IT WAS NOT EXACTLY PARIS

IT WAS NOT EXACTLY PARIS

“Of all the men in my life, there is only you”. A rather wistful and longing ending to a ballad sung by Nancy LaMott that I heard this afternoon set me to remembering my AA meeting today.

It was not my usual step meeting. Of late I have not been getting what I need from my men’s meetings where every week I feel I am treated to a torrent of encomiums to AA, sentiments that I do not exactly agree with although that appears to be the general conviction in the room. And how I long to have that feeling as others do, to feel that “AA saved my life and then gave me a life”.

Well AA may have saved my life, but as yet is hasn’t given me one and without exploring other venues, I’m not sure that I will find it in my usual haunts. So I have been striking out in new places. And this new meeting was a “Twelve and Twelve” (Twelve steps and Twelve traditions) meeting where we read and study the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in detail, what they mean and how we should try to apply them to our lives; how we “take” the steps. And while most groups typically read a chapter of a reading at a time and then throw the topic open to discussion, this group goes paragraph by paragraph and the reader gives his opinion of what that paragraph means to him personally in his life.

I find that particularly refreshing because it gives people who do not ordinarily share, and I count myself among those, a chance, even an obligation to share to get people out of their shells. More opinions are achieved and there is more knowledge that is shared, certainly more experience.

And today we were talking about Step Seven, “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” which follows hard on the heels of Step Six “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character” which we enumerated during “our fearless moral inventory” of Step Four. The operative word is humbly, and what it means to us and what it takes to reach the state of humility to have all those character defects removed from us.

Humility is a trait we AA’s have worked hard to bury and exhuming it can be a 'humiliating experience', something that we become more familiar with daily as we approach sobriety. As we begin to humble ourselves the first thing we feel is humiliation at the devastation that we have caused, the shame and the pain that we have been so much the cause of, in the lives of family, friends and associates.

And I was stuck with a paragraph that talked about how we often get sidetracked from learning humility in the search to satisfy our comfort needs of life first. When we do so, often to the exclusion of our spiritual needs, our stores of humility never quite get filled and we become spiritual and moral wastelands by the time we have reached “maturity”. And that then becomes our ethical superstructure for living which at best is tenuous.

But if our materialism is undermined by alcoholism, it is our alcoholism that attacks our very core material values. And then there is no underpinning for humility to support a moral design for living.

I, of course, feel this way since I am challenged daily by my material world which has collapsed around me, and it has been crumbling bit by bit over the past three years inexorably toward the point that it has reached today. And what frightens me is that sobriety has not yet allowed me the peace of mind to feel secure in the knowledge that the crumbling has stopped.

Humility does not thrive in that kind of environment except to feel that I humbly am thankful that I am not yet dead, dying, suffering from a debilitating disease or some other horrible fate. But then I sometimes, in my darker moments wish I was dead and acknowledge that I suffer from debilitating and paralyzing depression to the point where it is preventing me from pursuing jobs, and perhaps there are diseases I will not even investigate for fear of running up a mountain of debt that I can ill afford to spend.

So much for working on humility. But then there was a woman at this meeting who suffered from the same delusion of pursuing life for its material goods; a good home, private schools for her kids, summer camps, fancy cars and more. And then 2008 happened and the unthinkable happened to her and she lost the house.

And the fancy cars, and private schools and camps for the kids. And now she says humbly, that she thanks God from preventing worse things from happening. And I can see her point except we did not truly get into as to whether all the shoes have really dropped. I would love to think that everyone around that table is a successful seventh stepper but since we can only share for two minutes... pardon my cynicism. In this woman’s case, I hear more zapatos in the wings.

Which returns me to Nancy LaMott whose song triggered this whole remembrance. As we approached the meeting’s end with the five minute “anyone with a burning desire to share” ritual, a woman piped up that she felt that she was not being honest with the men she dated and that was her burning need as to why she needed to be at this meeting. She was not a regular attendee and she really should have been in Manhattan by now, where she lived, but needed to be at a meeting to deal with this “honesty” issue. “I have more than enough men who date me and usually I am brutally honest with them about whether I am dating other men, or should they propose to me I am honest about my desire not to marry, or if there are any other “issues”.

I turned to get a good look at this woman, blondish? in her mid fifties, slim, face getting lined but handsome in a maturing-lined sort of way. But after the claim that she had more than enough men dating her with marriage proposals galore, all of which she had to fend off with a baseball bat, my interest was piqued. She was particularly upset because she had come up to Connecticut from her NYC haunt to spend the weekend with some new? beau and now she was feeling guilty because she had not told him that she was dating other men in the city.

And not only did she not want to tell him, but she did not think it was any of his business and she did not want a marriage proposal out of him anyway, she had too many of those already and they always foundered as all her relationships did on the fact that she spent so much time with her AA business. With 20 years sober this had certainly become a priority and the usual complaint was that she loved AA more than she loved the men.
How do you answer that to someone who doesn’t get it? “YES I Do? If that’s the way you see it and that is a problem with you, then I probably do love AA more than you.”

But she was tired of feeling guilty of “hiding” her dating, AA had made her so scrupulously honest that she could not allow herself the luxury of this “privacy”. And she suffered for it. And the scene was wearing her out and truly the only man she loved ….her voice trailed off.

She became quiet for a moment and began to cry a bit, pulled herself together and then admitted that what she was doing was what her husband had done to her fifteen years ago just before they got divorced.
And yes, he was the only man she ever truly loved and now she thinks that divorce was the worst mistake she ever made.

As I absorbed this peculiar scenario I tried to remember where I had heard this before when I remembered that Maltby and Shire* song, “Life Story” and thought she’s singing it right here, right now. Life imitating art! There is truly nothing new under the sun.

….(“But I’m not complaining”)

©res 3/27/2011

LIFE STORY
…..
…And in the evening at my window
As I watch Jersey growing dim
I feel this troubling emotion
Summed up in this notion
I wished I’d stayed with him

Lord knows each day with him was madness
As I have spent my life maintaining

But more and more I recall the joy
My golden dreamer
My lost boy
Our life was life in the twilight zone
But no worse than a life alone

But oh,
Well I chose my way
And I’m not complaining

* “Closer Than Ever”, Maltby and Shire