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My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”

Pints.

“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn…

(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a q…