NOSTALGIA NEEDS SERVICE

NOSTALGIA NEEDS SERVICE

I am getting a lonely nostalgia lately as the sale of my house becomes imminent. I don't exactly know why since I haven't lived there in two years but I guess I have secretly harbored the thought that I may have returned there at some time. And the thought that it would be gone lends a certain permanence to my marital separation; a separation which I had thought I was quite 'sanguine' about for quite some time now. Because throughout this 'separation', I have always had access to the house, however limited, and despite all of the rights to it which I have given up. I was always granted access to use the laundry, to get to 'things' and to see the dogs and the 'kid' when she was home and I guess when the wife wanted or needed me there.

But in a few months, at most five, it will have been sold. And when the wife finally gets another house, it will be all hers and I will, for the first time in over thirty years, be property less. Growing up in Brooklyn, I never originally grew up wedded to the idea of property. I had always been an apartment dweller. But now that the greater part of my life has been spent as the landed rather than the landless gentry, it feels strange. I mean, I don't even own land anymore, having ceded the last of it to my friend in order to pay debts.

And the magnitude of the fall from 'Grace', if that is what you could call it, is finally becoming real to me. Why this should be, I am not sure and I suppose it is just a brief phase of adjustment that I have to go through, a period that I had not previously anticipated because I had not truly lived through it before.

'One day at a time' had not truly prepared me for this. Not that it hasn’t. But I had not yet lived through that stage of loss for this particular occasion and now since it is coming I guess I have to prepare myself for it.

I'm glad and fortunate that I recognized this on this snowy morning, not only fighting the fatigue of a poor night's sleep but the fatigue of pushing a foot of snow away from my car before the snow plow got to my driveway this morning in my vain attempt to get to my AA meeting this morning. So I am physically exhausted as well and then these thoughts of loss wheedle their way into my mind and bore into my serenity like a boll weevil undermining my well being and mental quietude. And I leave my car, freed from the snow but I personally feel imprisoned by these new thoughts of loss.

So 'move a muscle change a thought' as one of the adages goes and I called Aaron to ask him to come with me to the meeting that I am going to chair at Holbrook tonight. It is the first time that I am doing this as a service commitment. It is to volunteer to present the AA program to newly detoxed residents of this in patient psych unit and introduce them to the tenets of AA and what we offer, from my personal perspective.

After all, I cannot truly proselytize. I'm no good at that. I'm not born again, I just personally found myself, not religion. I can only present my story of how I found how to deal with my own alcoholism and how they might deal with their addictions.

I had been to this meeting run by John last week and these were surely a raw group of individuals, not just wet behind the ears but still with wrinkles on the skin. These people still did not have all of their faculties about them. It is sometimes difficult to reach folks who have trouble thinking because they are still in a drug induced fog. They are not quite mentally ambulatory. But you have to start somewhere and sometime and that is why I am volunteering. But I would be less than honest if I said that I was confident in my ability to sway or convince anyone of the benefits of AA. And then I have to remind myself that AA is 'not a program for people who need it, but a program for people who want it'. I can only do my best to introduce what AA stands for and offers and then they have to want it. I'm not selling anything. That is the advantage I have when I walk out of that conference room at the end of the hour. I am truly my own audience.

But going there tonight will help me not only to stay sober, but it will help Aaron who will go with me, to stay sober also. It will also enable me to deal with these troubling feelings that I have so ably squelched during this past year and now have to deal with because events are rapidly coming to a head on its own time table not mine. So I have to begin to deal with it on its own terms.

Not so hard when you recognize it, acknowledge it, deal with it and place it in its proper cubby hole and go on with your own life.

© res 1/11/11