On one of my last flights before the pandemic I was upgraded to first class, the highlight of which for me (and most everybody else from what I could tell) was free drinks starting from the moment you sat down. The woman next to me ordered a glass of wine, which wasn’t anything unusual. I also ordered a glass of wine. The thing about first class wine is that it tends to be a big glass. I think some people drink on planes because they are anxious about flying, or because flying is in itself a special occasion - a break from routine. I drank on planes because the high stimulation, sensory overload of the social arena of the airport and the plane, combined with the stress of whatever work I was traveling for, left me needing a coping mechanism. I have found that flight attendants generally don’t question alcohol orders and they figure the bigger the pour the less frequently they’ll be called back.
My seat mate and I didn’t say cheers or make small talk as we sipped our glasses of airplane wine. I took a sip, felt the familiar sensations, and let out a deep breath. The woman next to me drank quickly as she typed away into her laptop. When the flight attendant passed by again, the woman asked for another glass. “You could fill this one a little more,” she said. It was a forward request, but the flight attendant obliged unfazed, handing the woman an extra generous glass of wine, which, I thought was easily the volume of two normal glasses. I might have felt a little judgment at the boldness of this woman’s drinking. But I mostly felt an immediate empathy for her. She knew what she wanted - or what she needed - and I admired her ability to ask for it directly. The only reason I didn’t want to order another glass was because I planned to have some wine when I got home. The wine at home is better, I thought - I can wait for it.
When she ordered her third glass, the woman stopped the flight attendant before she walked away and said, “Actually, could you just bring me the wine in a water glass?”
“Excuse me?” The flight attendant looked genuinely confused.
“I just want a water glass full of wine,” the woman clarified, matter of factly, as if this was the way she always ordered wine.
The flight attendant paused - she seemed momentarily thrown off by this request. I have seen many heavy drinkers on airplanes, and I can only imagine how many more the flight attendant had witnessed, but this seemed to be a first for her. After a few seconds, she snapped back into form. “Sure thing,” she said, “I’ll be right back with that.” I could imagine the flight attendant commenting under her breath to her colleagues as she filled a water glass full of wine in the galley.
Wow, I thought. I found my empathy for the woman sitting next to me somewhat buried under the reflexive judgmental condemnation happening in my head. This woman had already consumed at least a half a bottle of wine in her two large glasses, and now she wanted a water glass full of wine? And she was asking for it openly, just like that? As if it was a perfectly normal request? I drink a lot, I thought, but I’m still working on my first oversized glass. As much as my gut reaction was to judge this woman, I also felt a connection with her. I felt I understood her situation. Or, if not her situation, the feeling she was having when the words “water glass” came out of her mouth. It reminded me of the way I might ask for, or demand, or scarf down food in a moment of extreme hunger. When the physical sensation of need is so strong that it overrides any sense of social etiquette, or modesty, or perhaps even dignity. But it was deeper than that. I didn’t just understand on a metaphorical level. I understood on a visceral level.
I know so well the feeling of sipping from a wine glass and seeing the bottom appear almost instantly, practically on the first sip, and thinking, “No way that was a full five ounce pour.” I know the little simmer of rage at the thought that the waiter has short changed you on the $15 dollar glass. Or the feeling of resentment as a table mate pours freely from the nearly empty bottle as if nobody else is wanting any more. Or the feeling of anxiety as you watch your host divide a bottle of wine into five waiting glasses and you aren’t sure if there is another bottle in the house (am I the only one who brought wine? What kind of people don’t have at least a few bottles of wine on hand all the time?) These are not feelings of, “Wow, I’m really enjoying this delightful wine and I wouldn’t mind another glass.” It’s more like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t refill this glass as soon as it’s empty” - complete with escalating heartbeat, a sense of looming anxiety, and a deeply rooted feeling that something is not quite right.
There was a pragmatic calmness to the woman’s wine ordering, though, that didn’t seem immediately relatable to me. I understood the idea of ordering wine in a water glass, but I would never actually do it. I wondered at what point the woman had crossed that line from ordering two or three glasses, to ordering four or five, to just coming out and asking for a water glass. Was she worried that ordering four or five normal size glasses would look worse than ordering wine in a water glass? That seemed unlikely. Was she worried that the flight attendant wouldn’t be back to offer another glass quickly enough? Or, worse, that the plane would start descending and they’d have to stop the service before she got that fourth glass? Or perhaps she was not worried about anything, perhaps she didn’t care what anybody else thought and she was just being honest with herself about how much wine she intended to drink. That made me wonder what had happened in this woman’s life that she stopped caring. Was there a day when she just said, “screw it”?
The question I didn’t ask myself at the time was, “Why do I care about this stranger’s drinking habits?” I know, when I’m choosing to be self aware, that the things I judge others for are the things I am most self conscious about in myself. At that time, I was not choosing to be self aware. My primary take away from that flight was not to contemplate if I would one day be ordering my wine in a water glass, or to reflect on how thin the line was between my own behavior and hers, but instead to think, with some sense of relief, that’s what someone with a drinking problem looks like, and that’s not me. It was as if the woman had given me a new bar by which to judge myself. “Well, I might have had one too many last night, but hey at least I’m not ordering my wine in a water glass.” It was a new item to add to the list of reasons that I wasn’t an alcoholic - the list that I would review in my head on a somewhat regular basis as I enjoyed wine (in a proper wine glass) almost every evening.
(They say these buttons impact reader’s behavior…)
Once, many moons ago, I was talking a walk with a friend of a friend who was a recovering alcoholic and I asked her what the difference was between me, a person who has to finish every bottle she opens, and her, an "alcoholic." She told me that before that bottle was finished, she'd have to procure the next one. And I guess that made me feel a little better?
Wow, it's funny how we use the behaviour of others to justify or excuse our own. Thanks for sharing this story.