I’m grateful to be home. I’m grateful for a new year. I’m grateful to see where life has taken me. I’m grateful for chance encounters and funny conversations. I’m grateful a lot of the bookstores in Paris were closed. I’m grateful for the feeling I got when I opened the door. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I am pretty happy to be back haunting my old haunts.1 I hear there is rain in the forecast here in New York City and that makes this owner of a too-swanky-to-use umbrella pretty happy.2 I brought back a variety of treasures and the haul would have been far greater had not January 2nd been a nearly universal “inventory taking” day in Paris. But it was enough to have a conversation like this:
Friend: You bought an extra bag to bring home books? Do they not have books in New York. Me: Ummmm, yes.
I will tell you, once you have made the decision to purchase a cheap additional bag to accommodate the things that should not have been purchased but have been purchased, well, the floodgates and the barn door both swing open. But it led a truly lovely exchange at The Red Wheelbarrow (a very charming bookstore) near the Les Jardins Du Luxembourg. I had an armful of books, mostly about Paris (this is how one prepares for the next trip), the bookseller grinned and said, “Building your library of Paris books?” I laughed, admitted that I was actually under a self-imposed kind of house arrest when it came to buying books and that buying an extra bag to transport books was a bit ridiculous.3 She laughed, and said, “Gabor Mate, do you know him, he wrote that books were the addiction he couldn’t shake.” I laughed knowingly, said I had read his books, she tilted her head,”Are you a therapist, or a doctor?”
If ever there was a moment to trot out the line that has been kicking around my head since like 1976 (maybe from “Airplane?”):
No, but I play one on TV.
I didn’t say that. I was tempted to say, “Nope, just a regular old alcoholic,” but I smiled and said, “just a personal interest in the subject.” Note: None of the books were about recovery or addiction or anything like that. There was a book about writers in Paris, and maybe she just assumed I was an alcoholic, too? Or maybe I just give off that vibe pretty strongly. That marks a pretty big shift for me. There was a time, actually quite a bit of time, where I would have been mortified by being “spotted” like that. My head would be spinning with questions like “how obvious is it?”
That’s an understandable reaction, because there is so much stigma around the words we use to describe ourselves. In early sobriety, the feelings of shame and fear of judgment and ostracism generated by bearing the scarlet letter A can be pretty overwhelming and most folks would prefer to sidestep that where possible. Me included. But once the shift occurred for me, once I saw and really believed that being an alcoholic was a diagnosis, not an insult, things got easier for me.
The power of that shift, the shift I believe is a consequence of a Big Book-style spiritual awakening, is pretty tremendous. I sat in the Air France lounge for a while yesterday and wrote. Airport lounges were a place I spent a lot of time drinking and let me tell you, they are really excellent places to drink because it’s pretty anonymous and self-serve. Anyway, I sat there yesterday, I could smell the bottles of wine, I had an unparalleled opportunity to drink by myself in an anonymous setting. My favorite thing in the whole world. None of that translates into “I’d like a drink” anymore.
That’s the real shift. I went from, “I can’t have a drink” to “I don’t want to drink.” Those are very different things and there are different mindsets attached. “I can’t” is the necessary language of early recovery, but the Twelve Steps and the 164 pages of the Big Book are directed towards producing the “I don’t want to” response. This alcoholic is here to tell you it works. I was a wine-drinking alcoholic and I just spent a few days wandering around alone in maybe one of the greatest cities in the world for drinking wine. I bought umbrellas and books instead.
I’m pretty happy to be home. The picture of my daughter was welcoming-ly askew. The cool thing is that the haunts aren’t so haunted anymore and every time I come home, I see that a little more clearly.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Do I believe in ghosts? Yes, mostly. I’m pretty sure I have a ghost here in the apartment, a pretty benign ghost who expresses itself by placing things in places I would never place them and there’s a photo of my daughter that is perpetually askew about 10 degrees. Yes, I re-hung it because I thought it was slipping off the picture hook. It’s not that. Also, I think Paris is a very ghosty city—not sure what that means exactly, but they did have to relocate an entire huge cemetery and I’ve watched GhostBusters enough times to know what that can mean.
You may recall, I also got pretty excited for rainy days as an opportunity to wear the big yellow Safety Patrol slickers in the 6th Grade.
My ban on acquiring “new” books has been completely misinterpreted and is actively being subverted by someone who thinks that the product of visits to “used” bookstores is somehow not covered by this ban. This is also how I kept drinking.
Such a great post! Welcome home!
In the early iteration of my life, I was a residential manger for a Steiner college for young people with disabilities. I managed several homes for the residential provision. One of the residential houses was a 17th century cottage with an enormous garden. It had a lot of its original features like wooden beams and stone floors in the kitchen.
For sure, it was haunted. Whenever I did a sleep-in shift there, something weird would always happen. Once I heard someone running around in the corridors outside my room. I got up to see which of the kids it was, but they were all sound asleep when I checked their rooms. There were no pets. When I went back into my room, all the lights were on - bed lamp, main overhead light, corner lamp and desk lamp. This was before the days of IoT and Alexa, and no way I got out of bed to turn all the lights on before checking on the kids.
This happened on all shifts i did consecutively, for about a month (the lights thing, it was always something different that would get me out of bed, to include the sound of deer mating. Not a ghost, but I wasn't to know...) One evening I asked the... being, to please stop fucking with the lights, it's very rude, and I doubt they needed it to see. It stopped.
I hated working there... And now I'm all creeped out telling you this story.