Me, My Dad, and a Bottle of Gin

The other day I found this polaroid photo in a box.

If you look at the back, you can see the date. May 13, 1971. One week old. My mom also wrote Mike, Ro with a partial n, with a different pen. I’m not sure when she wrote that, or whether I had been given the nickname Ronnie yet, or what she intended to write — Ronnie or Ron. Somehow the backing is torn, probably from when it was peeled out of an old photo album.

Then I flipped it over, and here it is.

Me, my dad, and a bottle of gin.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, a lifetime. And I think that phrase is grammatically incorrect. I suppose it should be “my dad, a bottle of gin, and me.” But that’s not how the phrase arrived.

This photo would have been taken in my parent’s apartment in Bitburg, West Germany. I say West Germany, because at the time, Germany had not been reunified and the Cold War simmered. Part of the meta-narrative of the story of my parents life, and now mine.

The furniture was all acquired in Spain, where my parents lived prior to Germany. My dad is tending bar, standing behind a freestanding bar unit from Spain. The bar was made of wood, stained very dark, with iron fittings and a rod across the front that served as a footrest. The top, seen in the photo, was covered in a leather that had been dyed to a dark green.

Ten years later, when we lived in Denver, I would sit on the floor behind this bar, in a tiny nook between the bar and the wall, and play LP records on our vinyl record player. More on that later.

Behind the bar is this piece of art, where wooden carvings are affixed to a painted canvas. The carved figures represent Polynesian dancers, or so I was told as a kid when I asked about it. My parents acquired it somewhere before I was born. Not sure why it appealed to them, but it travelled with us and was always part of our decor.

All of that stuff is gone now, including the knight helmet which was actually an ice bucket. I always loved that ice bucket and I wish I knew what happened to it.

The gin, with perhaps 20% of the bottle remaining, was Beefeater. As a kid, I never knew what a Beefeater was, other than it presumably had something to do with the dude in the red outfit on the bottle. Beefeater gin was a staple in our house, always in stock.

I wonder what happened that night when that photo was taken. According to legend, as in, the story my mom tells, my birth was particularly challenging, so maybe I had just been home from the hospital for a few days. Maybe they had some of my dad’s Air Force buddies over to meet the new baby. Who knows.

Yet here we are, having a moment. I know the photo was real, since had it been staged, my mom would have certainly taken care to remove the bottle from the bar. Wouldn’t want that around the baby, you know.

And every question I’ve ever had about my dad, my relationship with him, and my relationship with myself — somehow lives in this picture.