I have a good friend who goes to family gatherings at which folks fall on either side of the Great American Political Divide. He says his relatives and in-laws have come to an understanding to not talk about politics, but rather to treat it “like a drunken uncle sleeping it off on the couch.” You know he’s there, you know he will be a source of vexation again when he comes to, but for the moment you can enjoy his being zonked out.

The above captures my approach to my columns. Ever since I became a columnist years ago at another newspaper, and could write about what I wanted to write about, I’ve chosen to write largely about what I call “the depth charges of being human that bubble to the surface of everyday life.” I’ve chosen to let politics snore away on the couch while I do so. Obviously, the very term “depth charges” indicates that I don’t consider what I write about to be trivial or tangential. Rather, I believe that within those aforementioned bubbles of everyday life lie the seeds of the grand scheme of things. Besides, there are plenty of people who choose to write political opinion. The world can do without one more of them in the form of me.

And now to the story.

I grew up in what I learned in later life was “the inner city,” although we who lived there called it “The Square.” Most every family was “working class” (we called ourselves “regular people”), although some of us had pieced enough together to probably qualify as lower-middle class. I had two best friends. One’s father worked in a factory. The other’s single mother was a secretary in a small factory at the end of our street, and his uncle, who lived with them, worked shift work at a gun factory. I remember the shift work part because we caught hell for making too much noise playing in the dirt side yard outside his bedroom window when he was trying to sleep.

A lot of us kids had aspirations to rise in class, although we wouldn’t have put it that way and we didn’t talk about it with each other. Often our parents, who’d spent their lifetimes experiencing what one writer called “the hidden injuries of class,” were strong sources of those aspirations.

One kid I knew idolized the kids who came from the wealthy suburb that abutted our city. I looked it up when I began writing this column, and that suburb has twice the median household income of the metro area I came from. This kid believed being from that suburb, with all its ego strokes, was about as cool as life had to offer. The rest of us kids thought he was over the top in his worship of it and those who lived there.

Some people change their perspective and trajectory as they journey through life, and some hold onto the same drives and ambitions that propelled them out of the starting gate. This kid belonged to the latter group. He armed himself with not one, but two professional degrees, and parlayed the combo into big bucks.

I didn’t see much of him over the years. He had bigger fish to fry than you could find in our mid-sized pond. I suspect some of the communities he lived in made our city’s affluent suburb seem downright downscale by comparison. One scouting report that came back to me was that he kept a pied-a-terre in Paris.

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When I went to my 40th high school reunion, he was there in all his finery. I remember noting that the tie he had on looked like it cost about as much as a weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria, meals included.

Besides being adorned with fine threads, he was also stupid drunk, seeming to me to be just shy of stumblingly and mumblingly so. A number of my classmates were firing alcohol down with some vehemence, perhaps from nervousness and/or buoyancy at being transported back to their youth and those they shared it with. This guy, however, seemed to be someone who was under the influence as a way of life. Sadly, if they gave an award to the drunkest attendee, he’d have probably won that dubious distinction.

I remember thinking that by the next reunion he’d either be dead or sober. My timing was a little off. He was alive at the time of the next reunion, but he didn’t attend. Since he had appeared to be one of those people who glory in reunions, I found myself thinking he must not have been up to it health-wise.

He died a few years after that reunion. I had enough of a conversation about his decline and death with someone who kept up with him to confirm that his health had collapsed, and to suspect drink was a major player in that collapse.

Though my old friend had not lived in our area of origin since he left for college, his obituary appeared in our hometown newspaper.

Much of the obituary read like the deceased could use it as a resume at the pearly gates, if those gates were operated by an executive search firm.

I didn’t know him well enough in later life to know the names of his children and grandchildren, but their names were listed in the obit. A good number of their first names you’d be more likely to see in the student directory of an elites’ prep school than in the old neighborhood.

There was no mention in the obituary of the understandings and resultant drives that ruled his life, nor was there any mention of things like Parisian savoirfaire, expensive liquor and exquisite neckwear, things that aided, abetted, and rewarded those understandings and drives.

My boyhood friend had long ago vowed to himself that he’d live in that affluent suburb, or a place like it, someday. He kept that vow and held it closely, right into the grave.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.