Cesar Chavez: A remembrance

Cesar Chavez fasted this year for 36 days. Vice President Dolores Huerta was beaten by
San Francisco police during a protest of President George H. W. Bush.

(United Farm Workers union founder and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez died 20 years ago today. This is an essay I wrote after his death for the California Farm Bureau's newspaper where I worked; I'm still a bit surprised the Farm Bureau published it.

(All it takes is a sore back after just 10 minutes of edging the front lawn to begin to imagine the sunup-to-sundown toil and courage and pain of the farmworkers he fought for):

Cesar Chavez was a fiction when I was growing up. He was as distant and mythical as any of the dusty heroes who peopled the John Steinbeck novels I loved.

He was a symbol, a poor man daring to stand up for the workers from which he sprang, to speak for them, and I liked the symbol.

Out of school and looking for a job, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, a place as mythical as Cesar Chavez had been in my youth.

In this place, both became real for me. Cesar Chavez was a shorter man than I expected, the thick black hair I saw in old photographs having turned a thatch of gray, the lines on his face having deepened. The San Joaquin Valley, a vast smoky place scored with a gigantic grid of perpendicular roads, took its shape from farmers and a history unknown to me as the child of an itinerant Air Force Mechanic.

Something else became real for me at that place and time: The hatred farmers held for Cesar Chavez.

He was the devil. He was "that goddamned Cesar Chavez." People mispronounced his name Chu-VEZ. One former assemblyman who battled Chavez used to spell his first name C-E-A-S-E-R in press releases.

I heard he was the man who stirred up trouble for farmers by causing unrest among farm workers. I heard he intimidated farmers into signing labor contracts with his union, threatening violence and using it. I heard he threatened to destroy the industry with wild claims that farming poisoned workers and consumers.

I heard all of these and then I met the man. In his death I'm left with a cloudy soup of feelings.

He was rallying workers at a large farming operation in the south San Joaquin Valley when I first saw him. Some workers were trying to win United Farm Workers Union representation and Chavez had come to spur the effort toward an election.

A knot of maybe 200 people, waving red banners bearing the Aztecan eagle symbol for the union, filled a small community hall to hear him. They didn't represent all the workers at this operation, but their shouts of fierce passion made them seem more numerous.

Chavez spook briefly to the crowd in Spanish, raised its spirits, and departed. The election took more than a year to decide. The union lost.

Chavez came again to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the union's radio station in Woodlake. When he arrived at a nearby fairground for the day-long party, people quickly surrounded him, stretching their hands to him. He clasped the outstretched hands and embraced the small children who pressed close to him, and the crowds fell in behind him like a boat's wake as he walked about the fairgrounds that day.

I waited until late in the afternoon for an interview, when finally his bodyguards — including some off-duty city police — ushered me into a makeshift courtyard.

Chavez sat across from me in a folding chair, his sat eyes nearly hidden behind folds of skin, and challenged every one of my questions. With a wave of his hands, a firm shake of his head, the smile of a prosecuting attorney discovering an opening, he turned each question into a clumsy attack on his union and his causes.

He made each question an opportunity to attack farmers and the pesticides they used. Cesar Chavez put the blame for cancer in young children on all farmers.

In the course of a few brief moments, the man I once thought was a myth made me his real enemy.

Chavez dismissed me, the bodyguards closed ranks, and the union leader returned to the throngs of people who thanked him for dinner and a party.

After I came to work at Ag Alert, Cesar Chavez made a stop at California State University, Sacramento, to build support for a boycott against table grapes. He still regarded virtually every question from the press as a thick-headed accusation of his cause. But he had won over another fiercely passionate knot of people at the univerity, and leaders of major cities, including San Francisco, pledged to support the boycott.

Farm Bureau and other major agricultural organizations retaliated by boycotting San Franci
sco.

Over the years, I have read death notices for the union. Some former UFW officials left because they said Chavez refused to delegate authority, made no plans to pass his power on, and wouldn't consider changing the union's strategies to match the times.

Chavez and the union denounced the state Agricultural Labor Relations Bord he helped create, saying former Gov. George Deukmejian turned it into an advocate for farmers rather than farm workers.

Membership plummeted, labor contracts dissolved, the union built luxury homes with non-union labor as investments and it lost millions of dollars in court damages from labor strikes it waged.

