Part Three: Alcohol (A Letter to my Great-Grandmother)

Dear Sunny -

John meets you, pretty young Carolyn May, in a dry cleaners shop. You want to wed him. He wants to wed you, but because of the recent death of his mother, and perhaps because of the start of what will later called The Great Depression, you decide on a small ceremony. I’m sure you’re glad for the intimate wedding. No crowd, no camera flashes and no excessive attention, just you and him, and perhaps a witness or two. When you marry in that little church, does John know about your troubles? About your dreadfully poor childhood? Do you tell him about the man who hurt you? Have you told him about your mother and your father or your sisters and brothers? I imagine John probing you with questions, but that you keep things light and him in the dark. I imagine he likes to talk about big ideas, about humanity and kindness, God, empathy, service and community, while you’d much prefer to discuss the dinner you’re eating or the suit he’s wearing or the birds in the park singing. Maybe you want to remain a mystery. Or perhaps, you’re so lonely and in such need of companionship that all he has to do is tug at the past just gently enough and you can’t help but unravel your history until it is in a heaping heaving pile on some café tabletop beside your ashtray and half empty cups. Maybe John thinks that he can help you, save you from yourself. After the wedding, he takes you to New York City for a honeymoon. It is 1926, Prohibition Era, but he seems to know people, possibly old college pals, and he has some money and so he takes you around town to speakeasies and secret parties and it is then that you are introduced to alcohol. 

I have my first real drink, wine coolers, in college. They taste like juice and quickly make me dizzy, giddy and flirty. A drink gives you confidence - doesn't it? Confidence to sit with strangers, to dance with John, to pretend that you aren’t that poor, hungry child from some unmapped coal mining mountain town for which you are. You are clean now and well dressed. You are a lady, a married young lady with a new kind of social life and this is all well and good, but money and pretty dresses and cigarettes and scotch won’t change you, Sunny. You are still the daughter of a drunk. You are still the survivor of pneumonia with a frail frame and punctured, weak lungs and scarred skin . And you are still an orphan. All you know of your past is what you manage to remember. You have no photo albums. No parents to call on to converse with and ask questions. (I want to mention that I don't want to sound as if I am blaming John for giving you your first drink. I hope you don’t blame him either. It would have found the inside of your glass eventually.) Your horoscope tells me that you appreciate simplicity, of experiencing life through the senses. It also tells me that you are shy. I know this already. Just as I understand that a drink feels good in a warm sensory sort of way and a couple drinks can silence most self-conscious worries. Is it here on your honeymoon in New York City when you discover that you have been carrying your daddy’s coal in the soles of your shoes since childhood? Do you drink very much and collapse onto the hotel bed in your evening clothes? Do you then discover in the morning the filth of your daddy’s addiction as if it were a stain beneath your heals? If so, what is this devastation like? Do you wonder if he has damaged your biology? It’s from him, isn’t it? Or has it manifested itself further back, as far back as your great-grandmother? I don’t know how much you and John drink once you return to Philadelphia after your trip, but Prohibition goes on for another seven years. I imagine you find a way, but perhaps you are forced back into seven more years of sobriety. As you age, Sunny, I’m told you crave alcohol when you feel alone or afraid. You won’t ever really quit. Not once you know this warmth, this ease, this softening or rather blurring of lines and memories and feelings.

I wonder how deep this coal dust goes - how much of it is in my blood. Does it reach inside a miner to seep black specks of darkness into his sperm so that future generations can’t escape the sadness, which grows from hopelessness, hunger and years in the dark underground? Why am I not surprised to hear of a Scottish drunkard? Is there something in the soil of the lands of the Scots and the Ires? Something in the water? The sea air maybe? Have the rivers all turned to ale? A drunk father delivers his drunk disease to his baby, a future drunk son or drunk daughter. It is a story as old as famine and rotten potatoes and sheep wool sweaters. Could the stars be to blame? Your stars tell me how you might be. Much of it goes with the stories I’ve been told, but is this just coincidence? How can the moon and the tides and the planets shape us? Guide us? Do our brain cells or souls or cells reach for the heavens like a compass to gather our bearings before we push through our water womb to cold air and breath? If that’s true, then where we are born matters too. And how our mothers and fathers treat us - whether they love us, hate us, hurt us, spoil us- I imagine all these pieces matter. I hear that our genes can be very different from our siblings. We can’t all be made of the exact same matter or we’d all look, sound and act identically. Therefore, to share traits with one’s great-grandparents must be even more unlikely. But still, I wonder, are you in me? You must be here somewhere. Maybe all you give me is this story and your suffering. A story that says, I was born in 1906 in Eleanora, Pennsylvania. I live during this time with these circumstances so that you don’t have to.

Well then, dear Sunny, thank you.