Is It Worth It?

We did a weird thing. We bought a bottle of wine. That may not sound like a very big deal, but it is for us. We've never had a drop of alcohol in our house beside the rubbing kind and the medicine kind.

One reason is that I was raised in a church that believed drinking is a sin. However, in my own reading of scripture I've come to believe that it's not drinking that's a sin, it's OVER-drinking, so to speak.

Another reaon we've avoided alcohol, is that Hubby's extended family has a strain of alcoholism in it, and he has therefore avoided alcohol like the plague, which it sort of is in his family.

So why did we buy a bottle of wine? Two reasons. One, Hubby has been hearing a lot lately about the spiritual benefits of taking communion often, and he felt it might be nice to have real wine to do it. Two, I thought a nice spoonful of wine at night might relieve the bedtime achiness I get.

We went to a local grocery store on Sunday evening. There were literally no other customers in the store, and the two cashiers were pacing around wishing for something to do.

Hubby and I found our way to the booze aisle. Wow, I had no idea there were so many choices, never having paid any attention before. In fact, I'm not sure I have ever even been down that aisle. After looking for a little while we settled on something called "MD 20/20 Red Grape Wine." It looked very pretty, just like grape juice; and it was cheap-- less than $3. We didn't want to invest very much in this experiment in case it should be a failure.

When we paid, Hubby asked the gal if she needed to see our ID. She looked at Hubby's graying beard and said, "No." Then we put the bottle in our trunk, so as to have no connection between the drink and the driving, and went home.

At home, we decided to be upfront and tell our kids what we had done, in spite of our misgivings. (We really felt like wrapping it in a paper bag and hiding it somewhere, but the thought of one of them finding it hidden in that surreptitious manner gave me pause. I could see them panicking, thinking that mom and dad were, at worst, turning into alcoholics, and at best, being total hypocrites.) We pulled the bottle out of the bag, displaying it with trepidation, and explained our reasons for buying it.

And then our boys said, "Oh, why did you buy THAT kind? Don't you know what that is? That's 'bum wine.'"

I don't know how to describe here my multi-faceted reaction to that. It mostly boiled down to "WHAT?!!" with several inflections.

Somewhere along the line in their many bunny trails around the internet they had stumbled onto a website that describes the many kinds of wine and booze that are favorites with "bums." The popularity of any alcoholic beverage with the bum population is based on two things: its cheapness, and how little you have to drink to get stinkin' drunk. Some kinds of "bum wine" are little better than kerosene, some have formaldehyde in them, just to give it a little extra kick. Some have unknown ingredients that give you psychotic experiences.

At this point, I'm wondering "What have I done....?!" And I'm also wondering where the FDA is in all this.

On the positive side, you usually have to drink a whole bottle of any of these things to get the best effect, and I was only planning to drink a tablespoon or two at a time. Although I still wonder how much antifreeze can you drink before you poison yourself.

At any rate, we passed out tiny sips, and we all coughed and choked and made horrible faces. Our sixteen year old said we could get in trouble giving him a sip since he's underage, and I said a dose of communion wine was acceptable, but if we found he was sneakin' 'round the fridge door he'd be in big trouble. He rolled his eyes and said, "Yeah, like, DUH!" Spoken like a true teenager.

By the way, I found that if I sipped the stuff out of a glass it tasted really nasty, but if I put some in a spoon, my thoughts were, "Not too bad for medicine."

I took my first official dose last night, and I'm not sure it did anything besides fry my tastebuds. Aargh. I'm wondering if NyQuil would be a better choice, except for the fact that it's so darn expensive.

I suppose we could try what Hubby's folks did. Hubby's dad was told by his doctor that he should start drinking a glass of wine a day for his health. So they went out and bought a bottle of wine and poured themselves a glass. Blecch! they said. This is awful. So they got out some home-canned grape juice and mixed it in. Still awful. They experimented this way and that with the juice and the wine, and finally got a mixture that was pretty good. And then realized they'd forgotten to put any wine in it!

By the way, I checked the level of the bottle this morning, and it hadn't changed since last night. No bums in the house, thank goodness.