Chavez' 36-day hunger strike in 1988 to advance the grape boycott failed to ignite the emotional fire of the hunger strikes that launched his union in the 1960s.

Most recently, UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta, Chavez' sister-in-law who founded the union with him and marched beside him for more than three decades, left the organization (editor's note: Huerta had taken a leave of absence to focus on women's rights).

He was an icon for another age, a folk hero, a malcontent. He led with, as someone said, quiet charisma, but he distrusted criticism. Perhaps the United Farm Wrokers union has die
d with him.

But for me, Cesar Chavez stopped being a myth and became human.

It is as John Steinbeck wrote of Cannery Row: "Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'Whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole, he might have said: 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."

How to succeed in journalism without really trying

Celebrating my departure — and mourning my wife's — from The Hanford Sentinel 25 years ago, the editor in chief told my wife over beers that I was a lazy son of a bitch.

Rarely did I get in the picture, as when Gary Feinstein shot me looking over a
dairy veterinarian's shoulder. He has cut a hole in the side of a Holstein cow
and is reaching in with his plastic-wrapped arms to untwist her stomachs,
a not uncommon malady among cud chewers. I wish I knew
the doc's name;  he was calm and friendly and suffered this fool gladly.

No news, this — from a boss paid to know news.

I plead guilty, with aggravating circumstances. You say lazy — I say inclined to expend copious amounts of energy to avoid undesirable work. Such as whittling down that last sentence.

Of course, most reporters looked lazy alongside my wife. Hesitant to hire her at first for fear of nepotism, The Sentinel regretted letting her go — I had a new job in Sacramento — for the sheer breadth of news she wrote, and her plainspoken coverage of county politics.

I wanted to be like her. Since high school, I knew — knew passionately — that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, and did little else but train to become one. Until I became one, when I changed my mind. Ten years later, my body finally followed.

I like writing. It's the reporting I never got hang of. I wasn't much for amassing facts, and committed many sins of omission. I caused more than one post-election correction when I missed a precinct or an entire city's voting results. I got sick calling up families about their newly departed. Farm prices and policy, the subject for which I had been hired (not because I pretended expertise but because no one else pretended interest), mired me in a great big incomprehensible manure, and I was no match. 

Maybe I'd have enjoyed myself at a rewrite desk, had I landed at a paper large enough to have one.

Instead I became the master of day-in-the-life stories. They got me out of the office, which was mutually beneficial — they gave me something different to talk about back home at dinner, for one thing — and let me spend long periods just getting to know people and what they did. I was a gossamer Charles Kuralt, so long away on assignment that I was writing the stories in my head while I lived them.

The day with the veterinarian, chronicled above, was a short stint compared to others I did; I think Gary the photographer met up with us for just part of the visit, for the bovine outpatient procedure, but then took off to meet some deadlines. I stuck around for most of the veterinarian's day.

One of my first stories at the Hanford paper came from an interview with a dairy couple, who gave me directions to their place, just outside of town. I turned the wrong way first thing and followed the unbending road an hour west — "out of town," I decided, must be the loosest of loose terms around these parts — before I finally became convinced of my fallibility.

Though deeply embarrassed for being two hours late and having established my reputation as a bumbling reporter, I was not sad. I had seen some country I mightn't have otherwise, and I got to marvel at the intransigent planning of central San Joaquin Valley roads that would not bend unless forced by river or ditch. Two hours lost in a day but preserved in my memory, for no other reason than to entertain myself.

Civil War re-enactors once staged a battle at a county park near Hanford, and I stayed all day to watch each skirmish and immerse myself in the punctilious devotion with which Civil War aficionados immerse themselves. One soldier died over and over in battle, and he became my lead (or lede, the opening paragraph, as reporters sometimes spell it). Plus, I got to use the word "watchfires," a bonus.

I once spent 12 hours with a dairy family, starting at 4 a.m. in western Kings County when son No. 2 began moving the family's Holsteins toward the barn for the first milking, continuing through a table-busting breakfast, paperwork with son No. 1, artificial insemination, a second milking, an overview of the Dairy Princess competition with Only Daughter, feeding the herd and fixing equipment.

