A ramble

A friend gave me a copy of Eat, Pray, Love and I thought I'd give it a shot. Gilbert has a nice witty writing style, but I kept thinking, "This woman is infantile, self-centered and nuts!"

Then I realized that during the time she's writing about, she is exactly the age I was when I was infantile, self-centered and nuts. 34. The early part of such a journey will, has to, seem that way. When you start with practically no inner life, you can easily strike out at your outer life, get selfish, hurt people. What's good about her story is not her initial lunacy, but her decision not to get stuck there. Progress is what matters, and progress takes a
l-o-o-o-ng blasted time.

This photo is from around March 1988. I'm 34 years old, about 3 months sober, and have that new-to-the-program stare: "How did I get here? What in the world do I do now?"


At the time I thought (oh so wrongly!) that nothing had changed. Relationships were an emotional puzzlement. My need to feel capable and confident was still unfulfilled but I no longer even believed that substances could meet that need.

In 1988 I am in emotional kindergarten and I want to be Graduated and have a new life right now.

I went to meetings and looked around me. One who really seemed to have her act together was "Meg."

I've been thinking about her lately. "Meg" and "Jim" were relative newlyweds in their late 30's. Each had 3 kids from failed former marriages. They got into the program, found each other, and formed a family. They had a baby, and I confess I watched the progression of her pregnancy with a mixture of envy and horror. Seven children! She joked about her lousy childhood and how The Sound of Music had been her unattainable fantasy of home and family, and now here she was, probably trying to act out the film. They had a lovely sunny house and the cutest von Trapp Family-style Christmas card you ever saw, and she still had emotional problems. But she went to meetings and talked about them and faced them. She acknowledged her need for real therapy, and found a shrink with strong medical credentials. That's what you do. Pretend everything's hunky-dory, quit your support network, and that's when you get into trouble. She seemed to be doing it right.

I went to lunch with her one day, and unloaded about my then-boyfriend. "He is cute, isn't he?" she said to me with a wry grin, and I found myself reading this statement as a smart assessment that I needed to put my brain in charge and judge whether it really could become what I was looking for.

This might have been her meaning, or it very well might have been early stirrings of my own mind coming back to life. Maybe both. Meg's life deteriorated later, but if I've learned anything, I've learned that that in no way means she lacked smarts and insight. We're a patchwork of sanity and craziness, all of us who are getting our marbles back.

If my own smarts and good judgment were indeed stirring to life, the stirrings were very early because I put a lot more years into trying to hammer bad fits -- friends, lovers, career -- into what I wanted them to be. There are still days when a nice toxic dose of regret will reactivate in my mind, like a mental malaria, but with decreasing frequency. Other days, I breathe deeply and tell myself that I took the time I needed to take in order to learn what I absolutely had to learn.

The photo is a moment in time. A few years later things were radically different. I was getting my marbles back. Meg began to have dissociative episodes, a schizophrenia-like hallucinatory illness, or some deeply buried memories of some serious childhood trauma. She disappeared from the group and rumors were vague as to diagnosis or prognosis. She and Jim split and she was at one point found wandering the streets hundreds of miles away. But no moment-in-time situation is the end of the story. My last news of her is at least 16 years old. It may sound batty to hope that she's found her way back to herself and to a happy life but I have, honest-to-God, seen it happen, and several times. I know people who have overcome wreckage the likes of which I've never had to crawl out of. It's a matter of willingness to take time, time, time to grow up, and not feel too lousy about starting so blasted late.

Meanwhile, back at the book, I keep thinking of an earlier book of poetry, by a poet I've written about before. Like Gilbert's book, it's about both travel and an inner journey, about food and beauty and inner longing and a joyous embrace of life, and it seems better centred and less immature. Gilbert is OK, she has something to say, but I think Miller did it a little better.

The evangelism thing

In her comment on my bozo-bus post, my friend Catherine brought up some Big Questions : "How then can a Christian follow the Great Commission [Matthew 28:19] and still respect the beliefs of others? Can it be done? Should it be done?"

I think it's quite possible to respect others, but I have to say that I do not think it's possible to respect their beliefs, if I try to persuade them of another belief, no matter how lovingly or sincerely I do it. If it's a call to persuade others, that Commission, by its very nature, demotes their beliefs and places ours above.

To explain, I have to spout some AA 12-step philosophy because it's taught me the best way I've found to honor other peoples' views and still maintain my own integrity.

Here's what happens in a 12-Step meeting : I can be in tears over my boss, my love life, my money problems, whatever, but no one in the room will say, "Here's what you could do," or "Have you tried...?"

