Talking to your kids about alcohol. Final installment.

When your youngest kid turns 21 a certain adjustment in attitude is necessary.  Having for years been very outspoken on the matter of alcohol it is weird to have my final bit of paternal wisdom be: "Would you like to have a beer with your dad?".

Kids.  They start as whimsical abstractions.  They make their first mark in the world as a blue X slowly materializing on a pregnancy test strip.  We hear the whispers of their hearts at prenatal visits. Soon we hear their much louder cries, and smell those diapers.

When you see their photos as random finds they are enigmas.  Which one is that?  They all look alike, sun bleached little mop heads.  But the pencil marks still adorning an upstairs door, the school photos, the ever enlarging shoes and sports uniforms tell a different tale.

When you have been a parent of "children" for almost half of your life it is hard to realize that you are now something else.   But what?  A tolerated, mildly bumbling patriarch?  An example, for good or ill, of how to live the Adult Life?

I'll happily settle for the moment with just being a guy having a beer with some other guys.