I simply time-stamped each section and offered the insider's view of a typical day at the dairy. It was for a special section celebrating June as dairy month, I had a lot of space to fill, and I had never seen a story that simply described what went on in a dairy.

When I discovered a tree-fruit grower who also owned his own sprint car racing team — and built the cars himself — I spent as many days with him as he could stand. Sprint cars are snug little high-powered buggies topped with gigantic airfoils and shod with two larger tires on one side to better circle the dirt track, and they're a huge deal in Hanford.

The day-in-the-life story I wrote about him started at his nectarine ranch and ended late at night at the Kings County sprint track, where his driver flipped the team car high into the air in a collision on a far turn, and the owner ran across the infield like a wild man, tools falling out of pockets as he flew.

Writing for The Sentinel finally gave me a chance to scratch the itch for one desolate intersection of two lonely highways that has fascinated me since childhood. Year after year, on our way to some High Sierra camping trip or another, we passed the intersection of highways 33 and 41 with its lonely café and junklot.

I thought it might even have been the inspiration for Rebel Corner in John Steinbeck's "The Wayward Bus," until a bemused Steinbeck expert talked me down.

Thermos ™©® full of coffee, I drove out there before dawn one day and just sat and listened and asked and watched and photographed. I met the owners of the café and their few regulars. The concentration of fast-food restaurants and gas stations on Interstate 5 10 miles northeast had long since immobilized this corner of the world, but some remained faithful.

The fenced-in curio lot across the street, which sold brass giraffes and sunglasses and dishwasher-sized flower pots, was owned by the umpteenth person by the time I wandered by to write it all down. Everyone at that intersection seemed to be holding onto something, to keep from being blown away by the constant wind.

Eventually they all did blow away. A new, bigger café and store and gas station stands empty now where that wheezy little café had been, and the curio lot left no trace.

I won a feature writing first-place award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for that bit of laziness.

Get me rewrite.

Unfinished business

A work in regress …

Monday marked John Steinbeck's 110th birthday, churning up bittersweet memories.

The unfinished illustration at left, which would have been for self-promotion, represents a wave of wistfulness that crested over the weekend when I read a backhanded celebration of Steinbeck's life and work.

Posting the unfinished work breaks an internal cardinal rule of my blog, but feeds another purpose, which is from time to time to open a vein and bleed a bit.

John Steinbeck remains my favorite writer, since a high school English teacher first made me read him. I'd love to say I've traveled the world of literature page by page, from the hooves of Chaucer's horse to Cormac McCarthy's road laid waste (just two disparate examples), and returned to Steinbeck even after such a considered journey.

The uneasy truth is I don't read much. Aside from Kurt Vonnegut or William Saroyan or J.R.R. Tolkien or Garrison Keillor, I have not pursued writers through their collections.

I read anymore for need, not want, corralling and consuming the small and weak snippets of information that have eluded me all these years. Even so, reading is a chore, a fight against a Pavlovian predilection to fall asleep. 

Still, what a time reading Steinbeck! Good readers often say words transport them, and so Steinbeck did for me. He took me to the nearby Salinas Valley north of my hometown, to a place that no longer exists if it ever did, a romantic and worn-smooth place. He took me to the steep and hot and unforgiving canyons above Big Sur, (a Steinbeck style affectation I stole, replacing commas with "and" between items in a series) to the quiet gurgling bends of the Salinas River, perfumed with sycamores, to a miserable sodden rail car, full of miserable people going nowhere.

He made me want to try a beer milkshake, as Doc did in Cannery Row, in Santa Maria, a half hour from my hometown; or taste the regular irregular concoction Eddie made when he poured unfinished drinks from La Ida Cafe into a jug and took it back to share with Mack and the boys at the boiler-strewn lot known as the Palace Flophouse.

Steinbeck informed my thinking, to which these editorial cartoons attest. It set up awkward moments when I twice met Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, and he regarded me as a member of the hostile press.

I felt like I was living — and truly living — in Steinbeck's books, which is probably any writer's desire. I'd fall short describing that tingle, that sense of the earth falling suddenly away, when a college friend and I drove up to Cannery Row early one morning and I saw for the first time many of the places Steinbeck described. Until that moment, I thought them purely made up.

