Okay, I’ve been clean and sober for quite a long time. Enough time to have gotten and hung onto a great job, husband, house and 2 cats. In other words, I’m an official grown-up and proud to be so.

However–and I do love this–there are still times when I feel like a kid playing dress-up, and, yes, this is one of those times. I’m posting tonight from one of the guest houses at Montpelier, James and Dolley Madison’s ancestral plantation, all thousand-plus acres of it in Madison County, Virginia. The place is almost at the end of an enormous, multi-multi-million dollar restoration. It was owned for a few generations by DuPonts who entertained on a much vaster scale than the rather cash-poor Madisons and so swelled the size of the Mansion, stuccoed the brick, and then painted it a kind of New Orleans peach.

Now, the playing dress-up feeling is not because I feel I don’t belong at this press shindig. I’ve done several national stories for NPR from here–also ones for my station and a state-wide consortium of public radio stations. I know I’m good at what I do, and I know I know what I’m doing. But here’s the deal. We’re being put up for 2 nights, wined (which I shall, of course, pass on), dined, taken up in helicopters, toured, lectured, given gifts and, in general, professionally fussed over. There are reporters here from all over, professional people who’ve never been jailed for being drunk in public, and/or been fired from jobs. And that I’m being treated as part of this group delights me as much as prissing around in my Mama’s high heels and playing Grown-Up Lady when I was a little kid.

When I was a child, I loved to playpretend. I would fall asleep imagining I was the first female member of Robin Hood’s band, or the first woman to play major league baseball. When I grew up and was slogging through my bad years, I would lie in bed and pretend I was what I am now.

This afternoon, as I was driving up the long, curving, tree-lined drive this afternoon, it suddenly struck me that I don’t play pretend  much  anymore because my dreams have pretty much come true. Of course, it’s not only because I’m sober. There’s been a lot of hard, hard work involved, as well as the taking of a few well-calculated risks. But sobriety was the path I was walking when I did that work and took those risks. But I really, really love living my life these days.

Wow! Tonight when I lie in bed, I think I’ll just go to sleep feeling grateful.