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.

I am a fan of the frankly gaudy, and so am in love with a certain local Chinese restaurant–not as much for its food as for its decor. There are enormous crystal chandeliers everywhere, lots of shiny red stuff, huge aquariums full of enormous golden fish. The staff sports shiny clothes and barks at each other in staccato Chinese, which sounds exotic and slightly stern to my American ears.

I treasure what I think of as the small moments of theater that happen in my real life, and two of them occurred at The Dragon Palace–both at holiday times. One took place around Christmas. There was a huge party eating at one long table in the back of the restaurant. They were all well-dressed, elegant in their bearings, a gathering out of a film. At their exact center, right under a directional light, sat a golden child of about four adorned with a gigantic red velvet tam o’shanter set at a jaunty angle. The rest of the party seemed to revolve around her, and  Charlie and I immediately dubbed her La Petite Dauphine. We have carried our shared vision of Her Royal Highness with us ever since.

The other theater moment happened on Easter Sunday. The usual music at the Dragon Palace is a kind of oriental musac. I was at the buffet, grazing happily, admiring other folks Easter togs, when all of a sudden Bing Crosby burst out singing “White Christmas.” He was speedily followed by Karen Carpenter singing another Christmas ditty. I remember looking up and catching the eye of the woman across the buffet from me and thinking that she looked as baffled as I felt.  Charlie, however, figured it out. The management knew this was an important Christian holiday, so they were seeking to honor it with Christian holiday music.

Such theater moments are a gloriously regular part of my sobriety. I’ve become both   more aware of my surroundings and able to enjoy them with sobriety. Haven’t you had the same experience?

The above image is from bedouinweaving.com.

Just finished the first draft of a story on a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who is helping Negev Bedouin Women market their traditional, hand-woven rugs in this country–and not as a money-making endeavor for herself.

Political realities forced the Bedouin to end their traditional nomadic life in the middle of the last century. The Negev Bedouin’s settled in villages and towns as the poorest of the poor. The men took factory jobs, but the women–once integral to herding, harvesting, weaving, and home-keeping were left without anything useful to do or any way to make money.

Prue Thorner, the woman I did the story on, was visiting family in Israel when she discovered that the Bedouin women of the tiny village of Lakiya had begun weaving traditional rugs as a cottage industry–marketing them throughout Israel through the unlikely medium of high-speed Internet. And they were looking for a way to reach overseas markets.

Ms. Thorner went to work to create a non-profit that would sell these rugs directly to Americans. She takes enough of the sales price to cover expenses, the rest of the money goes directly to the Bedouin women.

Here’s a quote directly from Prue Thorner:

Someone suggested that I should triple the price of the carpets, put an ad in the New Yorker and they would sell thousands of them every year. And I said, “you know something? This isn’t what this enterprise is about. This is about helping women one at a time to carry on in their traditional ways and not destroying their culture. so it’s a fundamentally different paradigm.”

I’m so glad to hear of an American offering help to another culture that doesn’t bring with it any pressure to Americanize. Sounds very sober, doesn’t it? As in live and let live . . .

  Charlie rescued these from an old house that was being emptied way back when I first knew him. Wherever we’ve lived, they’ve always gotten the place of honor in our gardens. Whenever the garden gods get planted and flowered, that place feels like home.

I love their peaceful faces and the way they seem to relate to each other. They are separate, but they are so obviously interconnected. Just the way I want to be with the people I care about.

Over the weekend I finished up the second draft of my second, very short book, working title: God Is. Now What? One of my main points is that we cannot use religion or spiritual practice to hide from reality; in other words, we have to live in the real world, exactly as it really is and learn to handle all the ambivalence, indecision that reality produces inside us–not to mention anxiety, confusion and down-right fear. Faith, in other words, is not about us feeling comfortable–it’s about us doing what we can that’s actually helpful.

