I wake up hours before the alarm lately, not rested but propelled to the keyboard with some new idea for how to continue working on this puzzle.  The room I work in is dark, the puzzle pieces are tiny, and few, most of the puzzle is missing, its outlines hazy, melting into shadow.  Still, there seems nothing more crucial as I enter my seventh decade than assembling this puzzle into a form I can show you, a person I’ve never met, and pointing with a small smile to its most subtle sections. 

In one way there couldn’t be a more mad project, I suppose, because, if you look at it dispassionately, what is it that drives a person to speak to people who are nothing but abstractions, truly?  In a more immediate way, though, I can’t conceive of anything more important than this assembling of my own understanding of things that have long vexed me.  It is the tiniest flicker of a fresh insight into how to wrestle with this difficult puzzle that pops my eye lids open long before I’ve had enough rest lately.

“Only a neurotic would conceive of assembling one’s own understanding of his vexations as an important project,” says the skeleton, with a quiver of his native suspiciousness.  “More to the point, how is putting together the puzzle of my tormented life going to help you assemble any understanding of anything at all?”  

You might as well ask grandma what the point of all that vodka she took in and poured out through her sweat was.

My father and his mother-in-law loved each other like devoted child and doting parent, they admired and protected each other fiercely.  He always called her Mom. At the same time, my grandmother was prone to drinking huge quantities of vodka and my father, a teetotaler, never touched a drop.  He used the word ‘teetotaler’, as quaint to me as ‘dipsomaniac’, which may have described grandma, with her urge toward intoxication.  

“They were having a few drinks, you know, getting loose and laughing, but I’m a teetotaler, so I drank root beer and made a few cracks from time to time,”  he said, describing a colleague’s retirement party, and then explained to me that a teetotaler was someone who didn’t drink alcohol.  Google can reveal the origin of the word in a couple of taps, but I would rather picture the twenty-six year-old teetotaler’s mindset in America in 1950.  

There has never been any shame attached to a hardworking American coming home and kicking back with a little booze, a cocktail after a long day at the office, a couple of beers with the guys after the whistle at the salt mine blew, a bottle of wine with dinner.  Some of our greatest writers and thinkers were no strangers to hangovers, the most charismatic slugger of his generation hit more than a few home runs hung over.  

Even during that thirteen years of national hysteria, spanning my father’s childhood and the Great Depression, when ambitious criminals made their fortunes selling illegal alcohol, a newly banned substance that millions loved, there was never much widespread shame attached to coming home and having a few drinks, or drinking at a party.  We are still living in a century-long, bloody trillion dollar failed experiment in prohibition of most competing intoxicants, and shame has long been systematically attached to smoking the preferred weed of Mexicans, jazz musicians, Negroes and degenerate whites, but that pathetic hypocrisy is a sickening subject for another time.  The point is, people have long loved to savor a substance, like alcohol, that gives them a relaxing buzz and alters their thoughts and mood accordingly.  

Not my father.  He was a teetotaler, as he would proudly tell anyone who asked why he didn’t want a little sangria, or a cold beer.  In my experience he never had so much as a beer.  At Passover, when we are commanded to drink four cups of wine during the long ceremonial meal celebrating our people’s journey from physical and spiritual slavery to freedom, that elusive and slightly intoxicating state, my father nursed a single cup through the service, having a sip each time the Haggadah told us to drink the next cup of wine.  

My best theory: being in control, and at peak readiness for the ambush that was always waiting for him, was uppermost in my father’s mind at all times.  It made sense.  His trusty sword was always at the ready, it was nothing for him to make a few quick arcs in the air with it and nonchalantly disembowel anyone who came at him.  He was ready, and it was important to him to keep himself sharp.  Who knows what a couple of ill-chosen drinks might do to his matador’s reflexes in a world of constantly charging bulls?  

“Well, you say that with a certain mockery, but everybody has their demons, and their own ways of dealing with the relentless fuckers,” said the bones of my father, his now claw-like hand pushing a dusty shard of a tiny puzzle piece across the dirt.  “To you, I’m sure, it makes more sense to have a few puffs of that nepenthe and improvise with your guitar, dreaming of things that never were.  A chacun son gout, as the Frogs say, but for me– I valued clarity of mind above all else, why mess with that?”  

Fair enough, I say.  On many subjects that clear mind served you very well.  A pretty good argument can be made, on the other hand, that a certain stiffness of habit closed off entry to many other important human experiences to you.  In the end you came to regret your often rigid view of things.  Seeing the world clearly as an eternal battle between black and white, ignoring the million gradations, in the end, and as you realized, is not a very clear way to look at life.  To put it more starkly, it would be fair to say you regretted being closed minded as you were measuring out your last few breaths.  

“Well, that’s fair to say,” he said.  “I’m trying to see how getting drunk would have improved my chances for understanding things any better.  You’d have to admit that’s a fair question.”  

The question is fair, and it’s a good one.  And it shows me again how you taught me to think of things from as many sides as I am able, in spite of your reflex to reduce things to a deathbed regrettable “my way or the highway”.  

First let’s reframe your sneakily tendentious question a little.  If your goal is to end the discussion, reducing the other side to absurdity is one of the standard ways to go.  The question is not whether it is better to be unshakably sober at all times or sloppily drunk.  The proper question is whether it is better to refuse, on principle, to join the festivities, to hold oneself always slightly apart because of some moral standard you hold yourself to, or to be able to relax and share some harmless relaxation, as much for the sake of full participation and putting everybody else at ease as for anything else.  

Your buddy Russ, a life-long drug user, told me once that he didn’t get much of a kick from marijuana any more.  His preferred drug at the time, apparently, was cocaine, the hopped up drug of success and achievement for many people back then.  “I’ll take a toke just to keep the pipe going as I pass it around,” he told me, “but that’s not really the buzz I’m looking for these days.”  He told me this as he was proffering some of his preferred drug on the end of the tiny blade of an old pocketknife.  Coke was never my thing, a drug that made you nervous, vigilant, eventually paranoid.  I prefer gentler kinds of intoxication, but that’s just me.  

“Look, I never held that against Russ, he liked to get high, I never judged him.  It just wasn’t for me, losing hold of reality like that,” the skeleton said.  “You know, he was probably high half the time he was laughing his ass off at our house, but it didn’t change my enjoyment of our times together.  And, more to the point, I didn’t need to be high to love our times together.  You do get that, don’t you?”  

Focus, for just a moment, skeleton, on the phrase Russ used “to keep the pipe going”.  He didn’t particularly like getting high on weed anymore, it didn’t do it for him, didn’t scratch the itch.  But he’d puff on the pipe when it was passed to him for the sake of keeping it going for the guys around the circle.  There is a social element to sharing an intoxicant, like drinking a toast.  The man at the hard-drinking beloved departed’s wake who won’t lift a glass with everybody in their good friend’s memory?  

“The origins of anti-Semitism, right there.  To polytheists it was nothing to add a conquering god to their pantheon of deities.  ‘Zeus kicked our ass fair and square, a powerful god, we’ll put him on the altar above all of the gods we continue to worship’.  Jews, the first monotheists, we presented a problem.  We could not bend our stiff necks to a false god, we’d rather die.  Our enemies have always been happy to oblige us in that.  Flowing from that problem of clinging to the one true God, and reducing all other cherished beliefs to bullshit, millions were put to the sword, washed away in a two thousand year long tsunami of blood, splashing away now, even as you wrestle in that dark room with the puzzle that was your vexing father.”

You are still one stiff-necked motherfucker, my father.  I would be nothing if I could not give you that.