A History of (Mostly) Healthy Drinking

It feels like I’m the only one of my friends left.

There was an Illinois basketball game playing over the bar at Gunner Buc’s Pub and Grub, a greasy spoon watering hole out off I-57 in Mattoon, Illinois, a joint where you could get a bacon cheeseburger and a bucket of Bud Lights for 10 bucks. I was home for Christmas my senior year of college. I’d just turned 21 years old. And I was sitting there with my dad.

And we were having a beer together.

I did not drink in high school. This was not any moral stand, or some sort of pious abstention. So much of your high school experience revolves around whoever your friends turn out to be — something I constantly keep front of mind as my own children approach high school — and my closest friends were the nerdy scholastic bowl kids who took a certain pride in not drinking, in studied contrast to everyone else in our class. (I think we kind of considered it our own form of counterculture rebellion, almost punk rock in our dorky very-not-punk way, to not drink.) So I didn’t drink. My first sip of alcohol wasn’t until late in my sophomore year of college, at a Daily Illini party; it was a Bartles & James wine cooler, followed shortly afterward by a Zima. Most of my junior year was spent catching up. On my 21st birthday, the night that Gary Gaetti hit a grand…