Then & Now

When I first got sober, I heard a lot about the importance of living spiritually -- of seeing my life from a new perspective.

My only problem with that was that I ALREADY lived spiritually.

I’m embarrassed about a lot of things.

I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I did when I was drinking. And I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I’ve done since I got sober. I’m embarrassed about the fact that I’ve ended up – absurdly – writing so much about the topic of sobriety. (Can’t I think of anything more interesting to write about? Don’t I know you’re not supposed to attach your name to recovery material anyhow? Etc, etc.)

I grew up in a very large house (actually a converted cow barn) on a street that is suburban today but that, back in the early ‘70s, was closer to being outright rural. My mother and I were often alone in this house, and in the evenings I’d look out at the lights of our neighbors – wavering behind a green curtain of summer leaves or bright and bare through winter branches – and wonder why it was that people lived this way: close enough to know that others were out there somewhere, yet too far away for the fact to make much difference.

I watched a lot of TV during my years in that big converted cow barn, and the shows I liked best -- from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Mayberry RFD to MASH -- were always those that featured a community of one kind or another.

Far and away my favorite of these shows was Hogan’s Heroes. With their secret radio messages, underground tunnels, and endless late-night excursions into the German countryside to blow up bridges or secure some all-important roll of microfilm, Hogan and his men inhabited what was, to my mind, a supremely enviable world. Unlike the safe yet subtly insecure semi-suburban limbo I lived in, Hogan’s world was one where all apparent dangers and discomforts were mere camouflage. Truth be told, Stalag 13 was a place both comfortable, and comforting, in the extreme. A place where people were always coming and going, where something was always happening, and where (despite all the endless times Colonel Clink threatened Hogan with a spell in the cooler) no one was ever really alone.

Why couldn’t my own life be more like that?

Considering what an abstract thing it is, it’s amazing what a central role the concept of time plays in recovery. Is there another sub-culture out there that puts so much emphasis upon such a slippery – indeed, totally un-graspable -- concept?

Not that alcoholics and addicts come to recovery ill-prepared to talk about time. In fact, all alcoholics are time philosophers to some degree, because it’s really impossible to be a drunk or addict and not to have meditated at least a little on what time is and what it means. And in particular, about that supremely mysterious and vexing time-related entity called…

the moment.

There's a joke I’ve heard a bunch of times, the basics of which go something like this:

A guy stays out too late drinking one night. Staggering home at two in the morning and not wanting to wake up his wife, he goes to sleep on the back porch.

The next morning, his wife comes out and wants to know what happened the night before.

“I had to stay at work and help George,” the guy says. “He had so much extra work -- if someone didn’t help him out I knew he’d be fired. We didn’t finish till two in the morning.”

“That’s funny,” says the wife. “George called last night around nine, looking for you. What do you have to say about where you were now?”

The man thinks for a second, then says: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”