A Burt Bacharach Christmas Story

daily gratitude list 12.23.22

I’m very grateful for Christmas and to be seeing my parents and kids. I’m grateful for all of the work involved. I’m grateful for a seriously gloomy morning. I’m grateful at how often I laugh at myself. I’m grateful when I remember I’m in public. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I had a very definite plan when I sat down recently to write this. A topic and everything and then I was really struck by how gloriously gloomy it was this morning. I wonder if there is a color called “New York Winter Morning?” Because that is the color this morning, a very dark gray with greenish undertones and you can’t quite tell how much of it is fog. It strikes me that it is a very similar color to “Iowa August Thunderstorm.”¹ I went out to take the above picture, and really loved my little xmas lights against that gloomy, Gotham backdrop. Then there was some ensuing chicanery involving re-setting Apple ID’s and such and it’s funny how quickly one (“one” being the charitable way I sometimes refer to myself when I’d like to slightly obfuscate the fact that I’m speaking from personal knowledge) can get derailed. I think the way my mind spins or careens is maybe a better word, is pretty common among us alcoholics, slowing down the hamster wheel was one of the many beneficial effects alcohol had in the early days.

However, “I come today not to praise alcohol…” There’s the start of a great sentence, however, it’s also off-topic, so we’ll leave it there.² I’ve been working on something that I informally and off-handedly have titled “The Origins of Shame.” It’s going to trace the concept of shame from Adam and Eve, explain how the story of the Resurrection is something of a counterpoint and then connect it to modern ideas about addiction and recovery. With tons of snappy jokes and references to 1970’s music. However, I’m currently kind of bogged down in the “Begats” section, so I’m doing this instead. The central idea being that shame may be the central idea for a lot of alcoholics. I think we all know how effective alcohol is at interrupting the shame circuit temporarily. It makes sense to me that part of the reason we alcoholics are so stubborn about giving up the thing that is poisoning us is that we maybe have lots of unbearable feelings of shame that we’re pretty sure can’t be tolerated. This may be connected to the Fourth and Fifth Step process and you start to see how maybe the genius of the Twelve Steps is that they are maybe prompts for writing a really fantastic new script to frame life going forward. This results in an exorcism or coming to terms with said shame and, et voila, alcohol’s usefulness and its hold on the alcoholic is lessened.

But here’s where I really wanted to go. I’ve long had a sense that I was somehow living a story. This is kind of a hard thing to explain, and it’s one of the many ways I sound kind of crazy, but things that I thought about as a kid, situations I imagined (in a fair amount of detail) actually started happen. One of the ways I notice this is by the music I listen to, or I should say, listened to. I’ve got a ton of examples of songs that just resonated so deeply with me, songs that I thought perfectly expressed what I was feeling and what I was thinking, except that I was a Sixth Grader and it was a Burt Bacharach song. The Sixth-Grade TBD-model delivered the Des Moines Register, was a pretty accomplished Webelos and knew very little of actual heartbreak. Yet, he listened to this song kind of obsessively—putting that record on the turntable in the living room when no one was in the house so he could really listen to it, really feel it. Here’s the song:

I listened to that song over and over and just loved the part where there are like 2 or 3 quiet rimshots before the music swells and Burt Bachrach’s really not-very-good voice is perfect for a few seconds.³ The next song on the album is the terrible “Do You Know theWay to San Jose?’ What is that even about? Anyway, the song would trail off, I’d pop over to the turntable and pop-up the tonearm and try to plop it back down at the beginning of the track and listen again. This had to be a secret, I’m not sure what it said about an eleven year old to be this connected to a song that was clearly not about bowling alley Sunday afternoon “dates.”

I imagined how gloriously sad and lost it would feel to actually have that happen. Then it did. I have many other examples of this, trust me, you’ll hear about them soon enough. Do I think I somehow manifested later events in my life by ingesting a storyline via an album that had the “doomed romance” and “starting over” threads so prominently displayed? Did the weird Flugelhorn and Oboe-heavy arrangements somehow vibrate at exactly the same frequency as me in 1973? I have no idea. Maybe.

I may be so far gone as to possibly believe that sometimes those things are talismans, maybe sent as a friendly, “hey, you might want to get used to the idea that this could happen.” Obviously, the science lags a bit behind me here, but this fuels my idea that I’m living a story. Because the way these things eventually connect up looks a lot like foreshadow and setting up ironies to reflect on much later.

What I realized as I got sober and things started to unfold in ways that were unimaginable, but that I’d weirdly kind of known would happen, was the power of the storyline, the narrative. It’s the words we put around events that often end up determining the impact of those events, the meaning of those events. Meaning there are always different ways to look at the same old things. So, I could look at events, like the end of something I treasured, and I could see all of the ways maybe I could have changed things, the ways I could have been different that might have led to a different outcome, all of things I could have said or done that would have led to a different result. Or I could accept that this wasn’t a story that was only about me and it wasn’t a story where I got to write the ending or even really control much of anything about how it turned out. Maybe it was just a really beautiful story that had a beginning and an ending that were meant to accomplish something else, maybe for someone else?⁴

This is supposed to be a Christmas story and it’s not really turning out that way. I think I’m about to change that. For me, Christmas and Easter are important not because they mark historical events that actually happened, because I don’t know if they do. What I know, from years of reading them and listening to them, is that the stories are unbelievably powerful and when I consider that the same forces that were at work in those stories, well, maybe smaller-scale, more compact miracles might be possible in my own life. I didn’t need to still the waters on an actual stormy sea, just the wave machine sloshing inside of me, I didn’t need to find a way to sustain 5,000 people by conjuring up loaves and fishes, I just had to find a way to sustain my own life. The power of the story is when you realize it’s already at work in your life, you just didn’t realize it.

My Dad always read from the Gospel of Luke on Christmas Eve—it’s maybe my most favorite thing about Christmas. There’s just so much hope and love and humble, quiet joy in that telling. When I listened to my Dad reading that story and tried to imagine the scene, it was a really, really dark night and in my mind’s eye, there’s a little light coming from that stable and it’s a long ways away, but you can definitely see the glow even from quite a distance. It’s not an ordinary light by any stretch, it has a singular, beckoning, welcoming quality to it. I didn’t need to believe any of that, I could feel it when my Dad read the story.

You won’t be the first to admire my swanky Xmas tree skirt.

When I finally started to get sober, I heard the story about someone standing in a dark tunnel holding a flashlight and someone else who had been lost in that dark tunnel for a long, long time eventually, miraculously finding the person with the flashlight. The seeker says, “Wow, am I glad to see you! I’ve been so lost and here you are with a flashlight and everything to show me the way out!.” The person with the flashlight flips around and shows the way out, “See, it’s just over there, but before you can go, you need to stand here with the flashlight and wait for the next guy, because he’s lost, too.”

I heard the flashlight story and I immediately thought about the light from the manger on that very, very dark night in that other story. Once I figured out that could be my light, too, that the person it was actually beckoning might be me? Well, holding the flashlight for a while seems like a pretty groovy way to live my life. That’s a story I’m very happy to live.

Merry Christmas.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. You’re not the first to wonder if these would also translate to names for fancy candles.

2. Why couldn’t it be an infinite number of chimps typing would eventually produce “Julius Caesar?” There’s a Universe I’d definitely like to visit, the one where there are an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters.

3. Have I done a Bill Murray-esque lounge-singer karaoke version of this song? Yes. Would I do it again sober? Yes.

4. The thought that he is not at the center of all events and all thinking is profoundly unsettling for the alcoholic in his natural habitat.