On rare occasion a piece by Aaron Copland will pop up on the radio, and suddenly I'll be flying noiselessly over the golden foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a source for many Steinbeck stories. It'd be small surprise that Copland is my favorite composer, so tied was he to Steinbeck's work and era. Though Copland wrote scores for movie versions of The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men, even his signature pieces — especially Appalachian Spring — take me straightaway to the settings of Steinbeck's stories.

I remember how reading Steinbeck describe the chapparal vibrating with insects on a hot afternoon, or hearing Copland's The Red Pony quickly sweep into the joyful gallop of a boy and horse, and I'd catch my breath, lost in reverie. It was magic that doesn't happen very often anymore, and I wonder why; my guess is age has rubbed off many of the edges.

At one time I was on fire to complete the portrait of Steinbeck above, itself inspired by a photographic portrait. I was building Steinbeck with symbols of him; his shoulders the furrows of the farmland that figured into so many of his stories; assorted splotches and lines suggested a map of his characters' journeys; the curve of nose and plane of shadow on his right check somehow to comprise the Route 66, the path of his Joad family from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the poisoned bounty in California. Probably in the struggle of getting the sign to become the nose, I stopped, and never returned.

I post it now as a Post-It® note to self: Get moving on all the good stuff left unfinished. Succumb to the magic more often.

Whenever I read about Steinbeck anymore, someone is trying to punch him in his dead nose. He was a lightweight West Coaster, shoulda never won the Nobel, let alone a Pulitzer. That kinda stuff. Even a fan such as Joe Livernois, former executive editor of the Monterey Herald, used his Sunday essay of celebration to call two of my favorite Steinbeck books "stinkers" — singling out In Dubious Battle as maybe "the greatest disappointment to ever smudge a printed page."

Let critics talk, and jump on Steinbeck's bones. He will always remind me the good stuff is not entirely lost. 

The road taken

Our card: I'm afraid that in my bumbling I will
tatter, besmirch or even lose this artifact, so finally
I committed it to digital posterity.

Long ago, burning with creative spirit, uncertain of our future paths, and deciding we might as well just blaze our own — in fact,  the same place where my own children are now — my college classmate and former roomie David Middlecamp and I launched a freelance business.

Maybe launched overstates it. Fervently dreamed about and planned with bursts of enthusiasm is closer.

"Questing Unlimited" comes courtesy of the courtly days of King Arthur, when the knights of his and other realms were always gallivanting about the countryside in pursuit of adventure.

From a piece David shot for The Mustang Daily
about a San Luis Obispo ranching family,
demonstrating his excellence as a photographer.
This is old school: He produced these postcards
himself, on special cards with photo paper fronts.

(Now that I think of it, the quests were merely tools for Sir Thomas Malory and other writers of the Arthurian legend to plot stories; kind of like when the cell phones ring on any one in the Law & Order franchise episodes just when the chase grows stale.)

Somewhere in my readings of the Arthur legend (perhaps in John Steinbeck's preempted attempt to retell the Malory version, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights), I think I learned that for a quest to hold meaning, it must go in a great circuit, never to cover the same ground.

The advice, whether from those pages or from my fevered brow, informs me still. I loathe out-and-back backpacking trips (oh, I'll make them, if it means not going at all), and tend to drive in great, gas-wasting loops on errands.

So would it be for us and our budding business.

David and I wanted unfettered wandering, making stories of our serendipity. I wanted to be like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, except I would be discovering what he was re-discovering. I'm speaking for David — and this is the first of many invitations for him to fill in the gaps or correct me — but I imagine likewise that he wanted to chronicle our travels and travails much as Dorothea Lange did.

We had already begun training, and maybe got the idea for it, by teaming up on feature stories for The Mustang Daily, Cal Poly's student-run daily newspaper.

Our feature stories filled our own craving to move beyond Cal Poly's and San Luis Obispo's geographical borders, and the newspaper's daily need for copy. As long as we could sell even the weakest link to Cal Poly — whether our subjects had graduated from there or visited or merely heard about the campus — we could do the story for the college newspaper. We didn't leave the county, but imagined Questing Unlimited to be our ticket hither and yon.

David with all those postcards, all those
hoped-for assignments, set out to dry.

Then, life got in the way, or I let it get in the way. I got an internship at my hometown newspaper the summer after we hatched our dream. David, in San Luis Obispo, took the burden of nurturing the business — more likely, I let my end drop for David to pick up and carry my share with his — and continued researching story ideas.

