Triple Sec, Vodka, Port, Whiskey, Rum.  They all go together, right?  All at once and in a suntan lotion bottle for easy carrying?  Doesn’t work well in the summer, though, as someone might ask to borrow your lotion and then wonder later why they got sunburned AND reeked of alcohol.  This was me, briefly, at thirteen.  Escaping from emotions due to tremendous losses I had yet to mourn, I turned to my mom’s rarely used alcohol cabinet occasional mornings BEFORE school.  This went on for a few months, and then one day I ceremoniously dumped the fresh mixture down the drain and did not drink again until I was nineteen and had one drink at a baby shower.  At the time, I didn’t yet know that I, too, was pregnant, and so I worried about that one drink for nine months.  Thankfully, my son was and is a healthy, strapping man.

It would be another four years, when I was 23, that I would drink again, albeit is socially and casually, and rarely to a state of drunkenness.  I never drank during pregnancy or nursing, and I never amassed any bottles worthy of creating an “alcohol cabinet.”  And I never drank before five o’clock.  Wine was my drink of choice, and the occasional gin and tonic if someone else was buying.  So what’s the problem, right?

Well, lately, I’ve been drinking a bit more.  It’s only wine, (and the occasional gin-and-tonic-if-someone-else-is-buying), but I don’t seem to have that “wait until the clock strikes five” mentality that so many people do.  If I want a glass of wine with lunch, I have one.  If I want champagne with breakfast, I have some.  If I want to drink alone, I drink alone.  But what I’m noticing, is that I may, just may be drinking more and more often.  I don’t think there’s a problem, but I did want to get these thoughts out on cyber-paper to review.