CLOSER THAN EVER

CLOSER THAN EVER

It didn't get any better as I had hoped it would after attending my fourth AA meeting in two days.

After the massacre in Newtown, CT^* Friday, I knew that I would be attending more than my usual fill of AA meetings around town to quiet my inordinately agitated mind. I was in shock and my usual cynicism was entirely inadequate to the task of fending off the onslaught of unwanted emotion from the event.

My daughter had been in town for an appointment and as she returned it had come on the news and its direness struck us both to the point of speechless stupor. We were dumbstruck in disbelief.  The insanity that seemed to infect the rest of the country had finally come home to roost in the bedroom communities of Connecticut.

But how close it had come had not registered until my wife returned from work and she mentioned that one of her colleagues had a daughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School who was in the kindergarten class next to the one in which the children had been slaughtered. And moreover, she had known one of the children who was killed!

Then yesterday morning I went to a men's meeting where one of my friends reported that the wife of his employee was the psychologist at the school who was killed trying to stop the gunman.

At this morning's meeting another friend mentioned that his son had a playmate who was killed in the incident; and this afternoon I returned from a meeting at which the chairwoman told us that one of the little girls who used to take riding lessons at her stable was one of the victims and another guy was telling us of another young boy whom he knew who was also killed.

Jack, who was telling us about that young boy, was saying about how his son and his friends were asking questions that you would never have thought would be asked like:

What are they going to do with their beds? and, What are they going to do with the Christmas presents that the parents bought for the kids that were killed?

Innocent but pathetic questions and, no doubt, probably, the same questions the adults are asking themselves between beating themselves up for reasons they have no good reason to be beating themselves up for.

When Mary Beth opened the meeting, she said that although it was a meeting about Step Four, it was clear there was no way that this meeting was going to pass without mentioning the dreadful events of the past several days. And she went on to tell us how she supervises horseback riding lessons for these little kids and how one of them was due for a lesson this morning until they realized that she was one of the kindergarteners who was killed on Friday.

And she broke down in tears.

This event has made many things clear to me in my evolving sobriety and about what things used to be like.  And I know why I drank so much. It was to avoid all of this pain. I know that in the past during events like these I would have been plenty sarcastic about all of the people who acted so devastated about all of the children who were killed and how they took the situation to heart.

My attitude would have been to say "buck up"! "Suck it up! People out there are crazy, you can't predict these things and you've got to pick yourself up and move on!"

I'm now thinking that how can anyone be anything but paralyzed?  How can anyone think of anything but death, doom and destruction? How can anyone who has their lives invested in their children even think of moving on? But then I think, how else can one move but on? What else can one do? Nothing else will serve. Standing still, howling at the wind, taking up arms, taking up drink, nothing else will make anything better...really.

Just to be able to feel the pain and seek relief in the comfort of others, I never believed that having that available would be of any use to me. But I was wrong. I now wonder what do people do who don't have groups like I have in AA to spill their grief at? How do they manage to cope? The pain they must go through! And the loneliness!  

If there is anything that these past few days has taught me it is how closely we are connected to each other. People with whom I scarcely have any relationship I find are but two handshakes from me and to this sorry event.  

I used to believe that there were greater distances between me and the rest of the world; which is to say that I wanted to believe that was the case. But if distance and time become practically meaningless how can I face down such reality? That was the case when Stephen Jay Gould, (noted Harvard Paleobiologist), realized that he was but three handshakes away from Charles Darwin.

And when I thought that the shootings in Portland, Oregon had separated me in space I had to remind myself that my wife's best friend lives close to that mall and could have been a victim there.

So escape into alcohol is no longer an option, and, of course, its value as an alternative to dealing with reality is, as it always was, tenuous.  A drink never made any situation better, and surely in these circumstances a drink for me is no solution to the pain of the reality.

The President just said in a memorial speech for the victims, that in the end, all we have is the love we have for our children and each other. The material success and wealth is but a pale shadow of what is real and important in this world.  And if we cannot protect what is most important in this world, then all we have is a pale shadow. And a pale memory.

My pride and progress is that I am here to be able to feel today and mourn for those who lost their loved ones.  I would rather have been able to celebrate their greatest fortune. But that was not to be.

But for me to be able to be here, in the moment, at the ready, to help and be of service, if needed, is what I can do today.

And feel.

