“Ghosts are exactly what we’re buying at the liquor store,” Samantha Hunt writes, in a new Personal History. “We drink the dead, and, even past the point of dead, something so fermented it lives again in those of us who swallow these spirits.”
There’s a ditch at the end of our driveway that consistently swallowed vehicles heading home after parties at our house. My siblings and I would help drunk adults push wobbly cars out of that ditch and back up onto the road. Seeing them off on their drunken way home. We never considered the hazards. Everyone we knew drank. Everyone drove, and the ditch, streetside, late at night, was an exciting place to be: dishevelled clothes, jealous brawls, dirty songs at 2. His job was to read.
I have three children of my own now. When my oldest daughter was eight—near the same age I was when I watched my parents’ parties—she and I drove past a sign, “Spirit Shoppe.” “For a minute,” she said, “I thought we could buy a ghost there.” A sudden dawn. Yes, we could. Ghosts are exactly what we’re buying at the liquor store. Booze is haunted. We drink what’s fermented and distilled.
What our dad had forgotten that morning was to chug half a handle of gin. Off we went to Vermont with a new precarity to the drive. Just south of New Haven, the highway grew crowded. At that time the Sikorsky Memorial Bridge over the Housatonic had an open steel-grid deck with two lanes of traffic in both directions. Crossing the metal road surface was like driving on black ice eighty-five feet above the river below, difficult to navigate even for a sober person.
On my cousin’s sixteenth birthday, my uncle loaded too many of us into an open dory with a weak engine and a pitiful dinghy towed behind. We headed out to one of the unpopulated islands off the coast of the town in Maine where my uncle sometimes lived. The men of my childhood loved the edge. The boat was brimming with food, drink, sweatshirts, a motley crew of people young and old. We cooked lunch over an open fire on a deserted island. It was a perfect day.
What did the spirits do? Where did they take us? One brother jokes about digging a moat around his home. He and his wife are slowly building a cabin in a ravine a mile away from any road. Two of my siblings live so far north, the snow melts in May. Two of my siblings live on an island two hours out to sea where the ocean is wild, and sometimes I worry that one big storm might wash my sister’s tiny, basement-less house away. When bad weather strikes their island, the boats stop running.
When I travel for work, I am less lonely in hotel rooms if I have a glass of red wine with me, as if in drinking I keep my kin close. I use the past and alcohol in similar ways. They are comforts, reminders of our cohesion. I must moderate my consumption of both, so as not to grow senseless to the present.
Brasil Últimas Notícias, Brasil Manchetes
Similar News:Você também pode ler notícias semelhantes a esta que coletamos de outras fontes de notícias.
Ghosts of the past haunt 'Master'The debut feature from writer-director Mariama Diallo stars Regina Hall in an unnerving examination of how racism lingers at a prestigious college.
Consulte Mais informação »
D.C. bar that violated vaccine rules will get its liquor license back after paying fineThe bar, which raised nearly $58,000 in crowdfunding campaigns, will pay $4,000 in fines without admitting liability.
Consulte Mais informação »
Ghost Rider 2 Director Wants Johnny Blaze to Destroy Avengers in the MCUGhostRider: Spirit of Vengeance director Mark Neveldine says he'd like to see Ghost Rider blaze through TheAvengers and 'lay them to waste.'
Consulte Mais informação »
D.C. bar that violated vaccine rules will get its liquor license back after paying fineThe bar, which raised nearly $58,000 in crowdfunding campaigns, will pay $4,000 in fines without admitting liability.
Consulte Mais informação »
Ghosts of the past haunt 'Master'The debut feature from writer-director Mariama Diallo stars Regina Hall in an unnerving examination of how racism lingers at a prestigious college.
Consulte Mais informação »
An unlikely urban planner injects new life into her Michigan communityThis small city near Detroit had all the makings of a ghost town. Fortunately, one man's wasteland is another woman's blank slate.
Consulte Mais informação »