Back to my foxes. Molly’s comment about their looking thin really struck home. Much as I love seeing them out my window, I also wish they weren’t there, trapped in this little dot of woods in the middle of this city. I wish I could get Mr. Scotty to beam those foxes out to the woods and fields around my house, where I’d never see them, but I know they’d be okay. But Mr. Scotty, unfortunately lives on TV instead of in the real world, and those wonderful, magical foxes are stuck in the city. And,comfortable with it or not, I seem to be the closest thing they have to a keeper.

So, that’s the reality I have to face–uncomfortable as it is. The question for me to consider is: What’s the most helpful thing I can do for those foxes, given their situation?

The scrub outside my window is also overrun with birds, squirrels and bunnies–about whose presence I’m completely un-ambivalent, and whom I feed without any worry at all. With the foxes, however, I’m stuck between worrying that they’ll starve and worrying that they’ll become to acclimated to human contact. So what I’ve decided to do is buy squirrel food–which has cracked corn and peanuts in it, both of which seem to be part of foxes natural diet. It’s the best way I can think of to handle the uncomfortable reality of my marooned–and wonderful–foxes.

When I was drinking and using, I always went for the quick fix that made me feel better. Sobriety–and a life lived in partnership with H.P.–is tougher sometimes, but that’s okay with me. You see, I like living in the real world–even though it makes me have to have all these difficult feelings about things such as marooned foxes.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

A colleague took pictures, and I thought it would be nice to post them since I’d written about them. Aren’t they something magical to have show up outside one’s office window? We’ve been debating whether or not we should feed them. Any thoughts would be welcome.

I had to give a talk last night in a town where I lived when both my drinking and my head were beginning to go bad. It’s a place that I cannot drive through without finding off a sense of hovering unease.

But it was also while I was living in this town that I made the switch from television to radio, and so “came home” professionally. It’s where I was when I first began freelancing for NPR–long before I knew what I was doing, of course, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Lack of chutzpah has never been my problem.

I talked about all this last night–as well as about some of the stories I did when I was there; specifically one on rock-climbing and another on the actor, Paul Newman, as a race car driver. And it came to me that while I was warming up to be a full-blown, drunken nut case, I was also doing some really, really good work.

It strikes me that sobriety is not just about making amends for the damage we do; it’s also about retrieving our self-respect and our sense of self-worth. It’s important for me to recognize that even when I was heading off the rails–even when I was off the rails completely–I wasn’t all bad, and I didn’t do all bad things.

Sobriety, I think, is first and foremost about getting really, really real about ourselves. And then getting comfortable with that realness. In our pasts, as well as in our right nows.

I almost never have time alone at home. Charlie doesn’t work and he’s a real homebody, so he’s usually in our house whenever I am. I’m alone on the road when I travel, but almost never, ever within the walls of my home. Charlie’s just always around, making me laugh, keeping me company helping me out…telling me how to boil water, feed the cat, organize the kitchen cupboards. Charlie, you see, is a bit of a hoverer.

Well, Charlie spent all of last weekend away, helping his brothers and sisters sort through my beloved mother-in-law Lola’s stuff in order get her house ready to sell. Lola died about six months ago, and so it was simply time to do this.

I didn’t go. I was really tired from the fundraiser and, besides, there really wasn’t much I could do. I would have no idea what to do with Lola’s unfinished quilts or her 10 years worth of old Look magazines.

So there I was. Charlie-less for two whole days.

My pre-Charlie years were my drinking years, and something about having him not around brought back the ghosts of how the inside of my head felt during those bad and desperate times. The chatter, the fear, the worry, the financial and emotional chaos–I could remember them all vividly. And I was so, so glad to be sober–so glad that the remembered, horribly reality of active addiction was no longer my reality. It was alarming to revisit my drinker’s head so vividly, but I think that visit just made me feel more grateful for sobriety.

The weekend was great. I gardened, wrote, washed sheets and hung them out on the line, worked out, read, had a lovely, restful, sober time.

