Tradition Seven

Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

Another amazing example, when I read it, of how AA works as a world-wide organization.  The text talks about AA not accepting money from a will, back when AA really needed money, and I find a few things interesting about it.  There are a few things I wonder about.  Not enough to look into it, but I wonder.

Do they accept money from wills of members?  I can see why it would be a very bad thing for AA to have more money than it needs.  The concept of having just enough is an excellent one.  In my group, we donate what extra we have to the church where we meet (they don’t charge us rent), and to our local AA office and the New York office.  But what do they do with it if they have more than they need?

In the text of the tradition, Bill writes about how little they used to throw in the hat in the early days.  When I first went to meetings, beginning in 1978, people sometimes put in a quarter or two, though usually a dollar.  When, locally, there’s talk of AA needing more money, folks point out how that dollar doesn’t buy what it used to.  There is constant talk that the Grapevine is in financial trouble, and really I don’t know how it can move into the future and stay afloat.  Carole and I subscribe and get two copies, to help support it.  I don’t read it at all, but she does.

Carole and I don’t get reimbursed for snacks or coffee when it’s our turn to provide them.  I usually buy the books for the meeting, and I don’t take the money out of the pot.  We don’t take money for that we’ve spent on cards or coins.  We have had members donate a coffee pot, when we’ve needed one, or donate food or supplies for our group’s anniversary party. Members have donated frames for our slogans and a picture of the man on the bed.

All of this, obviously, costs so much less than alcohol.  Add into that the fact that I’m employed because I don’t drink.  I haven’t wrecked a car or needed bail money.  I have no medical costs caused by alcohol.  I don’t buy drugs.

That’s all wonderful for me.  More important than all that, though, is the fact that AA is free.  Our collection at my meeting often works out to be less than a dollar for each person present.  Thank God.  As critical as critics can be, none of them can furnish a remotely possible solution that is available 24 hours a day, and free.

The concept of having just as much money as we “need” is an interesting one to ponder, for me, as it relates to the rest of my life.

Tradition Six

An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.

The few pages that explain this tradition talk about the problems that did and could arise as AA as an organization and AAs as people publicly identifying themselves get involved in education, hospitals, laws and other important and well-intentioned endeavors.  From here, from now, it’s easy to see why any of that has the potential to destroy AA, so I’m very grateful that none of it succeeded before, and that we now have the Traditions to guide us away from that.

At my meeting last night, the topic was “the tool that keeps you sober” or something like that.  One man said that last Tuesday, he tried to go to a meeting that wasn’t there.  He then headed to another meeting, and it, also, wasn’t there.  He knew of course that many churches had activities last Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, but he reflected on what it would like if AA was to cease to exist.  It sounded to me like a good Twilight Zone episode and it is something I hope I never live to see.  I had a slight argument with someone (who will not be named) about who would brew the coffee for that meeting, and ultimately I decided that I’m honored and privileged and grateful to open the door and make the coffee and keep the meeting going for, I hope, alcoholics who have not yet even been born.

 

February 1, 2011 (this day)

A stream of consciousness, written to avoid writing about (really, reading about) Tradition Four.

This time of year is tough, with the unrelenting cold and ice and snow.  There are no “big” holidays and every day is a battle to get out the door and get somewhere safely.  Even when the roads are relatively clear, there’s a constant stream of yuck thrown up on the windshield and an endless stream of windshield washer fluid pouring out into the world just so we can see.

Football.  I despise it.  Truly.  It is so very wrong.  Millionaire men seeing who can smash whom the hardest.  The language of football is the language of war.  The resources that go into football make me weep.  Not so much the pro football, but in football for the children, football over books, football that endangers their very brains.  It is everywhere right now, and I hate it.  My problem, entirely.  I’m apparently not quite ready to have God remove this defect of character.

Sunday, instead of watching football, I will go to a meeting, and I hope there’s someone there in addition to me and the friend I asked to meet me there.  It’s very possible there won’t be.  But in talking about it today, this friend asked me why I love this particular meeting.  It’s not in my neighborhood and I pass many meetings to get there.  The “home” group is mostly if not entirely men, and I’m sorry, but I vastly prefer the company of women.

But.  For one thing, it’s different.  Just the sameness of AA meetings repeated for hours a week over what feels like a lifetime – for me, truly, it is a lifetime.  Just the sameness can cause people to drift away, I’m sure of it.  I vow to myself and my God who gave me this second chance at life that I will not drift away so long as I am able to attend, but not everyone shares my commitment.  Hardly anyone does.  But anyway, something different is nice, just because it’s different.  I know that I was raised that way, to prefer diversity, and I’m grateful.

