Our August Seminar on Drinking

Guest speakers are a regular feature of evening life at Kendal. They come to share their ideas and lives with us, and they arrive representing all sorts of interests and backgrounds. Just this past year, for example, our roster of speakers has included business people, educators, local historians, collectors, poets, hobbyists, directors of philanthropic organizations, story tellers, physicians, and travelers. They acquaint us with facets of our world that our daily conversations with friends, our viewing of television, our reading, and our web-surfing are not likely to leave us informed about. And we recognize this. That's why it's not surprising that these evening talks, usually lasting an hour or so (including Q&A), are widely attended.

Part of the attractiveness of the speakers' program is that it isn't thematic. Speakers are scheduled as their availability allows. Consequently, one guest might talk of a school for clowns, the next about the origins of the universe, and a third about genealogical research. We don't get in a rut. Across the course of a year there's something for almost everybody. But sometimes something surprising happens, an unplanned linkage occurs, and unexpectedly we have . . . a seminar!

That's what happened earlier this month when, within the space of a little more than a week, two speakers, quite unknown to each other and without any prior planning, told us about beverages – with particular attention to alcoholic beverages. The result was a conversation among a number of residents about the character and implications of American drinking habits.

The first speaker, a chemist by training, told us about the importance of water for human life (no startling news there, of course!) and then identified the six major ways in which humans have made water more potable and tasty. The earliest device, perhaps as much as 10,000 years old, was beer, with wine coming along several thousand years later. Distilled beverages followed, and then arrived coffee, tea, and . . . yes . . . soft drinks. As he guided us on this historical excursion, our speaker enlivened the evening with anecdotes, forays into molecular structures (he had some building-block models to pass around), and bottled samples of his subjects. He gave us an information-packed hour of fun and instruction, and by the time it was over we all had a fuller sense of how the marvelous ingenuity of our forebears has supplied our own era with such a formidable array of beverages to choose from when we want to quench our thirsts.

Unlike this first speaker, our second speaker, who was an anthropologist by training, came with a policy purpose. A student of the drinking cultures of several continents, he hoped to persuade us that this country could be wiser in its choice of policies to address the problem of alcohol abuse. Again we heard amusing tales – but this time of African workers celebrating at the end of a long day of labor and of American college administrators coping with student resistance to under-age drinking laws. Again anecdotes enlivened the presentation, but they were chosen in part to challenge the assumption that rigorous anti-drinking laws are the best way for a society to address the harm that comes from excessive alcohol consumption.

Both talks were followed by lively (but never heated) discussions, as residents sought more information or clarifications from the speakers, or chose to speak of events in their own lives that bore on the subjects of the talks. The only element missing in our unplanned "classroom" experience was the opportunity to see the two speakers on-stage together, discussing (with us as participants, of course) the character of drinking in America. But even without such a fantasy face-off (and perhaps "face-off" is the wrong term: for all I know, they would have agreed on most points), we had contrived to create for ourselves a summer seminar. Those of us who attended the presentations are wiser for the experience.