Drinking with Debbie

I'm writing this in the middle of June, but I've backdated it to May because it's another one of my posts about thinking through the outcome of my trip to Scotland with Debbie. Ironically, last night I wrote this post here, about drinking. So tonight I'm writing another about the same topic? Sure, hell, why not?

When Debbie and I first got together back in 2013, one of the few hard disagreements we encountered was over alcohol. I remember walking past a city park with her one evening, trying to suggest that alcohol could have a place in a well-managed life as long as you didn't let it take over. Since Debbie was a nurse [still is, I guess], I compared alcohol to a medical anesthetic: you don't want to abuse either one, but each one has its place. Anesthetic allows you to undergo the pain of a medical procedure placidly; alcohol can take the rough edges off your day and let you see the world in a more graceful light. But Debbie was resolute: she had watched her parents get drunk and then beat on each other, and so she didn't see any redeeming benefits in it. (See for example her references to this behavior here and especially here.)

Now, she never pretended that she had lived her whole life as a teetotaler. In another context she said she'd had trouble producing enough milk in her breasts back when Mattie was an infant, so she adopted every remedy anyone suggested, such as swallowing fenugreek and drinking beer. (But so far as I know, she never tried to season her beer with fenugreek!) She told me about once (before she was married!) waking up next to someone she didn't recognize and not remembering how she had gotten there: I'm pretty sure alcohol must have played a part in that story! (She was careful to tell me that when she awoke, her panties were still on; so she concluded, much to her relief, that "nothing happened" the night before. Damn! That might have been an interesting story. Sorry, my mind is wandering.)

It's also true that when I started visiting her as a side-trip from my periodic work assignments in Sticksville (beginning here), I regularly noticed either wine or beer in her refrigerator. Sometimes it was unopened, but not always. As I said here, on one early visit I saw a bottle of wine and asked about it, and she hurriedly said that it was a gift and she was looking for someone else to give it to. Ever since then I made it a point not to ask. Whatever I found might have been there (for example) for the use of her son-in-law (Mattie's husband). At that point they didn't all live together, but Mattie and her husband came over for dinner pretty often. But in any event, just in case it was for her and she didn't feel like talking about it, I didn't want to push her into a corner where she felt she had to lie.

My perspective started to shift during this visit here, when she offered me some liqueur after dinner and we actually talked about alcohol in a positive way. But I've already told that story, so you can follow the link for details.

And then we went to Scotland.

To be clear, neither of us drank a lot in Scotland, either. In two weeks, I counted four nights that Debbie had anything to drink: here, here, here, and here. (There might have been a fifth night for me—I'm vaguely thinking of this night, immediately after the first night that Debbie ordered drinks for us both. But I have no record of it so possibly not.)

But what I found remarkable was that she was willing to order any drinks at all, and to be so nonchalant about it. I could even make an exception for Day 2, when I was clearly suffering so badly. I could imagine her thinking that this was a sacrifice she had to make, so that I wouldn't feel self-conscious drinking a beer of me own; and also that the beer would help relax my thinking so I didn't do anything crazy like make plans to go home the very next morning.

But the other three times we were getting drinks in a bar (twice while waiting for a table to open up). If her antagonism to alcohol were still as strong as it seemed to be ten years ago, she could have ordered a pint of tonic water, or of what they call "lemonade" (which means a lemon-lime soda similar to 7-Up®). But no, for the most part she ordered hard cider. She made sure that the cider was gluten-free, but she still ordered alcohol.

Usually she drank less than I did. It was normal for her to order 1½ pints in an evening, where I would order 2. (At least once she ordered the second pint for me before I had a chance to express an opinion.) And on one evening (not the others) she stopped drinking her half-pint before finishing it, because (she said) she could "already" feel herself to be a little impaired.

But it was something. It was more than zero. Whether it meant that she changed her mind some time over the last ten years, or that she was allowing for more complexity in her position than she had been willing to trust me with before, or that she flat out decided to ignore her own principles, I have no idea. But I cherished every dinner where it happened.

OK, yes, I cherished all the dinners with her.

One other thought. Could it have made a difference to her that we were outside of the USA? In other words, might she have figured that she was safe in violating these rules because there was literally no chance that anyone she knew would go back and tell her friends?

It's possible—or at any rate I can't rule it out. But I don't think it matters. I get no extra points for playing "Gotcha!" on this. I'm just glad to know that somehow—one way or another—her perspective on alcohol is more nuanced than it used to be. That's a blessing.

Night-night, all.