What I will hear is : "When I faced [ ]
what helped me was [ ]."

The difference becomes a LOT more obvious when it's about touchy subjects that are inclined to cause exchanges in which people judge or feel judged. I'm highly likely to slam down the mental receiver if someone issues a finger-pointy "you," much less the intrusive "should," but I can listen to some one say "It was like this for me," and not bristle, not close my mind. It's not something I need to rebel against.

The 12-Step way, that of telling how I see things, not how anyone else "should" see them, lets me be genuinely respectful of others, and still honest. About faith, or politics, or my friend's marital problems, or whether my brother should eat Ding Dongs [TM] , or anything else.

Carrying the message and persuading are not the same thing, and when I read the Matthew passage, I see an instruction to inform those who haven't heard the Christian tenets, not a responsibility to persuade people who have heard and rejected them.

I'm fully capable of saying, "This is my experience," but wholly incapable of making any experience, much less a particular one, happen for somebody else. People have certainly questioned my beliefs and had no impact at all. I've been told that the faith in which I was raised probably planted images in my mind that I clung to in time of trouble.

I'm actually fine with others thinking that. If it's supposed to either burst my alleged bubble or tee me off, I'm afraid it's done neither. Spiritual belief doesn't enter us through the mind, even if it does come to rest there. It's a watershed, heart(?) soul(?)...OK, OK, irrational! 8~) moment that is strictly one-on-one between that great Source and each of us, and if we -- yeah, I include myself -- need more enlightenment it too will come from the source.

It doesn't mean that I hide what I believe. It does not even mean that I tell about it only when asked. Nobody asked for my thoughts about anything, but I've been jumping into online conversations for years and I, um, did start a blog. I just decided to start yammering away, and about faith as well as any other thing I feel like pontificating about. This might even meet some people's criteria for "evangelism," but it's just being who I am.

I also can't ignore times past when I thought I was doing the right thing, the best thing, and later realized i had not one clue.

There's yet another Twelve-Step tenet, which is that we don't know everything, and that "more will be revealed." That is, when I think about it, literally the most comforting phrase I've ever encountered.

Using dreams

Once in awhile, no matter how long ago we quit drinking, we AA members still have a "using dream," in which we begin again, drinking or drugging. And wake up with a start and a cold chill, wondering, "Did I just flush my life down the john?!" For me they come at the rate of a couple times a year. Including last night.

Why? What does it mean? Is it just a way to renew my feelings of gratitude for the freedom my program gives me? Or is it a warning?

In my version of this dream (which may be pretty common), I don't dream that I'm overwhelmed by temptation. I don't say, "I want it, I mean to have it, pour me one!" Nope, in my using dreams, somebody hands it to me and I swill it without thinking. My dreams aren't about conscious decision-making, but about dimwitted unthinking auto-pilot behavior.

So possibly I have the dream when I've been playing with fire in some way. Maybe by longing for abuseable substances, but maybe with some other form of bad life management. Ignoring a cautionary message my smarter self is trying to hammer through my thick skull.

My latest temptation -- boy my blog is one thrill after another these days -- is cashew butter. Hey, for me it could be the road to perdition.

But it's s-o-o-o-o good. Oh wow. The colors.

I discovered a year and half ago, through dietary experimentation, that I'm allergic to peanuts. This was hard to face. Very.

I have to eat sugar-free and low carb. I hate low carb. In heaven, I fully expect my reward to be the ability to eat all the bread, potatoes, and flaky buttery piecrust I want. But it ain't an option in this life. On low carb, one can and should do small, sensible amounts of healthy complex carbs. I hate small sensible amounts.

Peanut butter is one thing I both loved with a passion, and was allowed on the diet. Besides, I've eaten vats of it all my life. This is one reason that I never attributed the -- um --- distress I experienced to my beloved peanut butter. A late-life allergy to peanuts is unusual but it happens, and I faced facts and gave it up.

Yesterday in the grocery store, I picked up a jar of cashew butter. Carefully, I checked the label. Organic stuff, and not processed with peanut oil, which nuts-in-a-can usually are.

Should I try it? I weighed the risk: at worst, I'd be looking at about three days of itchy misery but no danger, if my system handles it the same way it handles peanuts.

Took it home. Stirred it up. Spread it on a single slice of ultra-healthy whole grain bread, thickly enough so that I kept having to catch the ooze and lick it off my finger. It was delicious. It was magnificent. Forgive my emoting, but it's been a long, long time. [YouTube alert -- for those with slow connections]

By nightfall any reaction would be fully underway. I told myself, "Even if you can eat this stuff, that doesn't mean you can gulp spoonfuls out of the jar every day and overdo it, like you did the peanut butter. You need to do this sanely. Sensibly. As a treat, not a steady diet."

