My mother drinks. Not to excess, but as a regular part of her day.
She’s 87, had her first drink at 15, and is one of those heavy but non-alcoholic, regular drinker types that the Big Book makes mention of on more than one occasion.
Ever since I was a kid, and long before I had any clue as to why it was called what it was, I understood that “drink time” was a special – almost a holy -- time of the day for her. Walter Cronkite on the TV, the sun slanting down through the windows… The whole world seemed to slow down at drink time, even its uglier parts taking on a strange, momentary beauty. The air itself seemed charged.
Around 17 or so, I started joining my mother for a drink myself – a beer, maybe, or a glass of bourbon and ginger ale (her own favorite). It was all very civilized and pleasant. Over the years, whenever I’d come home to visit, drink time remained what it had always been for us: the time when the heavy, opaque aspect of the day fell away for a bit, and one suddenly found oneself saying what was on one’s mind, thinking thoughts one somehow hadn’t thought to think just a few hours before: The time when the world came alive.
Drink time with my mother also became a kind of measuring device for where I was in terms of my relationship with alcohol – that is, for how much of a hold it had on my life at large. Somewhere in my mid-twenties, my mother started noticing that I lacked her skill in handling that all-important transitional moment when drink time came to an end. Suddenly it was dark outside, dinner was ready, and – increasingly over the years – I was a mumbling, slurring, decidedly uncivilized mess. The following day, I’d look back and, with chagrin, realize that I couldn’t remember everything I’d said at the table – perhaps couldn’t even remember the last hours of the evening at all.
Every now and then over the years, my mother would remark about this or that person that they couldn’t “hold their liquor.” For my mother, drinking too much was a sign of weakness – maybe even of a deficit of character. The last thing I wanted was to be one of these people in her eyes.
In the winter of 1994, when I was 32, I drove up to visit my mother in Vermont, where my sister had recently bought her a little place to live. I hadn’t seen her for a while, and was looking forward to the time away. I pulled in at 6:00 PM – just in time for a drink or two before dinner.
I woke up the next day around 11:00 AM, face down on the mattress in the little guest bedroom, fully dressed except for my shoes, my head pounding, completely at a loss as to what had happened the night before.
My mother’s expression when I staggered out into the living room told me everything I needed to know. That morning stands to this day, for me, as the moment when, in my mother’s eyes, I committed my final transgression against the fragile and sacrosanct structure of the drink-hour concept: the day I became, in her eyes and my own, a drunk.
Jump forward about a year. Of the many challenges to me in early sobriety, few were as daunting as the first visits to my mother, and the inevitable negotiations of the drink hour that went along with them. In fact, much as that visit to my mother in Vermont was a station point of my last days of drinking, so was the first drink hour that I sat through with her stone cold sober. She’d moved back down to West Virginia by then, but the setting – a kitchen with the TV on – could have been from anywhere in my life with her. Out beyond the windows, the sun was lighting up the trees and the air was getting that golden, timeless feel to it, just like always. Drink time was still, it turned out, the prettiest time of day.
And for me, without competition, the most difficult. Over the following months and years, nothing brought back the longing to get up and out of myself through a drink or a drug like that golden late-afternoon sunlight. In my first years of sobriety, a particularly beautiful sunset actually hurt to watch.
Today, my mother, 87, lives in a senior living facility here in New York. She still has her disciplined handful of drinks in the evening, but I usually visit her around seven thirty or eight – the tail end of drink time -- and by then she’s had her last one. I’ve been sober for so long that the embarrassment, incomprehension, and pain of those last years of my drinking, when I turned once and for all from a “civilized” drinker into a kind of shambling abominable snowman, have become safely part of the past.
My mother’s place is about a forty minute walk from mine, and I usually go down on foot, with my dog. On days when the weather is nice, especially in early or late summer, the air takes on that rich, amber color that I know so well. It still takes me right back to my drinking days.
But not quite in the brutally nostalgic way it used to. In fact, there are some days when I’ll look out at that golden light as it renders the gray and ordinary buildings around me suddenly beautiful, and I won’t even think about drinking all. Not always, but it happens.
It’s taken a long time, but I’m starting to make friends, again, with the drink hour.