According to a STUDY conducted at the University of Reading, drinking three glasses of champagne a week may protect your brain from the ravages of dementia.

Most sources that share the results of the study are quick to include disclaimers. As one who tends to err on the side of caution, I’m inclined to do the same, but not this time.

Champagne is a lumen to the mind. Its bubbles are self-authenticating orbs that allow us to be who we are and exist as we should. It fully engages us in the present moment; it is neither an encumbrance of past experience nor a conduit of future anxiety.

Dining in my childhood home was a study in opaque realism:

A drab, olive cloth covered the kitchen table. Its velvet was soft to the touch and its tasseled edge whimsical, but its purpose rested solely in the ability to protect. Starchy goldenrod drapes covered the dining room window. A damask pattern weaved frivolously through their gathers, but there was no mistaking the fact that the drapes existed for the purpose of keeping out drafts. Stagnant with the perfume of dust and neglect, the glint of my grandmother’s mismatched silver was carefully extinguished from plain view by a tattered wooden box buried inside a kitchen drawer.

Drinking, by contrast, cast a beacon of light into all of the shadowy corners:

Our home had two glassware sets designated for everyday use: The Flowers of the Month and The Twelve Days of Christmas. The Flowers of the Month were teardrop-shaped with sturdy bases and adorned with the image of a flower and poetic inscription. The Twelve Days of Christmases were slender by comparison and boasted colorful vignettes depicting the daily gifts of their namesake song.

Drinking imbued my life with a casual, elegant incongruence:

The white glow of December’s narcissus, frosty lemonade, and fifth-grade maths fractions in the light of early spring.

The festive blue of September’s morning glory, milk with chocolate syrup resting on the ledge of the dining room piano, and practicing scales for an upcoming recital.

Eleven pipers piping, cold raspberry kool aid ablaze with kitchen window sunbeams, and sidewalk roller skating on a late summer morning.

Years passed and glasses broke. I mourned, but any lingering tears over cast-off shards were fast replaced by adolescent sensibilities, the social rites of young adulthood, and eventually, occasional toasts of champagne served in ethereal flutes.

If left to my own preference, beauty would be always defined as a study of contrasts: warm-and-cool hued pairings, unrefined silk with rusted netting, dissonant phrasing with melodious accents, subtlety amidst distortion. Can we ever fully grasp the intrinsic value of something if all we know is more of the same? Experience shapes perception. Abstraction sharpens it.

Outside of champagne, where else can optimism and ephemera coexist so effortlessly? Bubbles rise to the promise of new and fade into a fluidity of calm and acceptance. The best thoughts and opportunities, however fleeting, know relevance because someone cared about them and eternity because someone remembered them. Celebrations pool in the myriad possibilities that lie in wait just for the corking.

Things constantly arrange and rearrange themselves in accordance with nature, and the end results cannot always be quantified by the sum of their initial variables. If they are, then perhaps they shouldn’t be. For someone experiencing memory impairment, dementia, or the loss of what once was familiar, recognizing the beauty in this makes life just a bit less cruel.

When everything is over, every last broken glass fared infinitely better than the obsolete glory of my grandmother’s silver, which was eventually uprooted from the confines of its kitchen drawer prison and banished to an indeterminate sentence inside a sealed and unlabeled moving box.

If I hope for anything, it’s that an abundance of kind memories will continually and freely pour into my life, and that my glassware will be consistently filled and overflown throughout the end of my days.

A votre santé. Cheers!