No allergic reaction. O joy! I missed my peanut butter so much, and here was a gift from God to compensate me.

That's very much the way I felt about alcohol when I first discovered it. And maybe that's why I had the using dream.

Overindulgence in cashews actually could be dangerous, if I end up in the emergency room with an allergic reaction. Botanically, cashews are nuts and peanuts are legumes, but most people with peanut allergies are sensitive to tree nuts too. Since there is a difference and since my allergy is mild, hives-oriented, and late-life, it was worth a try, but if I developed one sensitivity, I could develop another.

The question is: Can I do cashews in moderation, or is my basic tendency to overdo everything gong to take over? Will this treat be like alcohol, which I have to stay entirely away from, or like carbs, which I have to learn to do in moderation? We'll see.

Twenty marbles

Today is my friends' 20th wedding anniversary, and whoops! they'll get their gift late, since I only mailed it this morning.

That means it's also a big anniversary for me: 20 years sober in AA. 20 years ago today I got loaded for the last time, at my best friend's wedding, and made the biggest decision of my life.

Hey, you'd drink too if you had to wear this dress!

In AA, as you rack up time in the program, you occasionally get a chance to get up at the podium and tell your story. According to the basic AA text, "Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.”

Some peoples' stories are funny, some are scary, some make you want to cry. Mine, I was always embarrassed to admit in meetings, is boring. I helped clean up after the reception by finishing off everybody's leftover wine on all the tables. Pretty gross. So that's the story: I acted like an asshole, I drove home snockered, lane lines seeming to writhe like snakes, my hands on the wheel and my feet on the pedals refusing to coordinate with one another. I got safely home. I sobered up as the afternoon wore on and thought: Oh. My. God. What did I just do? That's it. Low entertainment quotient.

There was another gathering at the bride and groom's house that evening, so I didn't dare hit the sack. For the rest of that afternoon I wandered around my apartment, swigging diet coke, picking things up and dropping them at random (with even less focus than I normally manage) and mulling over where I came from, and where I really really did not want to go.

The short version is that my family is rife with alcoholism. Most were genial Elwood Dowd types. Occasionally, someone would manifest the nasty, violent type, but by and large my older generation of relatives were wobbly, giggly bourbon-soaked southerners. The smell of Christmas, to me, was bourbon and water, mixed strong, radiating from every glass and wafting off every breath along with the equally ubiquitous musky Marlboro Filter smoke, till it filled the rooms of my grandmother's house, family Grand Central. I liked it. I found it spicy, warm, festive and comfortable.

I was more of a Gin Girl. Sloe gin and orange juice was my drink o'choice, though I could never bring myself to ask for the drink by name. I was relatively old the first time I got plastered, judging by my fellow AA-ers -- I was a college freshman -- and I experienced that wonderful feeling of being at-ease and socially confident. This! I thought, this is what normal people get to feel like all the time! Relaxed and happy to be themselves. After all my years of resenting God's depriving me of it, this is His gift to me.

After the wedding I somehow, for the first time, saw the brokenness of that promise. Saw that the "gift" had come from somebody I have no problem calling the Father Of Lies. Because after that first time, I never again managed to engineer the right amount at the right intervals to regain that pleasant feeling. It's a feature of addiction that one does not apply logic and say "This isn't working." One keeps trying. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

I kept at it, but it never gave me that delicious sensation again. At parties I'd try to tell jokes and somewhere between my brain and my tongue the words would twist into a nasty insult and make the listener blanch, while I felt like a victim of some kind of Star Trek Disease that mangles language. More often I just felt depressed, unsociable and lousy. Well then, obviously I had not had enough, or else the cheery feeling would be in full operation, so I'd swill some more.

I can't even explain why, on December 27th , 1987, I realized I was headed down a path that those older relatives, so charming and loving when I was a little kid, had taken later, as their lives deteriorated or ended too soon. Maybe the blessing was that I got drunk so early in the day, and had all day to think about it as I sobered back up, instead of conking out. Or maybe it was simply the right time.

I decided that the only way to avoid ever having to belong to AA was to quit. This is the part of my story that gets the only real laugh. Most of us discover that the decision is only the beginning, and that we need help from others who get it.

