Cheap Sangria

When young, we were cheap drunks.

A last minute party was thrown together at someone's apartment, almost always a walk up, and we gathered to eat snack food and drink cheap sangria and solve the problems of the world with the arrogance of youth and the certainty that we could do a better job. We hung banners from the windows, protested against ROTC on campus and the war, smoked joints and woke the following day with headaches and regrets. We worked for peace, for candidates we believed in, and we dismissed the older generation with ease. We had slogans and protest songs and were part of a greater good that our parents didn't understand. We sat in and we marched, wore tattered jeans and feathers, we were about change and creating a better, safer, more free society. We scorned marriage in favor of open committment, celebrated sex, promised not to judge ourselves or each other. We worked but only at jobs we saw as worthy and apart from the establishment. Our heroes were folk singers, our values humane and our lives uncomplicated. We reveled in the disappointment of our elders at our lost causes and our youth. We favored communal living and universal health care, sought a more equitable playing field, vowed to never surrender our idealism or compromise our ethics, situational though they were. And we never learned much from our mistakes or defeats except to try harder - there was too much we didn't know or refused to accept. We spent weekend mornings with the old veterans at work in their Victory Gardens, pulling weeds, picking vegetables and listening to stories of France and the invasion at Normandy. We gave spare change when asked, donated what little we could afford to the homeless, traveled by bus or subway and took vows of integrity and sincerity to music and friends. Though we didn't know it, we were like each prior generation, we felt brave and misunderstood and driven to want to make a difference.

We were cheap drunks, quick to criticize and fight injustice as we saw it, tolerant to an extravagant excess, poor and mostly happy. Life had many surprises and changes waiting down the roads we would travel and looking back would become a luxury. Cheap sangria gave way to good scotch, idealism grew and matured into realism, marriage beckoned and divorce followed, our liberalism made a long, slow right turn and then we were grown and living in the world we had vowed to change but which had changed us. Some of us stayed on the path of conviction and some wearied and sold out, some took the experimental drugs a few levels higher and drifted away into addiction, some died and were mourned, some succeeded and some failed. The ordinary-ness of life was too much for some and too little for others.

And now we are older and wiser and still fighting the battles we've discovered in ourselves.