©  res 12/16/2012

rev: 12/25/2012

^{*Shooting of 20 kindergarteners and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012}

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

 

DEPENDENT ON SPIRITUAL CONDITIONING

DEPENDENT ON  SPIRITUAL CONDITIONING

 

This morning I went to the first religious service that I have been to in over four years and it was not even a Jewish service, it was Episcopalian.  That is the denomination of our resident priest in AA, George, and since today was the first Sunday of Advent it was designated Recovery Sunday in honor of those who are in recovery, the families of those in recovery and to those in need of recovery. I thought that the intent was wonderful  for this parish to celebrate.

And in honor of this first service, our resident priest was to give the sermon on his recovery both in AA and what it meant to him as a priest specifically.  George got sober in the mid 1990's after twenty years in the priesthood and after about thirty years of drinking. It was during a spiritual crisis that he got sober. In fact, he came to AA, as is most typical, after a complete loss of spirituality.

He had become a nightly drinker, alone in his home, and he felt that although he could tend to his flock's spiritual needs well enough, he did not feel that God would ever find it in his heart to be able to forgive his deeds and misdeeds, such was the state of his spiritual condition. He was of such intellect and  perceptiveness that he could minister to families in the most dire straits and attend to their spiritual necessities capitally but when he looked in the mirror he was sure that for him God saw nothing worthwhile saving.

Then one day two members of his parish noted his despondency and aware that he drank a lot, invited him to attend some AA meetings in the very church at which he was a deacon. Such was the sinking condition of his spirituality that he agreed to accompany them.

And there, on a Saturday, in a crowded room filled with fifty men he listened.  And he heard men who were once despondent, down and out drunks, who had lost everything, money, jobs, family, who had become happy, joyous and free. How?

They had admitted that they were powerless over alcohol and their lives had become unmanageable; they came to believe that a Power greater than themselves could restore their sanity and they made a decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God as they understood Him.

And all they had to do was to have a "desire to stop drinking".  And George did and has had each day since then. He found in that room and in many others, men sharing their love of one another, of the principles of how to live life without rancor, with simplicity, and understanding and to learn to live in peace with their fellow Man. Here he learned all that he had failed to learn in all the years he spent in the seminary, in graduate school and as a priest and deacon.

As a result he found that he had to radically amend his theological view of God and even his interpretation of the Bible! All because he got sober in AA. All because he had become a spiritual being in AA; all because he had come to see God in a more ecumenical way.

He saw people in the rooms from all kinds of ritual backgrounds who "accepted a God of their understanding" getting sober next to people of diametrically opposed or at least radically different religious practices. Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Christians all in a room together each sober by the grace of Gods of their understanding.

Clearly God must be great and grand and a lot more forgiving than he had previously conceived of him. So George rethought his theology. And now his God and the God of the Testaments as George reads them today is one of kindness and forgiveness and patience that is infinite. But not necessarily of infinite power to do anything to and for anybody. He does not believe that God manages the quotidian life of people. They have to do that for themselves. He is One who has bestowed free will on Man to allow Man to make choices for good or bad.

We can choose to be good or evil. We can be generous or penurious. We can be crotchety or happy. We can be drunk or we can be sober. But God will always be forgiving, for his forgiveness is infinite. He is not vengeful. But it is our choice to become spiritual.

And one of things that George found in the rooms is that like God you can always come back regardless of whether you are sober or not. For all you need is a desire to stop drinking and you are always welcomed back.  Even if you haven't yet stopped. Even if you are 'auditing' the rooms.

So George returned to the church with a renewed understanding of the love of God and the infinite patience of God's acceptance of Man; that as long as Man accepts God, God loves Man back. It is our choice.

You can listen to the stories in the rooms just to find out if you really belong there.  Because if you really are an alcoholic, you will hear your story being told, and when you hear your story, you will be saved just as George was.

What George found out when he stepped into those rooms of AA those many years ago was that he was not terminally unique; that he was just like so many of God's "lost" souls who through God's love saved so many of those drunks.

And if God could save all of those drunks, they could save George and bring him back to God too.

 

©  res  12/2/2012

IDENTITY

 

 

IDENTITY

 

The longer I remain in the rooms of AA the more that I am comfortable in hearing the stories of people with whom I identify.  Every day I will read or hear a story which, although differing in some substantial details, nevertheless is, at heart, my story and if boiled down to the essentials has me written all over it. Just this morning in fact, we started to read the beginning of the Big Book which is Bill W's Story and it starts with the premonitionary doggerel which he finds chiseled on the gravestone in the graveyard of Winchester Cathedral in England just prior to shipping off to the continent and to the Great War:

 

"Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier

Who caught his death

Drinking cold small beer.

