Why do I write, day after day about alcohol, about my alcoholic mother, and about my relationship to alcohol? Anne Sexton, when asked why she wrote such painful, dark poems, replied that pain engraves a deeper memory. Virginia Woolf said strong emotion must leave a trace. Dani Shapiro goes on to say,”These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories. Joan Didion called this a shimmer around the edges. Emerson called it a gleam. ” A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” he wrote. “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it was his.” Dani Shapiro writes, “If you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it. Like falling in love. Moments that announce themselves as your subjects are rare, and there’s a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.”
I cannot ignore the shimmer of alcohol, the stories it holds, the pain I and others in my family have experienced. Am I an alcoholic? The jury is still deliberating. Those of you who rush to judgement, walk down this path with me. See where it leads. I am going to follow the shimmer, the gleam, the light. I am writing into the light.
Last night we had a dinner party, actually a small neighborhood potluck. Ten of us gathered at our house. We drank, we talked, we laughed, we ate and we shared stories.
Since I began writing every day, I find myself asking people to tell me their stories because it is our stories that connect us. In the course of the evening, I learned that one of my neighbors worked his way through college as a door to door book sales rep. He made enough money to pay his tuition and travel to 65 countries in four years. He was one of the first Americans to visit Vietnam after the war. Among other things, he told us how he met his wife, who at that time dismissed his advances, but later traveled all the way to Thailand to see him. He proposed there.
When we wrapped up the evening at 10:30, there were 9 empty bottles of wine and that did not include the one still half full in the refrigerator which went home with our neighbor two doors down. Did I drink too much? I did not feel light-headed or intoxicated during the evening. I remember every conversation. I have a vivid memory of the food we ate, Rendevous ribs, coleslaw, a dreaming rice salad, asparagus cooked to perfection and cover with blue cheese. And for dessert, pecan bars with raspberry sauce and ice cream. I recall with detail the clothes people wore. One neighbor, who is absolutely gaga about holidays, had on a black cardigan covered with sparkling ornaments. It was fabulous. She had really decked the halls. One man sported a crew neck sweater, while another wore a V-neck, cashmere one. My husband wore my favorite blue shirt, the one that makes his eyes pop.
Back to the alcohol. Back to my shimmer. What did I notice? The laughter. The stories. The camaraderie. At the end of the evening, as we were washing dishes, I turned to my husband and asked, “Well, what do you think?” He said, “It was great fun.” Could we have had as much fun had we not been drinking? Maybe. We are having another gathering here on Sunday night. Neither of us will be drinking at that event. In fact, I really don’t have any desire to drink again for quite some time.
Writing about this, following my shimmer, I feel very differently about alcohol. It’s okay on occasion, but I never want to go back to a daily consumption. In small doses it can be fun, but on a daily basis it is depleting, mind numbing, and ultimately boring. Anything that becomes a habit, whether life enhancing or destructive, involves unconscious, automatic behavior. I favor choice. I do not want to be a human robot.
What about the after effects of a night of revelry? My stomach is a little queasy. I have a slight headache. Definitely not the way I want to feel on a regular basis. The experiment continues.
One more thing. As my shimmer around alcohol pertains to my family of origin, I know more now than I did even yesterday. I am not my mother. I am very clear about that. She never had dinner parties. Parties involve work, cooking, cleaning, setting up and breaking down. Too messy. And she had very few people in her life whom she could have invited. She pretty much drank alone or with my step-father. Living with my father was never a party. If my stepmother did invite people over, my father always managed to start an argument with one of the guests, a sure way to break up a party.
I will not drink today.
Writing into the Light 