“Hands Off My Wine”

It could have been my mantra. My dad, a jazz buff, came home with the new Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross album as soon as it came out in 1959. My favorite track was “Gimme That Wine,” although I was still in high school and didn’t start drinking until I got to college. The chorus spoke for me. “Gimme that wine, Unhand that bottle; 'Cause I can't cut loose without my juice.” I needed that first drink or two to party.

In college and for years after, I drank scotch in the winter.  Summers, I was a vodka guy.  Sometime in my late 20’s, I migrated to wine. It was still me when I came to Zen.  My youthful days of raucous partying were faint memories, but I wasn’t giving up my wine. When I started preparing for Tokudo, the head shaving ceremony, first step on the Zen priest path, I found myself studying the Buddhist Precepts. Fortunately, number five, Not Using Intoxicants, had been watered-down, had to be, I figured. When Zen landed on the West Coast – Maezumi Roshi in LA and Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco – during the hippie heydays of sex, drugs and rock and roll, how far would they have gotten if they’d demanded that Zen newbies abandon drugs and alcohol? Some accommodation was necessary if Zen was to find a new home. How far would they have gotten with me almost three decades later when I finally got around to daily zazen and began looking for others to sit with?

“Not abusing intoxicants,” I could live with. No problem. Whatever the excesses of my youth, they were in the past. Until Claude challenged me. He thought I drank too much at the celebration following my Tokudo. I didn’t agree. “So quit for a year,” he said. I accepted the challenge. I didn’t have a drink for eleven months – that was enough; I’d made my point – except for two glasses of wine, each one on the occasion of a dinner in Manhattan with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years.

I’d learned a lot about myself from that plunge into non-drinking. My wine had occupied a larger place in my imagination than I’d realized, but lessons learned, I was happy to get back to my wine and didn’t think of it again for thirty years. It was only after my carotid artery surgery when my guardian angel, who’d gotten me to a top surgeon, steered me to his nutritionist. I went with trepidation and an aversion to diets, but this was a savvy nutritionist. No diets, just a permanent change in lifestyle. She wasn’t going to ask me to do anything that would lead me to bolt. She saw the look on my phase when she suggested that I might give up my wine and pivoted, never mentioned it again. I embraced intermittent fasting, lost my thirty pounds, and haven’t gained them back.

That was almost ten years ago. This Spring, teaching the Buddhist Precepts, I found myself looking again at number five, still enjoying my glass of wine at dinner, and wondering again if maybe things in American Zen hadn’t gotten too loose.  That’s where I was when I found myself, quite unexpectedly, working with a nutritionist again. We’ll get to that story next.