HAPPY NEW YEAR

New Years, 2010. That reads like the comic books I was addicted to, when as a kid many of my friendships were based on the pile of comics you owned rather than your personality. 2010 was light-years away. Mysterious, a place where people walked on the moon, shot each other with ray guns, and communicated by sending their image and talking directly through a machine. X-ray vision and robots to do your bidding. This year, my daughter-in-law got a robotic machine for Christmas that rolls around her house and cleans her floors while she is at work. She calls it Cecile. But is any of this any more fantastic than an alcoholic happily living a life without a drink? Not for this alcoholic.

Alcohol was my coping mechanism. It overcame my shyness and made me able to talk and dance and compete with the life of the party. It constructed a reality that had little to do with real life. It told me I was a little above living life by the rules normal people ordered their life by. Then alcohol became a trickster. One day I woke up and I could not account for the last 10 years of my life and I could see no future. Suicide seemed the only option and I attended my first 12 Step Meeting only because a friend begged me to try it first.

Had I acted on my impulse, I would have missed the most beautiful years of my life. When I walked through the doors of that meeting I found hope in each greeting. I was told if I did not like who I was, I could change and become someone else. It never occurred to me that it was possible to shape myself into a new person.. I thought I was born a certain way and would always remain so. Not only did the program show me the way to change through the Steps, but it gave me living examples to follow, and friends to cheer me on. The process was not easy; it took commitment on my part and time, but the rewards in repaired relationships, friends, and a life
full of more possibilities than I could ever have dreamed, is priceless.

Michael and I usually leave the roads to the amateur on New Year's Eve and take silly pictures of ourselves in front of the TV as they do the count-down, toasting in the new year with sparkling pomegranate juice. Some of those pictures look very much like the old days, but we remember taking them and do not wake up with a hangover. This year we are going to a Sober New Year's Eve Party to celebrate with other sober alcoholics this miracle of reclaimed life and on the first day of 2010 we are celebrating with more friends, having a sober AA Picnic at a local park. To all our friends we are with in spirit if not in body, we wish you a serene and Happy New Year,... even if you don't own a comic book.)