Trees Do It

There’s a tree outside my bedroom window that has lost nearly all of its leaves. There are a few stragglers left, clinging to the tips of the otherwise bare branches, fluttering defiantly in the wind. I found myself this morning looking out and thinking, What are they waiting for?

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Heavenly Music

I went to an AA meeting with my doctor last night. Well, it wasn’t exactly my doctor, but a doctor—a first-year resident, to be specific, and it was part of a volunteer program called the Physician Alcoholism and Addiction Training Program in which sober alcoholics act as temporary “buddies” to primary care resident physicians in an effort to help the doctors understand the disease of alcoholism by talking about their experience and recovery.

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“If You Can Count to One...”

One of the unfortunate traits I believe I have passed on to my children is my almost complete lack of comprehension when it comes to numbers—numbers of all kinds.

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Blame, Baseball, and Beyond

I don’t know why I’m so disposed toward blame. Certainly, we live in a culture addicted to blame: If something goes wrong, the first reaction is to find someone or something culpable, and it seems to make whatever has gone wrong a little easier to swallow, it localizes the pain.

But, I was hoping I might have gotten beyond all that—was more spiritual in my outlook. I guess not.

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“Excuse Me...”

Interruptions. God I hate interruptions. It’s like this blog. Since the time I started writing, I’ve been interrupted 5 times.

First it was my wife, showing me the spot where she recently had a mole removed, trying to get my opinion on whether or not it was healing okay.

Then there was a phone call from one of my daughters inquiring how to make lasagna. That one I was able to pawn off on my wife, who followed it up with another interruption of her own, wondering if and when I would be making dinner.

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In Your Face

A number of studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have been conducted on alcoholics recently, exploring the kinds of damage alcohol can do to the brain.

I came across one recently and was surprised to learn that alcoholics, even those who aren’t drinking, can have problems in judging the emotional expressions on people's faces.

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Ride On

According to my calculations, I should be in Canada by now, somewhere up along the Gaspé peninsula, or perhaps in the Laurentian Mountains. But instead, I’m still in my apartment, tallying up the miles I’ve logged on my exercise bike.

I do about 12 miles a day and as I’m pedaling I make these calculations in my head, thinking about the many places I could be if the bike actually had wheels. 

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Guest of Reality

When I was early in recovery, I read a story by Swedish author and Nobel Laureate, Par Lagerkvist, which really captured the essence of my life. The story was titled Guest of Reality.

It wasn’t so much the content of the story, though it was an autobiographical reflection on his youth and his exposure to death at an early age, a circumstance I had been exposed to in my own life with the deaths of both my beloved grandfather and my baby brother by the time I was 10, but rather it was the title that caused such identification for me.

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Trees

I climbed a tree the other day in Riverside Park. I was walking down a wooded path in the early evening after work and a particular tree caught my attention. It was quite like most of the other trees alongside the path, but this one had a series of twisted knots on the trunk, as if it had changed directions a few times in its youth, shooting up one way and then twisting awkwardly to pursue yet another upward path.

I stopped to look at the tree and the longer I looked, the more the knots appeared to be a perfect set of stairs, one leading to the next.

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An Evolution of Sleep or The Art of Napping

I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping. By some estimates, nearly half my life. Sleep is a good thing, I’ve decided, in whatever size or increment it comes.

My relationship to sleep has evolved over the years, and will continue evolving for as long as I keep doing it, which, I suspect, will be the rest of my life.

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