Beyond that, of course, something can’t be good just because it is different.  At this meeting they read the big book, but they then discuss it in a way I haven’t experienced at any other meeting.  They have an actual discussion, rather than raising hands or taking turns or only having one turn.  An actual discussion.  That’s different, and in a good way.

The people who attend the meeting are smart.  I’ve recently stopped apologizing for being smart (and having smart children).  Being smart is a good thing, a gift, like artistic ability or athletic ability or some other ability.  I wish everyone could be smart, because it’s a good thing.  Given that everyone can’t be, I’m grateful that I (temporarily) am, and I enjoy being intellectually stimulated.  The discussion at this meeting is at a high intellectual level that not everyone would follow or enjoy.

AA is not a “smart” program.  Above average intelligence is by no means required to get it, thank goodness.  But like anything else, I believe, it can be intelligently enjoyed and explored an exercised in a way that, personally, gives me pleasure.  They do that at this meeting.

Some of the oldtimers and some of the newer people there have studied AA and AA history in a way that makes what they say interesting to me.  Again, I enjoy history.  I am on no crusade to bring AA back to the way it used to be.  Times change!  But I find history interesting and enjoyable and, for me, it adds to my experience.  I don’t question the credentials of the people at the meeting.  I know full well that they may be full of hot air and spouting things that are wrong or worse.  That would never endanger my sobriety.  I guess it could endanger sobriety for some, and they should certainly stay away.

So I’m very much looking forward to this meeting, and I will be disappointed if it’s a bomb or worse, if no one shows up because they’re too busy doing something else …….

June 21, 2010 (this day)

No one related to me, by blood or by marriage, is safe from alcohol.  I believe it.

I returned in the wee hours of the morning from a family wedding.  Carole the kids and I headed out Friday morning, back to near where I grew up.  My parents were the oldest and second-oldest among their siblings.  I have aunts, uncles and cousins of varying ages, and some of my aunts and uncles are not much older than I am.

We had a good time traveling Friday and Friday night we explored an almost-empty mall.  Saturday, the wedding was beautiful and went really well.  Sunday we visited relatives at a cook out.  And Sunday evening we started home, arriving around 2 in the morning this morning.

This wedding had more alcohol than I’ve ever seen at a wedding.  Everything was beautiful and costly, and even the delicious entrees (so I’m told) had alcohol in each and every one.  I don’t think I’ve seen that before.  There was an open bar, wine that was constantly refilled at the tables, champagne and, I’m told, cordials.

(For the record, Carole and I had NO alcohol at our wedding.  Nor did we have complications caused by alcohol).

There were several family members I worried about, people who have frequently, in the past, had too much to drink and acted out in one way or another.  Again, these people are related to me by both blood and marriage, and their ages and generations vary.  I remember once when a drunken wedding guest decided to steal all of the restaurant’s glasses.  I have pictures of a dance-floor strip tease.  I have pictures of children, children, passed out drunk at weddings.  I have to say that no wedding (that I can remember) coincided with my own drinking career, and I do not think anyone has drunken wedding stories about me.  But you never know.  There are a few years I can’t recall.

So two stories from this wedding.  One of my male relatives bullied me about dancing that is still upsetting me.  Understanding I have lead a very peaceful life in that respect – I have not been abused or beaten or tortured or bullied.  He physically pulled my chair out from under the table and threatened to carry me.  I know people live with so incredibly much worse every day, but I am not used to being treated that way.  I really panicked, in my thoughts, about how to make him stop and what I would do if he physically forced me.

The other major thing that happened was that an out-of-town relative who usually doesn’t drink, and who I actually thought might have escaped the curse, got so drunk that he sat at the table completely out, head on the table, picking it up to puke.  This relative sees us only once every few years.  The next day, at the cook out, he was too sick to get out of bed and missed seeing and talking to us at all.  I heard him remark to himself, “I missed the party.”  I’m still slightly shocked over that one as well.

We came home to the news that a friend in the program is drinking and struggling again.

In all this I realize, and I’m so very grateful, that Carole and I don’t (today) have to worry about each other, that we may or may not be sober, or how drunk we were when we had that (any) conversation.