A good soldier is ne'er forgot

Whether he dieth by musket

Or by pot." ¹

 

This event for Bill seems almost to predestine for him the way his life will turn out when he continues to drink, first a lot and then more heavily, until he becomes a daily drinker.

 

I have gotten so used to this story that it is almost welcome each time we come around to it as we do when we repeat the reading of it every several months in our cyclical reading of the Big Book. I used to think  incessant repetition  would bore me to tears but now I find it rather comforting.

 

A personal small sampling of the men in the rooms has given me the impression that this feeling is shared by the majority of the sober people in the rooms. I suspect that this is because we identify heavily with the stories of the Big Book as well as the stories that we hear among our fellow alcoholics.

 

Yesterday I went to see the movie "Flight", the story of an alcoholic airline pilot who gets discovered only because of his miraculous ability to fly his disintegrating aircraft out of a death dive and glide it into an empty field. And although this saves 98 out of 104 passengers and crew he accomplished this while he was legally drunk and high on cocaine; and despite the fact that simulations by stone cold sober pilots failed to reveal anyone who could duplicate the feat he attempts to extricate himself from this situation as due to equipment failure not pilot error.

 

This is not to excuse the pilot but to emphasize that drunks are sometimes extraordinarily talented people and this was one of those people whose skill could not be duplicated by normal folk. But it was because of that skill, that spawned this incredible ego and hubris, making it impossible to have this man face the fact that just because his skill was so great, that he was still a low down stinking alcoholic of the basest kind.

 

Before I went to see the movie I had perused the reviews and it seemed that there were some prevailing opinions that although Denzel Washington was brilliant in carrying the character, the subject of the movie was somewhat lugubrious. The implication was that a whole hour and forty-five minutes of addictive behavior with only one five minute death defying nose dive for the plane ride was too much to sit through. Watching a drunk was boring.  Or people don't really behave that way do they? 

 

People don't drink when they know that their whole careers are on the line and the appearance of sobriety is paramount! Do they? They present a sober front! Don't' they? Well the truth is harder than fiction to portray and the fact of the matter is that the movie did portray the truth and it almost seemed like fiction. People (drunks/addicts) do behave that way. This is what addicted people do!

 

To borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, this is the banality of Addiction.  There is nothing evil about it. There is nothing larger than life. It is very pedestrian and every day. It is banal, common place, trite, humdrum - ordinary.  We are ordinary people with an extraordinary propensity for self destruction, self-loathing, self-indulgence and just plain addiction and until we become unaddicted we can do nothing about all of the other things that plague our lives.

 

But every drunk I know who has seen this film has felt an identity with this character and  has seen his story in the story of this pilot.  When we see and hear our stories in the rooms of AA we begin to identify with the plight of others as brothers in arms, fellow sufferers who have what we have and who, if they have found a way of dealing with their addiction, have something that we want. So we listen. We want to learn to know what it is that they did so that we can emulate that.

 

For when we see ourselves in the story of others that is the first step to our own salvation. And when we pass on our own stories it not only helps us to tell them but we also hope that our stories will be a mirror for others; so that when they see the light, they can live again in its reflected glow.

 

© res 11/27/2012

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________

^{1 Alcoholics Anonymous p.1, Fourth Edition}

THE EGO HAS LANDED

THE EGO HAS LANDED

My wife once told me of a famous actress she knew who had a one woman cabaret show titled "Songs I learned at my mother's knee and other low places". I have always thought of this title as a metaphor for the serendipitous way challenging things placed in our life's paths  seem to work themselves out  if we are willing to get out of our own ways and allow things to develop  in the absence of our own intrusions.

This principle works well for teachers as well as for the student, and for doctors as well as for the patients. And it is nowhere more an active principle than in the rooms of AA and in the rooms of recovery centers of rehab facilities.

I had been asked to step in as a substitute to run an AA meeting at such a facility and the job was "simple" enough, just talk about how we stay sober once we start going to AA or when we just get discharged from  a rehab facility. And it isn't as if there is no literature on this subject. Modern recovery psychology has a whole discipline devoted to it which is called cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT was developed in the 1980's as a means of helping alcoholics and drug addicts to train themselves to mold behaviors from old patterns to new ones in order to prevent the older patterns from triggering desires into the use of drugs and/or alcohol. And either by avoidance and eventual  behavioral extinction this would allow behaviors to metamorphose into new and more acceptable behavioral pathways.

