This past weekend, Wonder Boy and I went on a walk, trying to enjoy the nice weather and check out a new (to us) bar. One our way, we passed a grouping of families grilling out and the food smelled delicious. I was looking their way to see what smelled so great and wiped out. I tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and landed on an elbow and knee with my sunglasses flying off to somewhere nearby. Wonder Boy leaned in to check on me.”Are you okay?” he asked.
“Do you hear them?” I hissed, trying not to cry. “They are making fun of me!”

And they were. And that’s okay because I appreciate schadenfreude as well as the next guy, but what they were saying!

“Look at that girl drunk on Wild Turkey!”
“Oh, that drunk girl just fell right down!”
“I bet she had so much Wild Turkey!”
“She’s drunk on Jegermeister!”

I was stone. cold. sober. and trying to calmly assess my damage (mostly road rash and a bloodied knee and ankle). I stood up and dusted myself off, trying to maintain what little dignity I had left when I received sage advice.

“Don’t let a fall ruin your day,” a man from the cookout group yelled out to me. “And you tell everyone a black man told you that!” (The second half of the quote is unnecessary to include here but it was equally unnecessary to have been said, so there you go.)

…

When I was young – maybe six – I cooked my parents a fancy dinner. I made scrambled eggs – the only thing I knew how to cook – and wanted to get them glasses of wine. I tried every bottle I could reach in the liquor cabinet, looking for one I could open. (Side note: Isn’t it a little odd that I, at six, could access so much liquor?) I located a bottle with a twist-off cap and filled some wine glasses to the rim. My parents sat down to their fancy meal and couldn’t help but smell the almost overflowing glasses of liquor. “Kate, what is this?” my dad asked me. When I showed him the bottle of Wild Turkey I had used, he replied (in my memory of the event) with “If I drank all of this, I would die.”

…

That breakfast story used to be my only association with Wild Turkey. Now I know that it is not good with scrambled eggs and might cause death AND that apparently I lot of girls get drunk on it and fall flat on their faces while walking down the street, not then I’d let that ruin my day.

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.