NOT THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN

NOT THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN

Sometimes I feel like sleeping in because my daily routine has finally gotten me exhausted. At least, that is my perception. And so I think that I require an extra half hour or more of sleep. But my body, so accustomed to the habitual 5:30-6AM  awakenings  unfairly jolts me awake regardless of my long hankered for extra thirty minutes' snooze and  without warning, my eyes just pop open, forcing me to face the day, "ready or not here I come". And to face it right that usually involves starting with an early AA meeting. 

But since my body is coercing me into consciousness I think today, I will use the opportunity to sample a different venue and go to a Beginner's Meeting at the local Rehab facility, the one where I used to run some Living Sober meetings. I have never attended this meeting and I have been told that it is special.

I have made up my mind that if I have to get up on this dreary Saturday morning then I am going to treat myself to something new, although I regularly attend a different beginner's meeting, it is a rather small affair, certainly by comparison to this. My meeting has on its best days maybe twelve attendees. Today the meeting had about seventy men.

I mean it is really imposing...and impressive.  And there are a lot of newly sober men there and that fact alone is important. Because, it is often said that those who are counting days are the most important men in the room. Which is not to make anyone feel better; it's just a reminder to those who might be inclined to be so world weary that sobriety is a tenuous thing. It hangs by a thread.

 

And if we take it for granted, it can be lost in an instant.  We have no right to be cavalier about it and it takes only one drink to lose our hard won sobriety! So everyone counting days is a reminder that we were once there too and we could be back there tout suite.

 

But more than the reminder of how tenuous sobriety can be, is the infinite variety of  stories that got us into the rooms of AA. They whirl in their color and diversity, in their humor and their pathos, in their hope and their despair. The stories tell us over and over why we return to the rooms.  We want to hear, to acknowledge what we are, we want to see and hear people whose stories sound like ours. 

 

They are barely the same but at the base, they are just like ours, because when all of the differences are stripped away, what is left is surely us.

 

So when Casey told us that he had just two weeks of sobriety and this was his first time at this meeting he was greeted with a round of applause.  "I'm a pretty good drinker.  I suppose that I drink about one to three scotches in an evening but I am really not the worst in my family. No, really, it's true. My father, now he can drink; my mother, boy! Really I'm not the worst in my family.

 

"I come from a long line of alcoholics and there are really bad drinkers in my family and I certainly am not the worst. You should see my brother. Now there is someone who can really drink!

 

 "But I did not realize how quickly things were deteriorating until the night before Thanksgiving. My wife was preparing a big dinner, the house was set up for 25 guests, she had worked her tail off and my brother and I were staying out of the way. 

 

"Which we did by starting in drinking a few scotches, maybe three, I thought, and, well, we got into an argument, a bad one, and, I don't even remember what we were arguing about but whatever it was, well, he wound up in the hospital. And that Thanksgiving Day my wife and my daughter were on a plane to California to be with her parents.

 

"I haven't had a drink since that day, which is why I am here today."

 

Charles, who was leading, remarked, "I suppose you did enough damage for someone who really wasn't the worst drinker in the family!", which broke the pathos of the moment with uproarious laughter.

 

I come to these meetings to hear stories like this to jar my memory.  Just as a reminder.  Alcoholics like me have "built in forgetters" that need nudging from time to time to keep them awake.

 

I do not know how long Casey's wife was holding those plane tickets in her apron. There is little doubt this wasn't a spur of the moment decision but an exasperated final straw that had  broken the back  of her stoic composure after repeated assaults on the resilience of their marriage. But that is what happens in alcoholic matrimony. She had finally had enough.

 

And the fact that Casey actually wound up in AA suggests that he had been thinking of coming in for a while. Which is a  good thing.

 

This can only be good news for Casey, his wife and child.  And it is at times like this that I wish I had been as smart as he is to have accepted the fact that I was alcoholic at as early an age as he appears to have.

 

But my regrets can only redound to his benefit and with the grace of a higher power, and if he can keep coming and find a program that works, he will be able to live a life beyond his wildest dreams. For there is no reason for him to ever have another lonely Thanksgiving again.

 

© res 12/8/2012

rev:  12/25/2012