How can I do it? I worried. How can I explain this big change to people? This friend, for whom I was a bridesmaid, was also kind of a drinking buddy. We would meet for drinks and a plate of Ruby Tuesday's Super Nachos and share all the life junk that was going on. Was I ruining that?

Friendships often end when one makes such a big change. Bless her, she never questioned my decision, merely asked about it, then let me do my thing while she did hers. That's why we can tell each other anything, and why she's still my friend.

And dating?? How was I ever going to date, if I couldn’t do normal things?

Within days -- coincidentally? or by act of a Great Designer? We each have to decide that for ourselves -- people began to come into my life. People whose guidance, whose stories, and, sometimes, whose failures, all knocked me here and there but always forward. Kind of like a pinball.

Every region has its own traditions for AA members. Mine gave out "chips" for successful time in the program. A blue chip for increments of a year.

But I heard, can't remember where, of a group someplace where they give you a marble each year. The symbolism is that as a drinker, you've pretty much lost your marbles, and now you can start getting them back. I love this idea. Quitting is only the start. One can make some

insane decisions and generally act like one has lost one's marbles, even some time after quitting. I was 4+ years sober when I began to date my ex, 5+ when we married. Somehow, with the help of a Higher Power who, at my lowest point, enfolded me in a peace that passed all understanding, and the help of some of those same 12-step friends, I got through that whole episode without using.

So I can say I've got 20 marbles back. No, it's not my achievement. You can tell me how swell I am to have managed it, but that's bull. What got me to this point was a concept that I ran into in Christianity, but other traditions have versions of it. Whatever others think, I know that the strength does not come from me. It's grace. And no day is promised to me except today, by God's grace.

That's it. Coffee, doughnuts and free literature are at the back of the room. Thanks for the marble.

Woulda coulda shoulda

This is a picture of pretty much nothing. The eaves of our porch. Well, pine trees. Trees are nice. But yesterday, and for a couple months, we've had a big beautiful garden spider living there. Now she's gone.

We may be too emotionally involved with our wildlife around here, but aside from the fact that, thanks to her, no annoying flying insects have come in our front door to divebomb us--not one all summer--we just loved her. We watched her and her downstairs "sister" build their webs. Larry took care when weeding around the downstairs lady not to disturb a line of weeds that anchored the bottom of her web. We enjoyed the drama as a collection of small males sidled over to each web, hinting around for the privilege of being her lover and her next meal. (Actually in the wild, the female only lunches on the guy sometimes. But if I'd gotten a good photo of the suitors, I still had an "eatHarmony" post all planned out.)

In the AA program I learned the dangers of "woulda coulda shoulda." All the things we wish we could go back and do over. They can drive you crazy. Some of them seep through anyway.

We got back from the grocery store yesterday and there was the Termite Guy.

This isn't our house. My parents own it as a guest house and we live here gratis which makes it possible to meet a lot of our obligations, especially medical ones. It's wonderful. But it's their house and we do things their way. My dad loves lawns. Larry and I both hate 'em. Someday in our mountain acreage we'll have woods and gardens. No bleepin grass. But we keep up the lawn here. OK, Larry does it. 8~)

In our own place, we'll avoid chemical pest control as much as possible. But the folks send the Termite Guy around periodically and it's OK. We did stop the inside spraying long ago. We figured that termite damage affects the house, but inside, chemical sensitivities take precedence. We've got cats for that anyway. Somehow we both thought that ended everything but the termite service itself.

So yesterday we waved Hi at the Termite Guy, said hello to our pretty spider, went inside and put the stuff away. After awhile the bell rang. Termite Guy said "OK, your termite inspection and pest control are done," presented me with the orders to sign, we bantered about the weather as per usual and he went cheerfully on his way. I didn't think to look over at our lady on her web. Though it would have been too late then.

We didn't notice till this morning that our girl and her whole structure were gone. Pest control had done its work. Her sister downstairs was cleaned away too. The words suddenly came back to me: "Your inspection and pest control are done."

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. "Hey we like the spiders so don't bother them, OK?" If I'd thought of saying it when we saw him in the driveway, they'd still be there, munching happily and making eggs. He didn't attend to them till after we got back. Upstairs Girl was still there when we went up with the groceries.

You wouldn't believe how much we care. Larry called the pest people up and told their Saturday answering machine never to bother our spiders again. I went out, looked around hoping she'd escaped, but knew that Termite Guy wouldn't have been doing his job if he just said "Shoo." Our 2 spiders are dead. No rewind.

I sat on the steps and had a good cry, helped some by the cat pragmatism of Scooter who mewed irritably and headbutted me: "This isn't about me so it can't possibly be important. Scratch right here." Then I walked around and visited the three who had not built on the house itself and thank God, they were well and happy.