As neural plasticity became further understood, it was even better appreciated how effective this therapeutic model could be. However, I certainly do not claim to be an ace practitioner of CBT, but I do know another, similar technique which was developed from the experience of alcoholics and was "codified" in the book "Living Sober". This book, published in 1973, presaged CBT by about seven years and had the hallmarks of CBT before it had that psychiatric cache.

At this meeting we were talking about how to modify behaviors once we had stopped drinking and drugging and the model we were using was the chapter in "Living Sober" called  'Changing old routines'. This chapter specifically addresses modifying behaviors through changing our engagement of people, places and things that we interact with so that the mere experience of these interactions will not trigger automatic behaviors associated with these "environmental" familiarities.

However, the language of the chapter was particularly geared to the alcoholic and made pointed references to commuter drinking cars, country clubs, Tom Collins drinks, yacht clubs, pool clubs, summer drinking days by the beach etc.  Parlance not geared to the typical pot head or junkie.

And, in fact, one young man made this a bone of contention when he pointed out that the terminology was such that he felt that the chapter had very little to offer him by way of motivation and I felt I was watching a very poor rendition of a Marlon Brando imitation explicating the importance of "method acting" in order for him to have a really solid recovery, ("what's my motivation here").

"I really don't see how anything that an alcoholic goes through has any relation to what I have experienced as a dope addict.  I have no desire to drink and I doubt that I ever will. How is this information going to help me with getting sober? I know that I'm only a few weeks sober but please tell me how this is going to help?"

And with that comment an alcoholic of many years and several rounds of rehabs chimed in and added that he had little understanding of the lingo and shares of the drug addicts and could not understand how he could possibly glean  from them any value from their experience, strength and hope.

I tried to explain that if one took out the references to alcohol and tried reimagining the actual circumstances of people, places, things that one did in these places and under these conditions, the techniques would be equally applicable. So, for the admonition that one should not keep liquor in one's house  it would be equally applicable to suggest that one would similarly not keep "recreational pot" or "recreational cocaine" around in case some casual friends came around and just happened to want to have a hit.

 

That this was not a good idea was agreed upon by all to be equally applicable to both situations.

Or if one just would consider that the effects of drugs and alcohol were the same when they reached the reward centers of the brain and the results were the same after they acted on these centers.  The resulting behaviors, lying, cheating, drug seeking, drug searching, drug hiding, to the detriment and in place of all other behaviors, was similar whether you used drugs or alcohol.

Yet still there was resistance. So I practically lost my cool and had to growl at the drug addict to let him know in no uncertain terms that I had known dozens of "addicts" like him who had "licked, beaten and conquered" their addictions only to find themselves in extremis at some time in their lives and the most handy potion for them was a bottle of vodka and the next thing they knew they were off to the races and lo and behold they had become raging alcoholics.  What had happened? 

A drug was a drug was a drug.

But the treatment was the same. It was a spiritual path. And that path was through the steps of AA and finding a softer better way to live a sober, cleaner, normal life.

But what had I accomplished by losing my cool. After all, these guys were barely sober?  What did they know and how did it help by me getting angry?  It wasn't all about me.

My getting them to understand what I was talking about  should not have been about me, but about them. And my only purpose for my being there was to be of service. So I instantly had to make my amends and apologize and let them know that I was out of line.

The fact of the matter is that I used to do this kind of service every week for a whole year. I had been used to people in early recovery acting unsober. That's the way they are. They are barely just getting drugs out of their system; and to call them sober is to suggest birds just cleaned up from an oil spill, are clean and healthy and out of the woods as far as their viability is concerned.

But really, they are still highly at risk and perhaps may not make it. Similarly, maybe one tenth to one fifth of those coming out of detox will make it to a sober end. Not a very good statistic but real. So it is a delicate balance that we are dealing with and not a good place for touchy personalities. I cannot force understanding, sobriety, knowledge and desire for recovery on anyone. That is something that has to come from within.

For me, that acceptance came like a film being peeled away from my eyes. Suddenly the fog had been lifted from me and I understood, finally, that I was an alcoholic and I had to stop drinking or I would die.

So in recovery and in understanding my own recovery, I have to put my own self aside. I was being too self centered in worrying that my point was not getting across to these kids. I should have been more concerned that perhaps I was going too fast for the lesson to be absorbed.

The ego must be relinquished for the spirit to be saved.

