Blue Laws

Until some three years ago, I spent nearly every night of my one, precious life in either a mildly or not-so-mildly inebriated state. It was as if the glass of wine, always at my side as I made dinner, shucking corn or slicing tomatoes, were a sort of lover, ever ready to overlook my flaws—how I left too many gossamer hairs upon the shorn cobs, how I never made Apple Brown Betty, how I failed in ways large and small as a wife and mother. The five, ten, or fifteen ounces of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay (I rarely drank red, even though it was meant to be healthier) was always ready to whisper endearments in my ears, to tell me I was merveilleuse, extraordinaire, magnifique, to fill up my silences with sweet-talk.

I never got the shakes when I went without a drink, but I did experience a kind of silent-screaming panic. I remember going down to visit my ninety-something father-in-law in Richmond, Virginia, who had long since stopped any regular imbibing of alcohol, as it seriously messed with his head, to say nothing of his sense of balance, and panicking because he didn’t have a corkscrew. There were silver-and-nickel-plated knives and forks, plastic spoons, crumpled napkins, multiple packets of Sweet N’ Low…but not one corkscrew in all the wax-paper-lined kitchen drawers that I ransacked.

Going door-to-door in his suburban neighborhood, I rang bells, rapped on windows, like some mad-dog Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t want to chat about the holidays, didn’t want to talk about whether my father-in-law was still driving or going to the Y. All I wanted was the silver gizmo that might unleash the firewater from its bottle and deliver me, at least for the next hour, of self-loathing and despair.

“Everything in moderation,” advised the Roman philosopher Petronius, “including moderation.” But we Americans, unlike our older, wiser European counterparts, despise moderation. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, in need of thundering preachers to keep us from drinking ourselves into a stupor every day of the week, which is what our illustrious ancestors loved to do, from the folks who stepped off the Mayflower right up through Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our founding fathers began their drinking in the morning with hard cider and continued right on through the day with beer, wine, and spirits. The early colonists were forced to institute “blue laws” which put all kinds of restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, banning the purchasing of beer or wine before noon on Sunday, something that remains on the books in most states today, which always shocks me when I try to purchase a bottle of white before noon at my local Whole Foods.

Why blue laws are called blue laws is shrouded in mystery. One theory goes that it was because of the color of the books in which the laws were first printed; another that it was the chosen shade of the stockings of those pesky ladies who tried to better mankind by lobbying for repressive laws.

What we do know is that blue laws didn’t succeed in curbing the early American’s passion for drink, a passion that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up with equal ardour until an entire temperance movement sprung up, which finally succeeded in 1919 in writing an amendment to the constitution to ban the sale of alcohol in every state in the union, as well as in parts of Canada. And of course even this most ultimate of blue laws didn’t do much to stop drinking, which continued in speakeasies all over the country and which was trucked across Canada and into the United States, entire fortunes including Joseph P. Kennedy’s being made on the illegal profits of bootlegging.

My first cousin, Lisa, died at 45 of acute alcohol poisoning, unable to face a single day, let alone the rest of her life, without the rivers of vodka that she poured down her throat. Her funeral, held on a sunny April morning in a gray granite church in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada, overlooking the agate waters of Georgian Bay, where she had passed many a drunken afternoon lounging on the decks of friends’ boats, was one of the saddest events I have ever witnessed. Her eighty-three-year-old mother, wheeled in on a stretcher from the local nursing home, wept with a copious and terrible abandon. Afterward, the mourners gathered in the dark smoke-filled Canadian Legion. Her friends cried, smoked cigarettes and knocked back shots of tequila.

It was enough to turn me into a teetotaler. But like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s legendary malcontent Miniver Cheevy, I had simply accumulated one more story to despair about, one more reason to have another drink.

Lao Tzu says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And so it was with my drinking: I made one small and subtle change in my alcohol consumption, which, though I could not have predicted it, changed my behavior conclusively. Three years ago, I joined a writing group in Northampton, which met every Wednesday night from 6-9:30 p.m. A hearty dinner of pasta and oven-baked squash was served at 6; drinks were strictly of the seltzer and juice variety; coffee pots were always full.

But this wasn’t a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, though several members were recovering alcoholics. After dinner, we had a moment of silence, then retreated to various parts of the house to spend an hour with our laptops, returning after an hour to read and receive comments.

Even if you were Miniver Cheevy himself “sighing for what was not, and dreaming of Thebes and Camelot,” you were not allowed to say: “That was nothing like Euripides.” Instead, you had to be positive; you had to find the firewater phrase, perhaps even just the single word that bootlegged your consciousness, that lit up your heart.

The adventure did something to you, made you feel full and unaccountably happy. All these strangers scribbling down the bones of their lives, speaking of divorce, loneliness, heart disease, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s, and you had nothing to do but listen, you wanted to listen, and for the first time in many decades, you didn’t think about how you couldn’t get through a night without a drink, you thought only about stories and similes and how amazing that people could spend an hour drinking deep of themselves and coming up with such treasures.

When you returned home well before midnight, you were too loaded with words to do anything but climb into bed. And so it was that you passed one night without alcohol and you slept a deep, dream-drunk sleep and when you woke, you thought, “piece of cake to go without a drink,” and if you could pass one alcohol-free day, surely you could pass another and another, and before you knew it, you had had five, ten, fifteen alcohol-free days, which you tracked with blue stars on your calendar. After a year, you counted up 150 days of stars.

And so it was that you learned to pass your own blue laws, learned to drink occasionally and moderately…and even though the shadows of a winter afternoon approaching five o’clock still make you yearn for the deliverance that only a glass of maple-colored wine brings, you know you can go without.

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