Well, they said that fraternity stuff was pretty revolting, but they didn’t really know anything about it. Neither one of them had ever been a drinker. B. started grinning and said his mother had been a teetotaler, but his father had drunk just a little now and then, which drove his mother crazy. If she found a bottle, she’d make a big show out of pouring it out. Toward the end of her life she had loosened up a bit, and at a party for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary he remembered her drinking a little glass of wine. “I only got drunk once,” he said. “I hadn’t drunk at all in high school, and not even when I was in the Navy, which was…well…let’s just say it wasn’t the usual thing!” But on V-J Day, the navy guys had a huge celebration, and he decided he could have one drink, and after that he thought he’d have another…
“I got really drunk and really sick, of course,” he said. “And apparently I made quite a fool of myself – or so they told me. I don’t’ remember any of it. But I decided I didn’t like that feeling, so I’ve never drunk much at all since.”
He sat back and shrugged. “It all depends on how you get your jollies, and that’s different for different people. I get my jollies from up here…” – he tapped the side of his head – “from using the brain…well, the brain God gave me. Why should I want to mess that up with drugs or alcohol, when I have a perfectly good time without them? But that’s me. Other people feel differently, don’t they?”
He turned to his friend, my father-in-law, who nodded solemnly. Both of my in-laws disapproved of alcohol and the people who drank it; so far as I know there was rarely any in their house, although my mother-in-law occasionally offered a tiny glass of sherry if there were “cocktail drinkers” coming for dinner, making sure we knew it was with disdain. My father-in-law would occasionally accept a drink at a wedding reception or some other formal event, and then brag that he had poured it out in a plant pot. I always thought this was a superiority thing – drinkers were weak people who lacked self-control, or something like that – but when I finally became friends with Muslims I realized that my in-laws’ attitudes were cultural; that being Christian had far less to do with it than the fact that they had grown up in conservative Muslim/Arab culture and had absorbed the prevailing values (alcohol is forbidden in the Qu'ran). Upstanding people simply didn’t drink – - and that was the end of it.
So when my father-in-law said he’d gotten drunk once, we both raised our eyebrows. “Oh, I never told you that story?” he said. We shook our heads. “Oh yes. It was in Nabataea. Three people, himself included, were scheduled to present remarks after a dinner. He had decided, on the spur of the moment, to have some wine. “I liked it,” he admitted. ‘And then I got up to talk, and realized I’d lost my cool.” He glanced at B., who nodded solemnly, and looked affectionately and knowingly at his friend.
“Yep,” he said. “That’s it. You'd lost your cool.”
“I was really worried! So I persuaded the others to go first, and by the time they were done I managed to give my remarks. It was the first and only time in my life that happened to me, and I decided I couldn’t afford to have it happen again. I didn’t want to lose my cool.”
Comments