Football and beer and my grandpa

Still watching the Texas Alabama game and holding out hope that the Longhorns will win. Probably not going to happen after the quarterback just fumbled and gave Bama the ball on the 3. It is not just my hatred of the Crimson Tide that fuels me but I also actually happen to be a Texas fan. I even have a hat that I wear pretty frequently, especially when in Arkansas. I can't imagine what Colt McCoy is thinking right now. I know what his freshman replacement is thinking. Probably a combination of "Oh Shit" and "This is what I have dreamed about all year!"
My head is still hurting, but I am hoping that my Pabst beer will fix that. Yes, I am drinking Pabst. I like it and it is cheap. It makes me feel old school, like I am drinking with my grandfather. Ok, he drank Shaefer? which was pretty nasty, but in my false memories he was drinking Pabst. I never knew my grandfather probably had a drinking problem until he had Alzheimer's. He had collapsed in the yard, a combination of sunstoke and heavy drinking, when my grandmother decided to unload all of the stories of his drinking and driving and drinking and hiding by the freezer out back. I think the time he got struck by lightning he was probably drunk off his butt. Why else would you be standing by a metal freezer outside in a thunderstorm? I have many memories of him. Mostly the smell of Old English and chewing tobacco. He once showed me his WWII pictures and they were haunting. He apparently liberated concentration camps. I had nightmares about seeing the pictures of the gas chambers and the bodies. I also saw the living and they were scarier than the dead. Seeing the pictures on real paper was different than seeing them in the history books. It meant they were real. Too bad all the people that think the Holocaust was fake didn't sit with my grandfather and have him turn the pages of his yellowed photo album. It was an emotional experience for him, even 50 years later.
Before my grandfather's mind was lost forever to his dementia, he would show me his medals and his military papers. I could see his whole military career in those papers. He joined up and went to Normandy and landed in occupied France on a glider. He was part of the 82nd Airborne and he was proud of it. He went all the way through Germany to the Hitler retreats in the mountains. He had pictures from inside the castles. I can only imagine what he saw and did during that time in Europe.
Now his mind is gone and he believes his nursing home is his barracks in England before he landed during DDay. He thinks the other men are soldiers and the women nurses. He doesn't know who I am. He barely knows who he is. It is a sad ending for a member of our greatest generation. I will miss him when he is gone and regret that I didn't spend more time sitting with him and letting him reminisce. I will finish my Pabst and think of him as he looked in his pictures, young and strong and handsome.