Day 1: I did a quick run to the drugstore a few mornings ago. My favorite corner Walgreens – I go there almost every day. It’s the place I buy my gassy water and Ice Cubes gum (and benignly yen for sweet-n’-cheap in the wine isle). The go-to where (at the worst of times these […]
Category Archives: Sobriety
I was at a Families Against Narcotics (FAN) meeting several months ago. It was a cold, miserable night and the room was full of folks who had lost a loved one to addiction and overdose. The topic was processing grief. The room was bursting with the collective swell of tears and regret and rage… Where […]
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a divining rod that foreshadowed alcoholism? It would start shaking when a person was about to hit the point of no return – that moment when over-drinking morphs into reliance. I can picture some modern day Carrie Nation entering a pub, water-witching her way along the bar. […]
When my son was a toddler, a resourceful mother bird built a nest in the tree outside his bedroom window. It was stressful for both of us to watch. The sparrows built their nest during a Florida wind storm. And because they took up residence in our tree, we felt responsible. We’d sit on the […]
I went to CPR training/certification last week. I felt a bit anxious as the trainer painstakingly itemized all the unfortunate things that can happen to a person. In the video, after someone cut themselves with glass or collapsed while ordering coffee at a kiosk, there was always someone who stepped forward. They would hold up […]
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead When the skies of November turn gloomy… Gordon Lightfoot It would not have been a trip to Marquette without thinking of the time my brother almost got swept off a break wall there, during a storm. A couple of days ago I said the UP […]
I am currently obsessing about climbing a set of stairs. The stairs begin at a feeder road to the expressway in Grand Rapids and end, like Jack’s beanstalk, high and steep enough above the ground to disappear into the early morning mist. I am obsessing (and I don’t use that word lightly), because this staircase is a […]
In the movie La La Land, there is a “what could have been” scene. And by the time you get there, you are so enthralled with the connection between the main characters, you can’t help but hope the real outcome is some cheesy, cinematic trick. A dream sequence, perhaps? Anything, so the beloved couple really does give […]
In the pubs in England, everyone talks about the weather. “Bit of rain today,” they’ll say, even when their brollies are turned inside out from the violence of the storm. It seems we do the same in Michigan in winter. We minimize our despondence, caused by the seemingly endless gray, as if we’re responsible. But, like England, when you get […]
I’m on the road, visiting addiction treatment centers and talking to professionals from every job description in the addiction field. What strikes me more than anything else is the diversity, the options one has to get and stay sober. Everything from white knuckled, twice a day AA, self policing; to 90 days or more in the […]