the years and years of beers and beers that I rarely saw my grandpa drunk.

In my lifetime I think I have seen him actually drunk perhaps 3 times and I have come to that number based upon a response he gave to me the very first time I saw him that way. Now, as many of you surely know, some people get talky and philosophical when they are drunk, others get sad and introverted, some still become wild and unruly and of course there are your dreaded angry drunks. My grandpa however, is none of those. He is a poetic drunk.

Somewhere in the deep vaults of his brain he has stored countless poems he memorized over the years, and more often than not he'd gladly recite a few if you were to ask, but when he had had a bit too much to drink, there would be no stopping him. The lines and verses would flow seamlessly and had you not seen the stagger in his step or the smell of his breath, you would assume a completely sober old man was recalling a poem he had remembered ages ago. The poetry alone was not a true test of his inebriation, no, once the poems began to flow the only way to know for sure was to ask him directly.

I did just that one summer when I was about 13 and the response I got has stuck with me since and has become my own personal breath-a-lizer test for my grandpa. I ask him, just as he had finished a poem. "Grandpa, are you drunk?" It was an innocent question, born solely from curiosity and he promptly responded, in a rather cheery tone, with this.

He is not drunk whom can rise from the floor
and drink one more.
But he is drunk whom prostrate lies
When he can neither drink nor rise.

To this day I remember that, though I do not know the origin, who said it or wrote or anything about it beyond that if I hear it, I know my grandfather is drunk.

As an adult, I sometimes find myself taking that poem and applying it to life. I know, I know, that makes me sound like a lush, but it is not the content I apply, more the message. Sometimes in life you feel as if you are just done, given up, or for the poems sake, drunk. If you can find the strength to get back up again and take another shot (literally or metaphorically), you will survive, you will make it through, you are not drunk. It is not until your truly have nothing left, not until you can neither drink nor rise, that it is truly over. I continue to fall to the floor, rise again and drink. I imagine I will be doing this for the rest of my life, sometimes I am forced to drink while upon the floor, but that is still not the end. Eventually I rise, sometimes it takes a long time, but eventually I rise, everyone does. In life, as long as you continue to find the strength to rise and drink again, you will only truly be drunk when you are dead.