On our way to the wedding, we visited a place I briefly lived when Nicholas was about two and Erica was about 4.  It’s a very rural area, and I’d find it hard to live somewhere like that today.  But it was closer to home (about three hours away by car) so I was thrilled with that and I really didn’t suffer from the location at that time.  Carole asked me where I went to meetings then.  I traveled to the very big city I had left once a month to attend my old women’s meeting there.  I found and joined a new women’s meeting in the farm country.  I traveled to a nearby tiny city to attend a “bring your kids” meeting in a church nursery, bringing Nicholas with me while Erica was in preschool.  I attended my old old meetings on visits home.  I kept in touch with a few of people I had known at the beginning.  I was then a sober, boring wedding guest just as I was two days ago and today no one is writing about the outrageous thing I did this weekend, or how I scared them or hurt their feelings.

The cook out was in the yard of a house that has been in my family for two generations.  I remember being in that yard with my great-grandmother, and my children, her great great grandchildren, were there two days ago.  I’m sure she couldn’t have imagined us (in many ways), and I don’t know if she herself carried the family curse or if she just passed it down or married it through.  I don’t know what relationship the next generation or any succeeding generations will have with alcohol, but today I am filled with gratitude that I have been able, for today, to break the chain.

Cultish Aspects, Part III

More from Antonahill:

>AA does not control the information that members receive from books or TV or the internet or from other people. It does not shun people who fall away. The fact that it actually welcomes such people back probably saved my life.

Not “shun”, no. But harsh judgement is lobbed at those who do not follow the culture that is preached.

Not really, not in my experience.  I relapsed chronically for six years.  I have had exposure over time to people who have relapsed.  I have known people who did “not follow the culture that is preached.”  I have not heard them subjected to harsh judgment.

When someone struggles, especially over time, in my experience, AA members become more heavy and adamant about the AA “suggestions.”  Mostly that’s because we hate to see people suffer, and know that in our individual and collective experience, the more of the “culture” we leave out, the less likely we are to achieve, maintain, and thrive in sobriety.

As for people who don’t seem to be struggling, but are not following the culture by maybe leaving out important aspects, I hear warnings sometimes directed toward them, but it is always couched in the terms of personal experience, and always  meant as a warning.  So for example someone who likes to hang out with old friends at bars may get told that this isn’t a good idea.  I hope they do get told that.  But harsh judgment?  No.  In my experience, AAs are the most gentle people I’ve known.

>AA does tell alcoholics that they have no personal power.

Which is absurd. And having such an absurd notion as a central tenet is at elast irresponsible.

Take it in context.  An alcoholic presenting herself at an AA meeting as such by definition cannot stop drinking.  Most people don’t show up at AA because they have one bad hangover.  It takes a lot of devastation usually for someone to take that step inside the rooms.  Usually this person has tried many many other ways first, and has failed, hence her presence at an AA meeting.

Now AA’s first step is to admit powerlessness.  This is the way sober people in AA have begun to live a life of sobriety. They don’t have list of ways for alcoholics to gain control of their drinking.  In fact, they have a list of ways that alcoholics have tried and failed to gain control of their drinking.

This concept is so central to the AA philosophy for me.  It’s what has enabled me to stay away from alcohol for 25 years after having nearly been killed by it.  The higher power, for me, at first, was the program of AA as practiced by the people I met there.  My will was to continue drinking, to not get so messed up that I couldn’t function, but I could not follow my own will.  I had no power to do that.  I had to follow the will of AA in order to begin to recover.  I had to.  For others, they don’t have to, and something else works for them.  When they show up at an AA meeting, though, I and millions of others will tell them what worked for us.  That we had no personal power.  That as long as we struggled to gain and exercise personal power, we were unable to stop drinking.  That if they are fortunate to grasp this concept as we have, they may begin to recover in the same way we advocate and love.

>Rather it has a systematic way of making sure, in as much as it is possible, that people apologize and make restitution for the past bad things they have done. It has a systematic way of encouraging us to review our conduct daily and several times a day, and to use our power to perform right actions.

As fine as that may be, the fact is that AA is not required for such principles to exist or be practiced.

And let’s be honest. One step instructs the member to hand all flaws over to God. That is not a system. That is religious tripe.

This is related to what I tried to express in the previous section.  The “handing over” is not a passive thing.  I may have struggled, for example, with dishonesty.  My presence in AA proves my inability to get very far on my own.  With the literature and people of AA, I have concrete directions and limitless counsel on how to actually do that by living a more honest life.  Once I have handed over the defect of dishonesty, for example, I can’t then to on to happily lie.

