The main room of the Country Club was empty. You’re alone — you and Goose on the rocks with three olives. You sit,  discard the loafers and rest bare feet on the long ottoman. Other seating — sofa, wing chairs and occasional upholstered chairs — are desolate, uninhabited. You have sat in this exact seat hundreds of times. In those times, she was most often situated at the left side of the sofa, across and somewhat diagonally to your right, You imagine her now, seated there — wearing black silk slacks, wedgewod blue cashmere sweater and black leather calf-high boots, glistening in the dim light. You study a wrinkle in the sofa pillow, as if concentrating on that impression might conceive her apparition as a movie scene might, designed to create sentimental tension. Deadened somewhat by vodka, you stare at that spot, as if willing the supernatural. “How about it, sir, you ready for another?” The question was a slap in the face — thankfully. The bartender was back in three minutes, with a fresh dose of liquid intemperance. Drinking alone isn’t the healthiest use of time, but the hard stuff does seem to unleash creative thought, at least according to psychologists who point to legendary literary alcoholics. Names like Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway, Millay, Poe, O’Neill, O. Henry, Parker (Dorothy), Cheever, Capote, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Coleridge, Chandler, London, Melville, O’Hara, Waugh, Yeats and hundreds of others. Reportedly, history’s first recorded alcoholic writer was tragedian playwright Aeschylus, circa 525 B.C. Perhaps in his cups, he wrote this rather somber, yet encouraging reflection: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” For the most part, serious novelists and playwrights are a miserable lot. And why not? Generally obsessed by what’s wrong in Man’s Nature, they yearn to right those wrongs. They search to find purity amid a sea of depravity. They despise suffering and the inequality of existence. Irrationally, they seek to know the unknowable — perhaps to be God-like? Even so — you never fault them for irrigating their brains. Especially those who toiled as recently as the 19th century, when monarchies and aristocracies still trampled on freedom. When disease, slavery, hunger and suffocating hardship ruled the landscape as they did for the entirety of human history. Now you’re inclined to imagine how Charles Dickens or Jack London might regard and comment on the rampaging suffering of the 21st century. Either one would be appalled that 5% of Americans do not own a cell phone. That typical poor households subsist on only one car, air conditioning, two TV’s and DVD player. That mean spirited citizens dare to oppose government paid abortions and illegal immigration. That university students must bravely tolerate the abuse of offensive speech. Of course, the world doesn’t need a Dickens to tell this sorrowful story. Modern media companies delight in the suffering. They delight in promoting class envy, race baiting and fake news. And, unlike serious writers, they do it without benefit of the hard stuff. Sober as judges, they stir, stir, stir the pot. Meanwhile, with the realization that suffering is eternally omnipresent, you stir your third Goose and manage to sit at a solitary table in what by now has become a nearly deserted dining room. You don’t recall the meal in any detail, but do remember Aeschylus. Although he lived over 2500 years ago, this Greek dramatist left behind a valuable lesson for all mankind. Given a trusting attitude, pain and suffering offer the opportunity for wisdom and grace. Anyone can drink to that. You for one.