When last we worked on the business together, we were just beginning to develop queries, which are story outlines that we'd pitch to magazines whose contacts we had yet to gather. Or maybe I have forgotten that David had already amassed editors' and publishers' names.

(I just discovered a stash of captioned photos David produced as part of a portfolio we'd send to editors seeking writing assignments. The photos are from a feature we wrote about Janita and Robert Baker, who make guitars and mountain dulcimers from their rural home in northern San Luis Obispo County. Wonderful, engaging, talented people, the Bakers were exactly the kind of subjects we wanted to chronicle; I'm happy to find the Bakers are still doing their thing at Blue Lion Dulcimers & Guitars.)

We had our marketing campaign almost ready to unleash upon the world, with a logo made the hard way.

To build the logo today, I'd probably buy the needed typeface from a Website, import it into Adobe Illustrator, type out the words I wanted, convert the word to shapes, then manipulate the shapes at will on my computer screen. Click, tap, click. It sounds involved but it might take an hour tops, no muss, no fuss.

Not so way back then. If you wanted anything even remotely exotic in type treatment, you went to Letraset, and any newspaper or graphic design shop would have piles of these transparent plastic sheets of letterforms lying in storage, usually with just a handful of letters removed from the sheet. I'd either transfer letterforms by burnishing them onto a surface, or cut the letterforms and painstakingly expose a thin adhesive backing. Want the typeface bigger? Smaller? Assemble the type and then throw it into the overhead camera for enlargement.

I spliced "Questing" across the bottom with an X-acto knife, then used thin 2-point black adhesive tape to restore the letterforms into complete shapes. In this case, the job took multiple precise angled cuts. Just before I'd get the last tiny end of the tape to stick in place, my shoulders would invariably kink up, or the tape would stick to my fingers and pull the whole job askew — death of a project by 106 cuts — or the letterform I needed, the only one left on the sheet, would get stuck on the bottom of my shoe. Good times. Good times.

We must have convinced someone over in the print side of The Mustang Daily into typesetting "Unlimited" and the contact information for us. David might know who printed our business cards for us.

That's as far as our quest went. David and I pursued divergent journalism paths, though we went on to lead roughly parallel lives. David's career explored depth over breadth, nourishing his roots in San Luis Obispo County. He became the envy of most Cal Poly grads — one of the few to find a lifelong excuse to stay and thrive in beautiful San Luis Obispo, as an excellent photographer and storyteller and historian/archivist for The Tribune.

He's even a gentleman farmer, nourishing olive roots on family land. Someday I'll write about the day long ago when I "helped" him buck hay.

I'm lucky to have been able to reconnect with David and his family, and talk about now and then.

Officially in mid-life or past it, I can't help but think about then these days. My wife joined me in wondering: What if we had pursued our quest? The words "hungry" and "hardscrabble" come to mind, but also "happy" and "simple" and "who knows?" It might have been a precarious existence, likely requiring us to invest our dreams from other sources, like parttime jobs. It might not have endeared me to my in-laws or pleased my parents, because Nancy and I were planning marry soon; it might be why I didn't give the idea the time and energy it needed. I was afraid.

Certainly I missed out on the people we would have met, missed the stories they would have given us, missed some countryside I have yet to see, missed the memories of epic trips on roads less traveled by, that might have made all the difference.

My long awaited theory on wine. You're welcome!

Artist's rendering of California's secret wine supply …

The bane of my extended family, I don't play cards, hang tough during small talk, or drink wine. You can imagine the joy I bring to family gatherings.

Of the last, I have heightened my unpopularity (or lowered my popularity further?) with a despised theory on wine, which is: It all comes from one massive tank, like the largest municipal water supply tank you can imagine, somewhere near Modesto, exact coordinates known to only to the wine industry. All of it, every drop of California wine, comes from that tank. Maybe Gallo controls it, maybe not.

(This theory as yet has gone unchallenged. I know what you're thinking: You can't prove a negative. Well, prove it!)

It's all white wine, by the way. The red wine results from dye, conveniently provided in color-matched packets.

