Well, for one, I was married. Had been for going on three years at that point.
Many consider turning twenty-one a "rite of passage" to legally consume alcohol in public establishments. I had already sampled alcohol before this point--and on our honeymoon, though we were only eighteen and nineteen years old, respectively, we were served champagne at the hotel restaurant where we were honeymooning.
Fast-forward three years down the road. I believe we were living at Witham Hill Apartments in Corvallis. That may have been during the cold spell we had, during which our freezer was accidentally punctured with an ice pack. So we put items in a cooler and set it on the back porch, where it kept quite cold.
If we did have alcohol to celebrate my reaching "drinking age," we may have been chilling it outside in that very cooler. I don't specifically recall, but chances are we may have gone out for a cheap dinner--salad bar perhaps (it was rather a go-to for us in those days), followed by simple alcoholic beverages--with me doing the imbibing, not Byron. He's only developed a taste for certain wines within the last ten years.
I do remember people teasing me and implying that I'd be getting drunk or some such thing, but that was never on my radar--or list of goals. I remember feeling a bit odd that I was now officially in my twenties--instead of just twenty.
I was attending Linn-Benton Community College at the time, taking transfer credits for my education degree. My nights generally consisted of some studying--and dessert. Alcohol wasn't a general commodity, and it wasn't encouraged in the church we were a part of at the time. So I can't be 100% sure that there was any involved in the commemoration of my first twenty-one years of life. But if I could go back to that time, I probably would have gone to Applebee's and ordered a Bahama Mama (I was not to discover those until many years later).
And been carded (which hasn't happened in quite some time). Minus a flux capacitor, we may never know what my twenty-first birthday was actually like. But I do know a couple things. I spent it with the one I love--and I didn't make a fool of myself.
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