 

 

© RES 11/13/2012

 

 

 

 

FOR A BETTER TOMORROW

FOR A BETTER TOMORROW

 

Sometimes  the wisdom that I get from people just equals that which I actually need for the day. And this morning I received an email from my friend the minister who passed along this saying of the Rabbi of Brastlav who taught, "If you won't be better tomorrow than you were today, then what do you need tomorrow for?"

There are many ways to take that plea to heart. One is to state plainly that if you can't see a better tomorrow for yourself then you have wasted your energies today. Another is that if you cannot use your experiences today to envision a better future then you are stuck in too much self pity.

So this morning was a pretty bright day and when I attended my dogs today I was pretty pleased that my oldest, which I just started treating for a flare of Lyme Disease, had started to perk up. She was wagging tail and hardly limping and generally a bit more spritely than the rather limp rag that presented to me yesterday morning, glum, listless and just laying around in her bed most of the day.

And the OD (other dog) who is always a bit more morose, was lying on the couch being pretty floppy when I noticed a big fat juicy tick engorged on her right ear. So I have to watch her for the signs of Lyme Disease now, although this was not the typical tick that carries the disease, it is certainly a sign that there are others casting about that may not be as visible. She remains her usual semi happy self still eager to beggar a treat from me at the drop of a hat just as a reward for returning from the back yard.

And after dutiful attentions to the dogs and a skimpy meal I headed to my normal AA meeting with the sun in my eyes and the Rabbi bouncing around in my mind.

As I arrived at the church I noticed Jeremiah, who joined our group about ten months ago upon the recommendation of Casey, and old friend who had been trying to get him to come into the program for years.  Finally, after suffering some medical  problems he was forced to concede that he needed to stop drinking and for health reasons was going to have to face the fact that alcohol was no longer an option in his life. Now was he going to be able to face the fact that he was an alcoholic?

As luck would have it Jerry (Jeremiah) soon was able to accept the fact that he was an alcoholic and his life was unmanageable. And this became pretty clear when he started coming to meetings and listening to the stories of the other men in the rooms, and finding that he had more in common with them than not. He found that yes he would make more time in the day find time to drink than to do anything else. He would spend more time with his bottle than his work. More time looking and thinking about alcohol than reading, watching TV, speaking with others, in fact doing any other activity in his life.

He finally understood that his life had been run by alcohol, the drinking, the thinking, the searching, the hiding, the stocking, the preparing and then doing it all over again. And when he finally came into the rooms, he realized to his relief how much more time he had to and for himself and for his family.

But for him it may have come too late, or so it seemed. For when he walked in the rooms his belly was distended, his skin was sallow, the whites of his eyes were yellow and he had that kind of skin that looked like the "tan of death" as I have often called it.  It is the kind of skin color that looks like the sickly fake tan that "Man Tan" used to give the user when it was first invented in the 1960's. That  skin coloring that was a poor excuse for a real tan.

That is the look of a failing liver and Jerry had it. And for the first five months he had it as he slowly was treated at the VA for his cirrhosis. 

He said then that he had been placed on a transplant list and was waiting. But as his treatment proceeded, he started to perk up, his skin color started to improve, his stomach started to flatten, his energy perked up and the news soon was that perhaps a transplant was not going to have to be imminent.

So we talked about me being available to him in case he needed company for his visits to the VA or to go to the Pittsburgh VA for tissue typing in case he needed to be set up for a transplant in the near future or perhaps later. But with that on hold for the time being we let that ride.

But today even with the sun as bright as it was, it could not animate Jerry's visage this morning. It really looked gaunt and drawn. He looked downright unhappy.

"What's the matter?", I asked.

"I'll tell you after the meeting," and he limped into the room.

The meeting was a step meeting, Step One, "We were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable". 

Our lives had become unmanageable... well that was surely true now as no doubt it had always been and always would be and I fully expected that that would be what would be forthcoming when I spoke with Jerry after the meeting.

And Jerry met me after in the vestibule and told me that his visit to Yale had been rather grim in that the news was not so good. Sonograms had revealed a couple of liver tumors.

To me this was not such an unusual finding. These could be anything from fatty tumors to hepatomas - benign tumors to cancer, both findings in cirrhosis of the liver.

And I mentioned that these were likely findings in cirrhosis and he nodded because he was well aware of this and I was not telling him anything that he had not been told before.

Then Jerry turned and brightened a bit and said with a bit of a grin "You know what this means? This means, of course, that I'm back on the transplant list... And I go to the head of the line...".  He turned on his heels and jaunted off to his car.