>Still, when I consider a newcomer, brand new to the rooms of AA, my best advice and my greatest hope for that person is that he or she jump in, stay close, and recover. I’ve seen it go the other way too many times. I couldn’t recover on my own, even after I had studied to some degree the principles of AA. So many others also cannot.

By your own admission, the principles of AA are not new to it. By what reasoning then is it a good idea to join and maintain fellowship in AA? The fact is that people can and do stop excessive drinking all the time without AA. There is, then, no reason for AA to exist if all it’s really going to do is rehash some tried and some absurd principles.

The fact that people can and do did not help me stop drinking one bit.  I don’t find any of the principles to be absurd, but then again, I wouldn’t.

>In speaking completely for myself, I can say with certainty that all the good I have done over the past 24 years is a direct result of AA. Had I lived without it, I would have been a pathetic taker, institutionalized and disabled in one way or another.

This begs the questions, were you unaware of the essentials of ethics before AA? Had it never crossed your mind to take responsibility for your actions? To apologize for the wrong you had done to others? If it had, then you had no need for AA. If it hadn’t, then you need much more than AA to become a productive member of society.

I had been exposed to those principles before AA.  It had crossed my mind to live an upright and ethical life.  However, as a compulsive drinker, I could not do it.

I needed AA to give me the people to support me in real time.  This may seem pathetic to a stronger person who could maybe study the Bible, or ethics, absorb the concepts and go on to be nearly perfect.  For me and most people I know, however, we fall far, far short of ideal.  For active alcoholics it is in my opinion impossible to drink and live an ethical life.

There are alcoholics who do it on their own but there are also many, many, who cannot.  I could not, and in desperation I turned to AA.  It gave me spiritual and ethical principles that I could live and apply, and an unlimited resource of people to help me do it.

The miracle of AA for me happened when I no longer had to attend in order to stay sober, but I wanted to attend in order to continue to grow spiritually and live better.

I am always sorry when I hear that someone will not give AA a try because the religious aspects turn them off, or because they think it is a cult.  I sincerely urge anyone who is struggling with alcohol to give it a try for 90 days.  You have everything to gain.

Cultish Aspects, Part II

More from Antonahill:

>Second, AA does NOT encourage members to leave society, but rather encourages them to become contributing members of it.

True (to some extent), but Scientology doesn’t encourage people to leave society completely either. This is a question of degrees. Is it possible to be in AA, be an active member, and have “normal” friends outside who engage in behavior that AA looks down on? Sure. But the fact of the matter is that the level of encouragement or discouragement that AA and its members levy upon certain behaviors is very much in a cult mindset.

“Normal” friends who engage in behavior that AA looks down on.  Well, being an active member, I would also then look down on those behaviors, wouldn’t I?  The truth is that many sober people, and speaking for myself, I find absolutely no fun or enjoyment in hanging out with people who are drinking or taking drugs.  Really it lost all its charm for me when I stopped.  At the beginning, I may have been vulnerable to relapse and so well-informed AAs would encourage me not to hang out with people who are doing the thing I seek to avoid.  This only makes sense.  Now, most days I am well beyond the danger of relapse and I have no desire to be around people who are engaging.  Once in a while, an occasion demands that I be around them, and this shows me again from time to time that this is not where I want to be.

At this stage of my life and my recovery, there really isn’t anyone who’s concerned about it if I should decide to go to happy hour with the people from work.  No one views this as dangerous for me and they neither encourage nor discourage me.  When someone is new in the program, it’s important that the newcomer experiences some sober time, to see if this will work for that person.  In that case, it’s very human to be tempted and to succumb, and so I, along with many other AAs, would discourage it and expose it as potentially dangerous.  We also suggest that the newcomer bring phone numbers and maybe another sober person along for support.  And you know what happens when someone doesn’t follow those suggestions?  Not a darn thing.  No cultlike behavior here.

>There are some lesser points that show to me that AA is not a cult in the negative sense. AA does not take financial control of a person, and is actually free to members, and discourages large donations made by individuals. There is not a charismatic leader.

I’ve already addressed this point, but yes, there are two. Any figure who is lifted onto a pedestal over the “regular” people can be considered a charismatic leader. In my experience, Dr. Bob and Bill W were treated as saints. Every word they had written was held aloft as divine wisdom. And so what of criticism? Plenty of cults, such as the Chabad movement, employ self-criticism.

