I’m running out of things you don’t already know about me, but here’s something. I never drank anything alcoholic, all through high school and college when everyone else was bombed out of their minds, until I started working in a children’s shoe store.

It wasn’t the job; it was my boss at the time, as salty a man as I’ve ever known. At the close of each work day, he’d hand me some money and ask me to walk down the block and pick up a six pack. He’d drink two and I’d drink one, and he’d take the rest home. I never had a taste for beer before those happy days.

By no coincidence whatsoever, I was never overweight until I’d been working in that store for a few months. I was a skinny kid, and I never knew what it felt like to put on extra pounds. Now it’s hard to remember what it’s like without them, because even though I don’t drink much any more, I still have the weight. If I had someone to drink with after work, I’d probably be even worse off. But I don’t do the bar scene. That’s one place I could never get myself to go.

My worst drinking years were in my late twenties and early thirties. I had people around me who encouraged me to drink. Some encouraged me by wanting to drink with me, while others just made me want to get drunk. The pounds I have today are more likely from that era than from those early nights in the back room of the shoe store, as I watched my boss count out the day’s receipts.

It’s not that I don’t drink at all now. It’s just that I’m alone a lot, and I can’t justify drinking alone. I’ve seen what drinking just for the sake of drinking does to a person, and to the other people in that person’s life. I know how impaired I felt when I drank too much (and I did some things I should never have done). I was never an alcoholic, and I was never tempted by drugs (even though I was in high school and college during the drug-crazed sixties). I claim no moral superiority; I’m just lucky, in a lot of ways.