 

The Rabbi would have been proud!

 

©  res  11/9/2012

 

 

 

 

OUT OF THE EYE OF THE STORM

              OUT OF THE EYE OF THE STORM

One would think that a hurricane would be an awful time for a drunk.  Perhaps it is... I don't remember now. Except to say that in the past when there were warnings of inclement weather, that never stopped me from preparing to have a well stocked wine cellar for the storm, (that is the storm that there would be if I ever ran out of booze).  And I know, (and every honest drunk that I know of will attest to this fact), that no blizzard, no hail storm, no hurricane ever stayed the course of my (his) search for an open liquor store if I (he) was in need of some shoring up of liquid courage.

But it wasn't alcohol, the fear of it or the lack of it that most of my friends were wary of this morning. Because of the damage that Sandy's wake left in our community, two men's meetings had to merge resulting in a lot of camaraderie among the attendees, most of whom had not seen each other in two years since the groups had originally split.

"I didn't remember that this meeting had such old men in it" chided Mack, himself approaching retirement as both his hoary hair and beard can attest to. Garson poked him with his cane and offered to lend it to him. "All in good fun, I'm just a dirty joke since I haven't had a shower in the past five days. No electricity since the beginning of the storm."

And with that the crowd feigned turned up noses and offered rude noises.

Before the meeting began, and prior to the AA Preamble, offers were made to share accommodations for hot showers, warm beds and food for those still without power now  more than five days since Sandy's passing.

With the meeting starting in earnest, the major complaint was that after the danger was gone, after establishing that life and limb were no longer at risk, after the excitement had died down and the crushing boredom of the perplexity of uncertainty that remained with us day in and day out, it became hard to maintain civility.  Being kind, patient and unflappable stopped being easy. Tempers were hard to contain.

What we had learned through the routine of daily AA practice, (practicing these principles in all our affairs), was becoming worn out because many of us were going without meetings. First many of us initially thought that our families needed us by their sides first and foremost.  Then there was the fact that many churches were as without electricity as we were and were forced to close. Then we became lazy and mistakenly thought that we could do without the meetings because we were needed at home more than at the meetings.

Until a week went by and suddenly we had become noticeably more touchy and  irritable. Not only were we primed by the circumstances of the storm but we are naturally predisposed to be disturbed because we are drunks and we do not handle stress, any stress particularly well. So where did we get this notion that we could go so long without a meeting? 

But there it is. We've set ourselves up for failure. But most of us don't because we try to catch the signs early...hungry, angry, tired and lonely.  And when all of those are present we slowly become fearful.  So we need to reassess, sit back and take stock.

I was ill for two weeks prior to the storm and I could not get up to get to a meeting. And I was too fatigued to get out to a meeting during the days either.  But I thought I could get through without too much harm.  And it seemed that since I had gone about two and a half years straight without missing a day that I had enough time saved up that I could miss a few days. 

And then just as I started to improve and return to my schedule, the storm hit and another four days without a meeting! 

The most amazing thing was I never thought about drinking but until I returned to my schedule I hadn't realized what I had been missing in my daily life.  I had forgotten the rough wisdom. The reminders that there are folks out there who are worse off than I am and when I am alone in my thoughts I tend to really focus on my own personal muddle.

With others I realize the world is much bigger than me; and my problems, although personally daunting, are only larger because they are viewed though my personal magnifiers. Those magnifiers tend toward a grandiosity that is of greater proportions than the rest of the world because it has my peculiar proclivity with which to view them.

But this storm is a sobering reminder of the power of nature and the power of things other than myself. And that's a good thing to remember when my personality gets beyond the capacity of my emotional superstructure to contain it.

 

© res 11/3/2012

 

 

IN THE BEST OF SEASONS

IN THE BEST OF SEASONS

There is something renewing about having a New Year's celebration in the Fall, something much more rejuvenating than a New Year's celebration in the most insensate part of the year. But with the sky a deep azure with a bit of a nip with a promise of warmth by noon there is still hope in another day.

And yet the trees, green, hinting of the gilt on the leaves and the promise of a harvest, these are the joys of a new year in the autumn.

But for the Jew the new year is a call to hearken back to year gone by to recall if one's deeds are worthy of being called to be written in the Book of Life for another year. Has one been good to one's fellow men, kind to one's family, a worthy Jew, peaceful, supporting the needy and helping the poor and suffering.

