On Wine and Memory

Early evening, before dinner, has always been a difficult time for me. I feel ragged from the day, my reserves are drained.

I started to drink wine in earnest several years ago, as a harried technical writer. I would pour a glass before dinner, looking out the window at the sunset. I relished the first sips, which quelled my fevered thinking as reliably as a switch.

Fancy my ragged early evenings and my wine ritual, and fancy the regular static that interfered with early radio broadcasts, turning out to be no less than residual radiation from the Big Bang. Something as ordinary as late-afternoon crackle on a radio tuner actually had a cause as big, old, and deep as the birth of the cosmos. Why shouldn't individual personalities, as the universe, show "seams," dating from their construction?

The mundane habits, the recurrent tics, the predictable impulses and sensations we take completely for granted, wouldn't they have profound causes in our individual histories, dating from a time when our parents were Titans in our awareness, and personal sensations like hunger filled the known universe? Sipping wine in the kitchen, watching the shadows lengthen over the hills, don't I invoke an all-powerful mother who is available at my whim?

The deep past lives. We reckon with it in the realm of the commonplace.

I came into this world at 5:57 PM, Pacific Standard Time, according to my birth certificate. My wine-before-dinner ritual, then, suggests a re-enactment of ambiguous personal milestones--my birth, per se, and my drugged awareness of it.

My affinity for wine before dinner is more nuanced than a longing for nurture. I remember stories of my birth, my mother's accounts of being drugged during her interminable labor. Imbibing, I think of the narcotic racing through her bloodstream, to my placenta, and into my morsel of a body, where it muted the sensation of her muscles on my exhausted brain.

My awe at my passage into this life marked me at my core. It is a mythic shaping force I can't know, remember, or touch, except in ritual.

My after-work glass in the kitchen costs me not at all. I sip my drink and the clock stops for a moment. My mental chatter quiets blissfully. The hills outside darken. I step out of the mundane, and return to origins.

I would not call my evening drink a compulsion. I would call it instead a form of prayer.