By Choice

 By Choice

By Bobby Neal Winters

I told my Paraguayan Elementary Statistics Class.  My Russian snake vodka story.  While it has nothing to do with statistics, every once in a while it is good to let the young people know you weren’t always the old boring thing that you are now.  

Anyway, if you catch me sometime, I’ll be glad to tell you, but for my current purposes we only need the end: I am on my Rotary Group Study exchange to Russia in June of 2000 in the dacha of my host’s father.  His father was retired military and had a nice summer country house, aka dacha.

Earlier in the day, I’d had a toenail ripped from my foot, and I was sitting in the dacha’s living room.  The father had made sure I was taken care of.  My foot was propped up; I had a beer in one hand and a glass of vine in the other; and the father was showing me his rifle.  I’d praised the rifle, perhaps too effusively, perhaps too politely, because then the father got a gleam in his eye.  

He spoke to me through a translator:

“I have some medicine that I brought back from China,” he said. “It will cure your foot.”  Then because I’d told him I had three daughters. “After you take this, your wife will give you sons.”

He then brought out a large jar of vodka.  Vodka with the body of a snake suspended in it.  The vodka had leached enough pigment from the snake’s dark green body to render the vodka in the bottle a clear yellowish green color.

I took a look at it and prayed, “Jesus, if you get me out of this, I will never miss church again.”

At that point the father’s wife came in to call us to dinner.  I said, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus.”

Then the mother spooned out the vodka into a shot glass. The father took the glass and put it in front of me.  

At this point in telling the story to my class, I stopped, looked at the young men in class, and asked, “What would you do?”

The answer came back almost immediately: “You’ve got to drink it.”

And I said, “I opened my esophagus as wide as I possibly could and threw the vodka down my throat.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and began to ponder the young man’s answer: You’ve got to drink it.

While everyone in the class understood, the sixty-year-old that I am now as opposed to the thirty-something of 23 years ago or the twenty-year-old from my class says: No, I chose to drink it. 

I’ve been meditating on the use of food in the Bible, in Genesis in particular. The serpent said, “Go ahead and the fruit; you aren’t going to die.” Eve did, then took some to her husband.  He chose to eat it.

Esau came in hungry from a hunt.  Jacob was making some stew.  Esau said, “Give me some of that stew. I am so hungry that I am about to die.” Jacob said, “Only if you give...your birthright...this day...to me.”

Esau wasn’t going to die; he was hungry.  He chose to sell his birthright.

During the famine in Egypt, the people first gave all their goods, then all their animals, and finally themselves to Pharaoh in exchange for food.  The Children of Israel sold their descendants into slavery for hundreds of years for food.

On the flip side of this, Satan tempted Jesus and Jesus chose not to eat.  He chose not to turn the stones into bread and ultimately the Cross.

The point is to say, I chose to drink the snake vodka.  I didn’t have to.  Ultimately, we have very few things we can choose: I can’t choose to live forever; I can’t choose to jump over the moon; I can’t choose to lift the Empire State Building.

I can choose what goes into my stomach.  That day 23 years ago, I chose to drink the snake vodka. The reasons? To make my host’s father happy for one thing, but I think on a deeper level it was to make a better story.

This was before I began to write, but even then I was a storyteller, and the stories I brought back from Russia were the first ones I had appear in the paper.  It was then that I got printer’s ink in my veins.

It has been an addiction, but I choose to do it.  It has made my life a better story, don’t you think?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.