Holly, Drink! Teetotal: The Early Years

I was such a goody two-shoes in high school that I never drank except for communion in church. Then, in college -- can you believe this? -- I didn't drink because I didn't want to break the law. When I finally hit my twenty-first birthday, I was hanging out with Christians who didn't drink. I had a great day, but it was all about cake and pizza and goofy decorations -- not a hard-core vice in sight.

Of course, I was so obviously square and wholesome that some people wanted very much to see what would happen once I had a drink in me. And it wasn't frat boys looking to see if I would party. It was men who had more of a fatherly interest in getting me to loosen up. Uncles at weddings and such. And my trombone professor in grad school. That's a story. I was in England, where they have three terms in a school year instead of two semesters. One day in each term, the whole trombone department would go to a pub and have a "piss-up," which meant they would get there early and spend the entire day getting very, very drunk. My professor kindly offered to buy me drinks, with the understanding that if I didn't like them he would happily finish them off. The problem was that I don't like fizzy drinks and I don't like the taste of alcohol, so I always went back to pineapple juice (which should answer the question you've all been asking yourselves: yes, I've always been this cool). This would leave me the only person even close to sober. People get really philosophical when they're drunk, and I got plenty of opportunities to talk about God. Someone would say, "You're a good person. I'm not a good person," and I'd whip out the little Bible I kept in my pocket and show them a passage and say, "We're all sinners. There's hope." My little bits of evangelism didn't prevent the entire trombone department of the Royal Northern College of Music from being permanently banned from the Moon Under Water pub, though.

Anyone who's been to England knows that drinking culture is much different over there. There was a bar right in the college cafeteria. (And lots and lots of smoke, produced by brass players who figured that if the tuba player in the Chicago Symphony could play with one lung, so could they.) Christian culture is different, too. The first evangelistic meeting I went to in England was held in a pub.

...Which provides a nice little segue, because the one man who tried harder to get me to drink than anyone was the pastor I shadowed my second year in the UK. His house always smelled fermented. When we talk on the phone now, he'll often say, "Holly, guess where I am!" "In your garden with a pint?" "Yes, I am!" He would hand me various liquids, and I would try them, make a face, and say, "Cough syrup!" There was one I tried once which made me think of hot dogs. I was told the word to describe it was "smokey."

Thus I managed to make it to the age of 31 without any understanding of the appeal of alcohol.

But you know this gets more interesting, or I wouldn't be writing about it. Or at least, I wouldn't be writing about it under this title. So stick around.