OK so we’ll ignore the financial aspect, since AA is decidedly not cultlike in that way.  And that is not to be minimized.  Much of what we fear and dislike about cults, much of what is dangerous, is the way they take what ultimately matters, the money and property, of their adherents.  AA does not do this.

As for the sainthood of the founders, what they have written is certainly held aloft as wisdom, divinely inspired or simply divine.  Much more so Bill W than Dr. Bob, and personally I am always astonished and eternally grateful that the man had such a gift for writing.  I’ve heard plenty of criticism of Bill W and of some, admittedly few parts of what he has written, both in and out of AA.  It’s also been my experience that some AA members revere and try to interpret the AA literature literally, and try not to deviate from what they see as the exact written word.

I’m not like that, and I have had no problem getting on in AA with my liberal point of view.  To me, people who try to do this are like people who try to literally interpret the Bible, and I think both camps are missing the point.  Just as there can be fanatic and rigid Christians, there can be fanatic and rigid AAs.  In my experience, there are not many AAs like this.  But the fact that they exist does not negate the fact that there are many more moderate, thinking, questioning, practicing AAs than there are fanatics.  Extreme Christians would not make me suggest that Christianity is a cult.  Extreme AAs do not make me see the point that AA is a cult.

I thought I could wrap this up but there’s too much here.  More to follow.

Keep coming back!

Spread the Message

A wonderfully awesome follow-up to my post about Phyllis.

The speaker at my meeting tonight, Eleanore, had, at one time, 17 years of sobriety and had gone out.  Much failure, loss and carnage had not brought her back in.  One day sitting in some establishment (I don’t think it was a bar, but it might have been) Eleanore ran into Phyllis, who she had known both in the bars and in AA.  Phyllis told Eleanore that Eleanore looked “like hell,” and that Eleanore should go to a meeting.

Eleanore did, and tonight lead the meeting with over a year of new sobriety.

I don’t know what would have happened if Phyllis had not met Eleanore and had not told her to go to a meeting.  My experience tells me there would have been more, worse, failure loss and carnage.

Secrets (You’re only as sick as your secrets)

There’s someone specific on my mind for several reasons.  I’m going to call her Phyllis for this post.  She came to us a few years ago when she was 70 years old.  Circumstances had made her think it was a good time to stop drinking.

She went to lots of meetings and she stopped drinking and using other drugs – pretty much.  She sort of asked someone to be her sponsor, and that didn’t work out.  She kind of tried to work a step or two but that also didn’t work out completely well.  She stopped going to meetings for a time, then came back.  She goes to a few meetings a week now and hardly does any drugs or alcohol.  She doesn’t have a sponsor and she isn’t working steps.  Maybe, she tells us, if she had started out when she was younger.  But at this time, what’s the point?

And what’s the point of AA meetings for someone like this?  She tells us all the time, just about every time she’s at a meeting, that she comes because of the people.  I’ll point out also that no one to my knowledge tells her she can’t come, doesn’t belong, or is making her own quick doom.

Now I haven’t asked Phyllis about this, and I never spent any time at all in bars, and I imagine that drunken disclosures can be quite personal.  If they’re true.  I know the things I said when I was drunk were not always rooted in reality.  But the things Phyllis has disclosed to us over these few years are amazing.  I just bet that she never imagined she would tell strangers the things she has told us.  Most of us aren’t strangers, of course, but at an open meeting, there could be any number of strangers.

I don’t have any secrets.  I have one wacky circumstance wherein my work partner does not know I’m in AA, and I just feel ridiculous after all this time telling her.  I conceal one other fact from her, a friend I have whom I know she disapproves of, but I don’t hide it to the point of lying.  And for some strange reason I feel like I even have to only record those things because if I don’t, my wife will call me on them.

At times I’ve hidden my cigarette smoking from my children and my mother.  Thank goodness that hasn’t been an issue for quite some time.  I might not exactly hide, but not exactly broadcast it, if I cheat on my diet.  Smoking and eating in a disordered way.  Those things are sick, I think.  In those cases I am as sick as my secrets.

The fifth step has us disclose everything, at least once, to at least one person.  The exact nature of our wrongs.  Then then tenth has us admit when we are wrong.  It’s my own mind that is putting together secrets with wrongs.