There's one:

But the two on the house -- they shouldn't have died, damn it.

Clapping for Tinkerbell

Down at the Caveat Christian Emptorium, you can get all kinds of weird stuff -- every home should have one -- including bumper stickers that announce: "Prayer Changes Things!"

This is not unique to Christians. Most of my New Age friends believe in an intervening God or universal god-mind, and the power of prayer. We ask for, and offer to others, prayers for surgeries and troubled kids and safe travel.

Unbelievers think we're delusional. That's OK. I'm not sure we aren't. After all, the other condescending sticker at the Jesus Junk-tique says: "God always answers but sometimes the answer is no."

Maybe so, but Cute Little Sayings are usually bullshit, and especially when they try to explain God. A deeply worried friend asked for prayers when her father was admitted into the hospital. We all prayed like crazy. Nothing stopped the relentless parade of medical malpractice that misdiagnosed a simple malady, mistreated him and caused both his death and maybe some suffering, too, though maybe God's one gift was that the man was unconscious for most of it.

It's a reasonable question. Is it delusional to pray to a God who acts like Lucy?

I was raised by two people who had each experienced some degree of childhood trauma, from being sent away during the life-threatening illness of a parent, to ugly abuse. They both believed firmly in a loving God anyway and maybe their understanding of life's full spectrum of joy and shittiness gave that belief plausibility for me. They may not have reconciled the concepts of a loving God and the things he allows, but they are willing to not understand. They were also OK with anger toward God, and this may be one of the greatest gifts one can give a child.

Mary Martin's Peter Pan aired every year. My first viewing was memorable. There we all sat, the folks on the couch and 6-ish year old me on my favorite cushion pile on the floor, in my nightgown and robe and clutching my chocolate milk, about to see this great event in kiddie television.

Something in it disturbed me at gut level. There's Tinkerbell about to croak because not enough of us believe in fairies. Um...God will let her die because we don't believe?! Clap, kids. Save her life.

I clapped and scowled. Okay, I was always a testy little kid. I certainly didn't think out all this stuff, but disquiet began blooming in my mind: Does God punish somebody over somebody else's disbelief?! God will favor the clapped-for?

When Peter Pan aired the next year I tested the waters. Here we went again, Tinkerbell flickering out, while my parents said, "Aren't you going to clap?" No, by damn. Already, at age 7, I was gonna divest myself of this responsibility and put it right back on God where it belonged. And as Tinkerbell's light began to blaze more brightly I realized two things:

ONE: God may not save us in response to each other's prayers, but he won't smite us over lack of them, either.

TWO was that it was a film. OK, video. Either way, burned unchangeably onto celluloid forever. Even if every kid in the US took a bathroom break right then.

It took Alcoholics Anonymous to tell me the real reason for prayer.

I quit drinking so that I would never have to go to AA, but ended up there anyway and learned a lot about how to stay grounded in a high wind.

I run into two common misconceptions about AA, and they are, interestingly, polar opposites. One is that it teaches us how to have power over the addiction.

Well, kinda. Well, no, not really. In the first of the twelve steps, "we admit that we are powerless over alcohol and that our lives have become unmanageable."

That leads some people to the other misconception: that we're dumping responsibility for our actions, calling it a "disease" and ourselves "victims" of it, excusing our behavior. Wrong again. A huge responsibility is demanded of us, that of self-honesty. It starts with the next step, that of "turning to a Power greater than ourselves."

AA does not presume to define that Power for us. Do you believe in any power greater than yourself? they ask us. Anything? I know a few atheists who did fine in AA.

I found that, however bad a job God did with the world, he could make better decisions than I could. This was not saying a lot.

I learned about letting go, about not using God to control outcomes. To slowly learn the balance -- a lifelong process that I earn about a C- in -- of seeing when I can make a difference, but never driving myself to drink over things I could not control or change. AA teaches neither passivity, nor the illusion of control. It teaches Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

AA simplifies the wording:

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

I keep praying because it reminds me to turn things over. To accept the burden of doing what it's in my power to do and to free myself from the burden of things I can't change. If I let go of the outcome, then, at best, I've added my drizzle of healing energy to the great river of light. And at worst, God seems to say, stay in touch with me but live your own life. Do what you can, then make a milkshake, do the laundry, cut your nails. You can't cure someone's cancer, but you can make a donation, help a kid stay in school, recycle, vote. Be fully in your life.

Pray for Callie, if you're inclined to do that sort of thing.