Nurse the Hate: The Bourbon Man

He was a bourbon man, just like his father.  He liked the feel of the heavily weighted glass in his hand while he sat outside of his home, his kingdom.  There in the backyard he liked to sip his bourbon after dinner, gazing over at his well appointed outdoor kitchen.  There were absolutes in his life.  He never cooked inside the house, yet he always did the outdoor grilling.  The primal aspect of the meat on the fire is what appealed to him.  Wrestling with the fires and the coals, knowing exactly when to flip the sizzling beef…  Those were necessary life skills of a bourbon man.

His boys were older now.  He had always imagined them to be high school football stars that would get scholarships to the University of Tennessee, his alma mater.  He had run countless drills with them in the back yard when they were young boys, but they both fell out of it.  The eldest one joined the lacrosse team at the behest of his mother whereas the younger boy shied away from physical activity.  He would never admit out loud his disappointment, but anyone attuned to the subtle energy of a household could tell.  The bourbon man never played football at the University of Tennessee, but in his constantly revising perception of himself, he felt that he could have walked on to the team and undoubtedly earned a scholarship.    

The bourbon man was a serious man.  His profession was law, which allowed him a veneer of practical knowledge that he felt placed him above other men with less serious careers.  His specialty was tax law, though he never corrected anyone that assumed he was a criminal defense attorney upon first introduction.  When the forks in the road appeared in law school to decide an area of specialty, not once did anyone assume that the serious young man would join his more outgoing and demonstrative classmates in trial law.  He was a grinder, face down in books, memorizing obscure tax codes.  Sometimes when the bourbon man sat outside at dusk with the warm sweet burn of his after dinner drink spread on his tongue, he would picture himself in a hand cut Italian suit dazzling a jury.

The bourbon man’s wife would dutifully sit quietly by his side after dinner sipping a white wine.  She was a quiet woman that had been searching for purpose after the boys had earned their driver’s licenses and their independence.  The bourbon man had only a vague idea of what her life consisted of, some sort of mosaic of yoga, group lunches and overseeing never ending unneeded home improvement projects farmed out to overpaid contractors.  He passively listened to the details, unable to engage.  She was trim, polite, smartly dressed, and by all accounts, a good mother.  She wore her mid length brown hair pulled back almost without exception.  She was a practical woman, the perfect match to the bourbon man.

The bourbon man always wished she would wear her hair down, but understood her practicality.  It was a trait he valued intellectually.  She had been a logical companion for the bourbon man.  Before his coupling with her, he had been involved in a brief moment of passion in law school.  She had wild blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, a sharp tongue and intelligence that more than equaled the bourbon man.  She was unpredictable. She was the opposite of what he had planned for himself.  She did not factor in to his long term plan and he broke it off with her, a painful memory.  He would never admit to anyone his thoughts of her each day filled with regret and longing.  He pushed those thoughts in the box each day, a chore that had become routine like brushing his teeth.  His wife was solid, steady and part of the community.  His father, UT Class of 63 and a bourbon man himself, greatly approved of her.  She had provided him two strapping boys and maintained the well appointed household. It had all gone according to plan.  The cicadas sounded off.  The smell of other nearby grills filled the air.  The bourbon man sipped his drink in the dusk.