’Twas the night before Halloween and a thick fog rolled in. So thick, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone the lamppost whose black paint had faded to a mottled grey, thanks to the constant sandblasting by the wind off the Chesapeake Bay. So that’s how I ended up in the ER, with a goose egg on my forehead, on account of I’d been running, and smacked right into the damned thing. “Why were you running in the fog?” one might ask. A valid question.
I’d had a phone call about seven p.m. “A wine emergency,” my friend Riley Wilson proclaimed. Riley was eight-and-one-half months pregnant. (Don’t ask me to convert that to weeks…I birthed my babies when everything was calculated in trimesters, not days) and for obvious reasons she’d sworn off all things alcoholic. So at the end of her terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, she called me to drink the wine for her. That’s my motto, “I drink for those who can’t.” I’m a good friend that way.
