Bar tabs

I've decided to give up my wine for the month of March. Sort of a lenten sacrifice, although, being an athiest, it sounds like a poor excuse. Lately it's been every day of 1/2 to 1 bottle of wine. And I really don't need the extra empty calories. I am haunted, too, by the memory of my father who used to pass out sitting at the kitchen table nearly every night after consuming what I think was scotch. Later in life it was wine. But there was always something. He gave it up, cold turkey, in the late 1980s. He also quit smoking and lost 100 lbs that year. It was quite an accomplishment. In 2002, relatively early into his Parkinson's/Lewy Body Disease, while he still had the capacity for speech, albeit with some truly mixed up word choices, he said to me, "Michele, you & I have the same," and he struggled to find the words but came up with , "bar tab." It's true. We do. We both consumed to excess, almost everything in life. We don't have a "stop" signal and so go on way past the time when others would cry "whoa."

I have an acute sense of smell and can recall the smoky smell of my parents' breath. It was the 70s and everyone smoked and drank all the time it seemed. One of my first boyfriends smoked. He was 16 or 17 and I was maybe 10 or 11. I loved the taste of cigarettes as we kissed. I craved the warm smell of smoke in his clothing as we feversihly made out and dry humped like dogs in heat. My next boyfriend didn't smoke, but by then I did. His clothes had the fresh scent of laundry soap and I longed to bury my face in his body to extract that clean smell. I worry now, that each night, as I tuck my daughter into bed that she smells the wine on my breath as I kiss her soft cheek, and that she will seek that smell in a lover. It's a dangerous smell to be sure, particularly when you have this family's bar tab.