have three children of my own now. When my oldest daughter was eight—near the same age I was when I watched my parents’ parties—she and I drove past a sign, “Spirit Shoppe.” “For a minute,” she said, “I thought we could buy a ghost there.” A sudden dawn. Yes, we could. Ghosts are exactly what we’re buying at the liquor store. Booze is haunted. We drink what’s fermented and distilled. We drink the dead, and, even past the point of dead, something so fermented it lives again in those of us who swallow these spirits.