These are the requirements of normal people with normal lives. This is a normal life that I should have been living. But today I am leading a meeting, a Twelve and Twelve and at times I feel ill equipped to lead such a meeting because after 32.09 months of sobriety one would have thought that I would have gotten this "sobriety thing" down. This idea of knowing how to deal with guilt, grandiosity, problems with either blaming others or blaming myself too much. Dealing with insecurity, depression, worry, anger, self pity and relationships. And finally coming out the other side and not blaming anyone at all for my life, even myself, but accepting it with the notion that in the end with patience, and time, all things will get better.

Have I yet learned that?

Step four is to take a "fearless moral inventory" of oneself of all one's shortcomings and come to terms with those failings, who they involved and how they involved those folks. And in the end they will require of us that we make amends to those people with whom our inventory is involved. It is only when we come to terms with the baseness of our very beings, our souls, that we will finally be able to face a new and useful and fruitful life moving forward.

Otherwise we will always be reminding ourselves to "abandon hope of a better past" for the future that will be no different.

But somehow I never feel that I have the suasive ability to make myself believe that I can impart that knowledge or wisdom to a group of people who are as eager to understand sobriety as I am.  Indeed, who am I to do that at all, I often ask?

And to indicate my confusion I lead the discussion by analogy. Most people, when they do a fourth step, find that they have great difficulty in getting honest with themselves, with others and with the program. And after great personal angst with some literal and figurative cramps, out pops some story of mournful suffering which ultimately ends in a sense of uplifting release.

My story was like a feeling of being in an operating room getting an angioplasty with the surgeon telling me to hold on just a bit longer; the pain was only going to last just a bit longer while I was listening to a whirring sound of the atherectomy blade eating away the plaque in my anterior descending artery. "Just a moment longer" he was urging on as the pain felt like my heart would just rip out of my chest.

And then - - - quiet - - -. No more pain. My heart beat returned to normal. No more whirring. No surgeon's urging insistence on only a few more moments of pain and it would all be over, because it was.

Like my sponsor saying that all I had to do was get through the hard part and it would all be over.

But was that it?

But after another year and a half I know that isn't it.  I know there is stuff that I missed.  How did that happen?  Well I know how that happened! There were some lesions left in there that the surgeon left in there! 

We knew that!

So we got to George who was concerned about his sister who is terminal and he rambled about not being available enough, about being too self centered, about not being ready to help.

It's all about us isn't it? Isn't it?

And then Crystal who is fifteen days back wondering if she just did not do her program well enough the first time or was she just fooling herself or just what was she thinking buying that single malt scotch for her cousin at the duty free shop on her only vacation in the past year? Not ready for prime time or what?

We sure do test our sobriety to the limit and don't we know it each and every time?

But there was Norton, who by his own admission has stretched his belief in a higher power to the limit.  He doesn't know what to believe and where to turn.  Last week was out of the ball park.

On Tuesday his father died.  And since he is the only sober one in his family, dealing with the family homestead has become a real strain. But four days ago his friend loaded up on some drugs and OD'ed. Then three days ago his boss went out for a run and ran down a ravine and never came up, cutting his throat at the bottom.

"How should I think about this?" queried Norton to us in the room.

Norton is not religious, but if nothing else, he has a strong tie to his wife and children and if anything is going to keep him going, it will be his connection to his family and his friends in the program.

Drinking or drugging, that is not an option.  Too much darkness down that defile.  Go to meetings, talk to people, speak his feelings even if he has a very tenuous belief in God. For now he has a higher power in the others in program. Had he not done a step four he would be at sea right now.

These troubled waters could irrigate fertile seed for a bad crop of jitters and woes. Or with the pruning techniques learned through the Steps this could just be another solid harvest for this New Year, a New Year with an indigo sky, tawny soil with a whiff of chanterelle on the air.

 

© res 9/16/2012

SEASONS

SEASONS

 

I read a blog from someone in recovery on the other side of and underneath the world in South Africa.  Right now Spring is beginning to warm some of the days there just as we are feeling the creeping chill of Fall trying to sneak up behind us and catch us unawares.  But the Fall can't fool me because Louisey tells me that Spring is there around Capetown and so my guard is up, ever aware that these warm days are just a fool's show  trying to put my attention at bay until Winter arrives to astonish me with its sudden arrival.

Louisey likes to share propitious regional or national events that occur in her village and town during these months, what meals and foods are served, flowers that are in bloom, smells that dominate the landscape and most of all the reaction of her Great Dane puppy, the goings on and how many of the people he pushes over in his excitement.  And occasionally she will remind me, by way of a quote or two, of what a fantastic musical heritage we in America have, by quoting some composer from the American song book or Bob Dylan or some rock star or other on either side of the Atlantic.

