A Glass Of Wine Or Two

In the English version of "House of Cards" the prime minister's brother is a dreadful drunk, always getting into bad publicity, and in one scene as he is being hauled off yet again, he says to the police "I don't know why I drink; it must be boredom."  My youngest sister, a decade or so ago, retired quite young,  and thereafter sat at home where she ballooned to immense, truly immense proportions.  Once when I was out in Iowa on a visit, she said to me that she thought it was boredom that had led her to eat so and put on the added pounds.  Boredom, existential boredom, is a difficult foe to confront. I was raised in a home of a gracious witty mother who nevertheless insisted subtly, only by implication, on the utter meaninglessness of life; she made that clear.  In the weeks since I have returned from Greece, I have eliminated alcohol from my diet, first because of the surgeries for skin cancer, and then because I was suffering from such extreme acid indigestion despite taking Omeprazole, and more recently added coffee to the list of prohibited foods.  Giving up coffee took me a couple of days to work out the withdrawal symptoms; then it was as though I had never tasted it.  Still without it, there was a gap in the performance of breakfast.  I have yet to find a suitable replacement.  As for alcohol I am desolate without cocktails or glasses of wine in the late afternoon, and it is not intoxication I crave, because in fact alcohol, the very small amount I was drinking, still made me feel ever so slightly unwell.  It is more that alcohol softens the edges of the stark crushing boredom that has gripped me every day around twilight time.  I was a different person in Greece as I reverted to the me of twenty or thirty years ago.  In the company of jolly companions I downed glass after glass of white wine at lunch and dinner, bottles and bottles, laughing and joking and paying no heed to the increasingly obvious acid indigestion this was kicking up.  I have not had so much fun in years.  Life was brilliant, there was a sparkle to everything I said, handsome young waiters seemed inevitably friendly.  My companions danced the handkerchief dance one night with two or three of these beauties and I wanted to cry, but instead ordered more wine.  I was having fun, fun, fun.  Tums, malox, nothing seemed to help me as my stomach complained louder and louder.  Now I am back home, happy in a way to be under the surgeon's knife and then in recuperation with slowly dissolving stitches.  Thereafter I will have my tragedy course to prepare, and we are traveling north for Thanksgiving.  But the truth of the boredom is there, like the wolves at the edge of the forest, or the bacteria waiting to invade.