Of all the things we threw out of my father’s trailer — old socks, worn T-shirts, bottles of prescription medicine, expired food — the bottle of Bombay Sapphire gave me pause. It was a big one, shining blue like the gemstone, and over half-full. He was drinking Wild Turkey the night my mother left him some 15 years earlier, but since then, he’d taken to gin and he had this in the house when the dementia from surgery with the heart attack chaser finished him off.
My truck was packed to the gills with his more valuable stuff, including the TV, computer, coins, his wallet, poems I’d sent him years ago that I thought he’d never read, insurance and financial papers. Still, I found room for the bottle, and for the travel flask he’d brought to my house before.
When I was growing up, I remembered that he drank Canadian Mist and water most of the time, but that he also talked about working on TVs or antennas or whatever at baseball great Ted Williams’ house and drinking gin through most of the afternoon. My mom said he came home “stinking of gin.” Still, we never drank gin together much, even after I’d grown up and moved away. When I was maybe 15, we took a huge load of appliances out when things were very busy at the store. On the way home, we stopped into a convenience store, and he came out with a six-pack of Mickey’s Malt Liquor. I drank one of them as we drove home. A couple of years before, when I got my first BB rifle, he picked up a six-pack of PBR at the same time and let me drink some of that.
The only bottle of gin I shared with my dad was the one he was drinking when he died, or maybe before he went into the hospital. I brought it home, where it hulked in the pantry for three months before I pulled it out, self-conscious, like putting on his shirt or smelling his sweat. I made a martini that I mostly didn’t like and drank it anyway, the sweetness and flowery aroma somehow comforting. I had one every couple of weeks, sat on the deck out back and thought of my father.
When my father-in-law came to visit, I pulled the bottle out and shared my dad’s gin with him. Paul was 24 years older than my father and drank martinis all his life. After my wife and I were married, I’d watch Paul make his martinis, stirring his drink 100 times until it was just right. He’d soak olives in them and pass them out to grandchildren like a Pinkerton family eucharist so that, even today, my 17-year-old daughter says, “No, I don’t need to know what gin tastes like — I know from all of those olives Grandpa gave me.” It was near the end of his life, when he was maybe 94, that Paul was making drinks one day; I’d usually have a Manhattan, but I said, “I think I’ll have a martini,” and we both drank them, doubles, until we went for our second, which he drank diluted and full of ice so that he could nurse it a long time. Or perhaps it was because he could add “just another dash of gin to flavor the ice.” Paul had maybe a year to live when I made him a martini from Dad’s bottle of Bombay. I figured he’d appreciate it more than I would. He passed at 96, another gin-father who greets me along with the taste of elderberry.
Last fall, I had the pleasure of driving to a conference with my college poetry mentor. At 84 now, he prefers not to drive when he doesn’t have to, and since we were both heading to the same conference, it made some sense to drive together and catch up on writing, kids and life. We told old stories we’d never told each other as the miles of Florida rolled away under my old Toyota pickup. In St. Augustine, we drank Scotch and soda — he was usually a bourbon or beer or wine guy. When I dropped him at home and his wife greeted us, he invited me in for a drink. After hours on the road, I didn’t mind much. They went into the kitchen intent on whiskey sours but came out with gin and tonic. They were out of oranges, you see, but had limes and tonic, so, gin and tonic it was.
I was tired from the drive. Night was falling. I still had to drive 30 miles north to catch my daughter in a school performance. But we shared the tonic, lime and elderberry of gin, and as I pulled out of their neighborhood, I knew that I carried something with me. I think his father drank gin, too. And we had talked of fathers during that drive.
This is how we pass something down, why we drink what we drink. It’s not the taste per se, or the buzz, but that something in the combination of all of those things — bottles left behind, the mixing of a cocktail, the gift of a drink — that keeps us having one more, in a toast to our fathers.
Gregory Byrd is a Creative Pinellas and Fulbright fellow who teaches writing at St. Petersburg College.
This article appears in Jun 14-21, 2018.