But her blog gives me a firm sense of one person's sense of being in a place, in time, and space.  Along the way she shares the highlights of the difficult lives of people in recovery in her corner of Africa, the difficulty of living in general in her corner of Africa which is hard enough for sober people alone but could drive anyone to drink! And it reminds me of how good life is here in the United States and of all the things we have to be grateful about when she describes some of the lawless rampages that happen particularly against women.

She describes in the most poignant terms, the circle of her life that I have been reading about now for more than a year, in the most wonderful prose and poetry. And now, one year after returning to living with my wife, another circle has been completed and I look back and see that many other circles are in the midst of being completed as I observe the various life circles going on about me and among the circle of friends and family who I love.

So when Steve finally reached thirty five years this year working in the postal service as a letter carrier, he had already been thinking of retiring for three years and had filled out the paper work two years ago. But taking that last step, well that was a long way down.  It was not so much that he did not have enough money to retire as much as that his life was defined by the daily grind of getting up, getting on the train and going to the city and to work.

 

It wasn't as if his intellectual capacity wasn't far above his pay grade at the USPS. Steve coulda' been a contenda' for any number of things. And now that he could be at that first step, to stop working, that was hard!

But in July he stopped and suddenly he had re-defined himself. He was suddenly retired. And for a good month it was difficult to get a handle on what that actually meant to his self image.

However, just now, Steve is not so eager to hop back into the work environment.  After a month of well deserved rest, he is finally beginning to enjoy the time of leisure and is finally sorting out what it means to have time on his hands. And he is taking his time in figuring out how to use it.  Using the AA adage "Time takes time" he is harnessing the time to its best advantage.

 

As the end of September approaches, Jill will face a hearing to get her pilot's license back.  It's been a year. She has done everything by the book; random drug testing, monthly shrink visits, regular AA meetings. And although she was never an alcoholic in the truest sense of the word, we are talking about her livelihood and she is not fooling around with this. So if it means not drinking again, that's OK with her. A small price to pay for the privilege of flying.

 

Frank is moving into a small apartment after being forced out of his mother's home. That abode houses a schizophrenic brother and elderly mother and she cannot manage having Frank there too since the mentally ill brother does not get along with Frank too well and the mental illness gets worse while he is there.

 

Frank wanted to help his mom since the brother does not do that, he destroys the maintenance equipment and the house among other things, and then blames Frank for the deeds. So when Frank leaves, these issues will become more acute.  Meanwhile during the past year while this was going on Frank had to fight a lymphatic cancer, a really serious and typically terminal form which he appears to have beaten.

 

So this season, Frank is moving on, starting afresh. And perhaps it is better. He can no longer be accused of instigating the incidents of which he is now being accused, and he no longer has to deal with the constant threat of being thrown out of the house under a court order. Now he can concentrate on his sobriety and leave the Stürm und Dräng to other people and other occasions.

 

Then there is Jo, who has decided to leave a liaison after ten years. And this is painful because Jo has thought long and hard about this; it has been at least five years since there has been any sex and three years since there has been any acknowledgement of any respect. Just, you clean up this, and cook the food, and wash the clothes and go shopping and...

 

Jo finally has had enough and is moving out...Moving out from an old stultifying life into a free and oxygen rich new life. A life that celebrate diversity, fun and sobriety.

And in my circle the changes have not been particularly radical. But my daughter, having found a job that she really enjoys, and found an apartment that she loves, in the city that she adores, has moved aided and abetted my me and my wife and a truck and an AA friend. A friend who must have had sardines as close relatives since his packing abilities are second to none.

 

I am proud of my closer relationship with my daughter and a new found trust that I believe that we have for one another. And I am glad for the affection that we have for each other.

As for cementing marital relations, well at least they are not getting worse. They need work, but then to quote Eleanor of Aquitaine in "The Lion in Winter" "What family doesn't have its ups and downs?" Avanti! More work for the next year.

 

As the High Holy Days approach and a New Year approaches it is time to take stock of the year gone by and to assess what I can put in the column of good things that I have done, what were the bad things and what do I still have to do. And though I cannot claim spectacular or even small success in any pecuniary fashion, I guess I can say that at least I did no harm. And perhaps I may have done a bit of good.

 

Maybe even enough to be written in the book of life once again for another year.

 

© res 9/10/2012