About Wine and Children

So today I had that dumb graduation dinner with my family. All 16 of us on my mother’s side ate at this Italian bistro in the afternoon. There I made two distinct observations. The first thing I noticed was the wine all the adults were drinking. I’ve always had this morbid curiosity about alcohol. My father’s side is full of drunks. I admit that they’ve toned it down in recent years, but when I was little every family event was a gathering of drunken idiots. Then there is my gradfather, my mother’s father. He was an alcoholic. See his dad was a war vet and mental health care was pretty shitty back then. Attached jumper cables to his head thinking it would cure him. Obviously not so he came back with all these fucked up war visions and beat his kids thinking he was defending his country. Fucked my grandpa up bad. He grew up and had a depression and took to drinking. My mom says he died alone in his last days. Ate lentils from a can and drank rubbing alcohol. He was basically vomiting out his insides, alone in his house. They said it was a fucking mess when they found him. I was only 5 so I don’t really remeber him. Just what my mom tells me. I always look at alchol in this strange light. It’s so curious to me what it would be like. Complete loss of control. Just sink into that mysterious void. Is it freeing? Is it just the same as all the other pain? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up like him. Alone and drinking rubbing alcohol. Then the second observation. My youngest cousin is 3. He’s at that stage where he just looks so strangely at the world. So mystified by it. He’s such a simple thing. Laughs when he’s happy, cries when he’s not. He doesn’t question the meaning of his existance, he just exists. I saw him run through a flower bed without any thought. Of couse my uncle was mad at him, but I saw it differently. He just did it. Without thought or reason. He just felt like it and he did it. He doesn’t know anything about our sort of pain or the complexities of thought. He simply exists. As we grow older or emotions become more complex and thought processes become more convoluted. Our understanding of it all doesn’t seem to evolve though. We know as much as he does. I wanted to know what he knows. This bizzare little secret of his. Of course I’ll never know. I guess that’s just the way I’m built.