I’m trying hard and I think all I have these days that I don’t want to disclose are sometimes disturbing dreams or thoughts.  At other times I don’t want to tell someone what I’m doing or what I’ve done because I know the person will disapprove or be angry, but I don’t usually feel I’ve done something wrong.  I haven’t seen it, in the rooms, where people are encouraged to confess all kinds of personal stuff to strangers, I really haven’t.  I have seen them, again and again, actually do so, though.  It seems natural to me to question why I or someone else wants to keep something a secret.  Something very personal, like a trauma or a medication or something, I can understand keeping close, and having few people who know about it.  That isn’t the same to me as a secret.

The level of disclosure I’ve experienced over the years is amazing.  Mary writes about a man who lived a good and productive life all the way through until an early death, a life uninterrupted by alcoholism.  I feel even luckier than that.  My life was interrupted and almost ended by alcoholism, but I have had so very many years of not just sobriety, but living the steps and knowing the wonderful people of the program it makes it more than worth it.  I can’t find words to explain the good fortune.  After all this time I still get to meet and know and pray for and worry about people like Phyllis.

January 18, 2010 (this day)

My friend Sofie is in town again.  She’s someone I knew from the beginning of – actually before the beginning of my sobriety.  We’ve kept in touch all these years.  A few years after I moved away from my hometown, Sofie’s daughter moved to the very place where I landed.  Last year, Sofie’s daughter had a baby.  Since my mother retired, and I don’t go to my hometown anymore, I get to see Sofie when she comes to visit her daughter.  This is amazing and priceless to me.  I can’t believe how fortunate I am that it worked out this way.

Carole and I visited Sofie and her husband Marcel and the baby today.  The baby is like a television baby.  One year old, adorable, agreeable, and very very good.  Carole and I had planned to go there for an hour, then go to a meeting near there, then go home.  The area is not the same as ours – it is another suburb of the same city.  Sort of.  Anyway we don’t go to those meetings and I like to go to different meetings.  The meeting we picked out is one where Marcel goes sometimes when he’s visiting.

• Between Carole and Sofie, Marcel and I, we must have about 100 years of sobriety in one room.
• I started a meeting here in the style reminiscent of the meetings back home.
• I prefer the AA of my hometown to the AA of here.
• Marcel prefers the AA of here to the AA of my hometown.
• Marcel loves the meeting we attended, and I was not impressed.
• I thought they were Big Book thumpers in the worst sense of the word.
• I learned that the two main AA hangout diners of my hometown are not there anymore.  I guess they’ve both gone away within the past two years.
• I have mourned those diners as here we go to a chain type of restaurant for the meeting after the meeting.
• When I find that I don’t like a particular meeting, I have six kabillion others to choose from.
• There are sober people at that meeting, at my meeting, in my hometown and here.
• I am aware that I am lucky and blessed to be one of them today.

December 25, 2009 (this day)

This Christmas day, Nicholas is home from school.  Carole and I went to church this morning because she was the assistant minister for the service.  No one goes to Christmas morning church.  There were probably 15 people there, if that.  Everyone goes on Christmas Eve.  I remember hearing a few years ago that some mega churches weren’t having services on Christmas, because the expense of heating the church wasn’t worth it for the few people who attended.

The weather was gray and cold and rainy here, so the inside of the church wasn’t all that cheery.  On the upside, our pastor has communion at just about every single service, so with so few people, the service went very quickly.

I’m a reluctant Lutheran, but the message and explanation of the message that was in the beginning of Hebrews made some kind of sense to me.  Except for the parts where the author claims to know what God said to Jesus ……

Nicholas and Erika were here, as well as a friend of Carole’s.  We called my mother and she sounded quite drunk to me.  She doesn’t like the weather in Florida.  They are wearing shorts and t-shirts.

I don’t like presents, especially when I or another giver feels like they have to give something.  So basically on days like Christmas, Mother’s day, anniversaries and birthdays.  But I think I lived through it graciously enough.  I hope I did.

When Erika and Nicholas are with me for holidays, I always have the feeling of not knowing if they ever will both be again.  I’ve gone through only one holiday without Erika, I think, when she was in England at Thanksgiving.  At this point I’ve been through lots of them without my own mother.

Tomorrow, after our meeting, Carole and I have invited everyone from the meeting to come to our house.  For me, it’s in memory of my women’s meeting back home, when we would have a party at the meeting every year on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s.  Next year, Christmas and New Year’s are on Saturday, and I’m already liking the idea of having a party-meeting both days.

I also noticed that the Obamas made it to Hawaii OK for their Christmas.  I bet they weren’t even a little bit afraid.