One "vintage" of white wine
(or red, whatever), coming up …

During the night, all the wineries — big and small, with names like Leaping Lizard or Fauntleroy or Burnt Bramble or some such; all the wineries with histories written in warm tones about how the sweat and love and blessing of a certain microclimate and generational vision (leaving out the part about the hefty inheritance or absconded-with treasuries) of this or that family delivered this fine wine to your worthy table — back their boutique vans up to a hose bibb sticking out around the base of the tank.

Each winery has a hose bibb. I imagine a plaque — probably gold-plated — is affixed above each, engraved with the winery's name. Each winery pays according to its needed volume in wine product, and drives it back to its home place, and dumps the wine into its casks for distribution.

Back at the wineries, wine lovers cluster in for the distribution, bellied up to polished countertops, sampling each winery's "specialty." Through the power of suggestion (hypnosis, perhaps?), well-trained winery staff use buzzwords to impart the effect that each wine has a different flavor, is brim-full of nuance and pleasure.

Maybe this is all in my mind, a convoluted rationalization for explaining that all wine tastes the same. To me, anyway. Probably to everyone else too, but everyone else denies it. Instead, under the wine stewards' spell, they say they taste "notes" of currant and chocolate and blackberries and dirt and coffee and redemption and longing and success and who knows what else. Sometimes maybe wine grapes.

I don't get much kick from wine (or champagne). Mere alcohol, as is said, doesn't thrill me at all. But most around me indulge in its thrall.

Our son celebrated his 21st birthday belatedly last weekend with friends and family on a winetasting tour of the Amador region, in the Sierra foothills along Highway 49. They stood at those counters and pretended with the proprietors that this wine tastes different from that because this was bottled under a quarter moon and global pressures and regret, or lack thereof.

But the proprietor will know where the wine really came from, and now so will you.

I wandered around the wine tanks, where it's cool and smells sweetly of wine. I like the fragrance of  a cool cellar on a summer day; I enjoy the subterfuge on which each winery has splurged in order to make people believe they actually make their own wine. I like the token vineyards around the winery, the usually unbelievable, money-laden architecture of the wine tasting room, the unmatched views. Always the view; makes me wonder if winemaking isn't really all about prime real estate.

One winery encouraged our entourage outdoors, where a staff member brought out its "pourings." He described one wine as "smoky" and "jammy." Wineries are where real adjectives not only go to get stretched to the breaking point, but where some get born that never make it off the property. Jammy!

My wife held out her glass to me. "This guy said it tastes like blackberries, and I have to say, it really does!" I sipped.

"Tastes like every other wine to me." The party proceeded to ignore me again, clouded in their bliss.

I don't feel the same about beer. Beer certainly tastes different from brand to brand, and it all tastes … well, not awful exactly, but not something I look forward to drinking. The only time beer tastes good to me is right after mowing the lawn, and then it's a cheap beer, and then only a swig or two of it and after that finishing the beer feels like work. I feel like I'm chewing most other beers.

Plus, certain beers, like certain wines, "must" be drunk out of certain glasses that foment foaming or  oxygenate or imbue nobility. Or the glass must be held just so. Hm. Life's too short.

I tasted straight tequila last month for the first time, and actually laughed. "This tastes exactly like whisky," I said. As with whisky, I don't feel I'm drinking tequila so much as it feels like my body is quickly bypassing normal processes in order to ingest the alcohol.

Alcohol should taste like it does when I read about it. Doc in Cannery Row exclaimed, "Hah! There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer!" I want beer to taste like whatever he's talking about. John Steinbeck even made a beer milkshake sound good, even though Doc finally struck up the nerve to order one in a diner (in Santa Maria, 30 miles from my hometown!) and decided it was terrible.

But alcohol never takes like I imagine. Maybe if it did I'd be in trouble.

The truth: Alcohol scares me a bit. I'm afraid of its effects on me. Yeah, goody two-shoes, born and raised, which even my mom regretted.

I don't think I'd be a mean drunk; my maternal grandfather, from the stories I was told, became mean and violent. The closest I've come is being a sarcastic drunk, which is unpleasant enough.

On the few occasions I saw my dad drunk (he was mourning with his best friend the cancer that had shaken and would soon kill his friend), he was sweet and cloying and smothering, weeping and waking me up early in the morning to tell me important things a nine-year-old is never going to understand.

I've never wanted to be that way, and I think maybe the germ of my wine theory is born in that.