Yet even then, as young as I was, I had already begun to sense that most of the people in the bar weren’t there out of choice, that what my grandfather sought there was the company of people who could help him forget his own troubles, people who he believed would not judge him. Maybe the bar really did help him forget, but I knew with the unerring instincts of a child that he was wrong about not being judged. Our presence there felt forced, and by the time I had reached junior high school I had learned to beg off from Gramps’s invitations, knowing that whatever it was I was after, whatever it
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