Back at the Beginning
A Trip to the Archives
I’m grateful for a super busy week. I’m grateful for bouncing back. I’m grateful for letting things work out. I’m grateful for my kids and my adorable grandson. I’m grateful for love and beauty. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Hello to all of our very valued subscribers. Due to a fairly rugged travel and work schedule, I’m going to need to ask for your indulgence and pull out a “Best Of” for your reading pleasure this morning.
This is one of the first things I wrote and published here during my first year in New York. I’m struck by my own prescription for sobriety way back in 2021:
“I’m coming to realize that getting sober isn’t so much about deciding to not drink, it’s about deciding to connect to the life that’s all around us.”
I mostly live by Satchel Paige’s sage admonition: “Don’t look back, you don’t know what’s been gaining on you!” But mostly what I see when I look back is how much things have changed. Things that were aspirational are now a part of life. Some hopes and dreams maybe didn’t make it, some things turned out very differently than I thought they would, but life is very good and I’m still sober! Hope you enjoy:
An Alcoholic in New York
I’m a 58 year-old alcoholic living and writing in New York. How I got here is kind of a long story. Shakespeare wrote “brevity is the soul of wit,” and I do like to think of myself as kind of a witty alcoholic, so I’ll try to be concise. I ended up here in NYC because I didn’t really know what else to do and literally had no place else to go. I’d always loved it here and had always wanted to live here. If I was headed for the end of the road, I thought it might as well be somewhere nice.
Happy Friday!