The weekend made me grateful for Charlie as well. The ability and desire to enter into the give and take of a good and enjoyable partnership with him has been one of the great gifts of sobriety. And you know what? I even kind of missed the old guy’s hovering. At least a little bit

My work office is in a small city of maybe 45,000 people. I’ve written before, I think, about the scraggly lawn outside my window that’s backed by scraggly woods. Charlie installed a bird feeder for me, and I also sprinkle food directly on the grass and dirt for birds who prefer to ground feed. I can have a couple of dozen birds at a time, along with a half-dozen squirrels and a bunny or two. Once I had two deer. Now I seem to have attracted a pair of gray foxes.

They are healthy looking animals–sharp-faced, bright-eyed, about as big as medium dogs with big brushy tails and perennially perked ears. They don’t seem particularly nervous as they, too, eat my bird seed.

I do so want those foxes to be all right. I love seeing them, but I do wonder how they got here. It’s got to have been as unconventional journey to this place for them as it’s been for me.

I’m glad they’re here; I’m glad I’m here. They’re welcome to as much birdseed as they can eat outside my window in the scraggly grass amidst the equally scraggly trees

I had to go to traffic court last week.

Way back when, on Virginia primary day, I had to drive all over this part of the state, visiting polling places and reporting live from them. The day was a nasty and cold day, with wet, spitting snow. Charlie, who worries, sent me off in his Toyota truck with 4-wheel drive. (As an aside, he and I are an interesting study in contrasts–I’m the original yee-hah girl, he is Mr. Caution. It makes us very good for each other. He keeps me from spiraling off into outer space on a whim; I keep him from being an old stick-in-the-mud.)

Anyway, long story short, in Charlottesville a very nice cop pulled me over, because Charlie had forgotten to get his truck inspected (Virginia requires that this be done yearly). I didn’t mind the ticket as much as I minded the time it took to write it. There I was trying to get this young man to write faster so I could go report!

The deal about such tickets are, if you go to traffic court and can produce a proper inspection sticker, they will dismiss all charges. So, of course, I had to go. What a bore to have to drive all the way back to Charlottesville (70 miles) by 9 a.m. on a work morning! But a necessary bore, since I didn’t want the ticket on my insurance.

Anyway, I showed up at traffic court and there (also waiting to show her current inspection sticker), was a dear–and I mean really, genuinely, dear–old friend from before sobriety. And it hit me like a blast directly from H.P.: I still owed this woman an amends for my behavior. I have no idea why I’d never sought her out to make one before, but I hadn’t and now here shewas.

We were so glad to see each other. We caught up, talked about life, and then–out of the blue–I just told her I was sorry for the extravagantly emotional way I’d behaved at times during our friendship. And she apologized (needlessly, I felt) for not recognizing that I was in trouble.

I immediately felt close to her again. All the fun we’d had, all the good talks, all the good stuff just came tumbling back, fully alive, into my heart. Made amends are miracles, in my opinion. How else can you explain their healing power in our hearts?

The fundraiser, by the way, is going swimmingly. I think I’ll still have a job when it’s over!

Forty years ago, my husband, Charlie, was at a Jimmie Hendrix concert in Hampton, Virginia. It was supposed to be the first of two that evening, but the second one was canceled because Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

I was living in Houston, Texas, around Rice University. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t stunned and didn’t grieve and didn’t feel that the world was sadly diminished when Dr. King was shot. I suppose there were plenty of people who did not feel that way, but fortunately I didn’t have to know them.

I’ve read several enormous biographies of Dr. King. He was as flawed as the rest of us, but my goodness, he lived in a way that touched the best in us. And still touches it today.

As for the here and now–my beloved public radio station starts its fundraiser today. I get to go on the air and do my best to raise my own and everyone else’s paycheck. This means coming face-to-face with the fact that I have absolutely no job security.

But you know what? I so don’t care. I love what I do. Besides, I don’t really believe in security. I believe in doing the next right thing and letting whatever happens happen.

Or at least, I try my best to believe in that . . .

Thanks so much for the help. This is fun! I found the rules and here they are:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) What was I doing 10 yrs ago?

I was living in a trailer in the woods in Amherst County, Virginia, working in a co-curricular life at a woman’s college in a job created for me by one of the deans. Which was quite brave of her, considering I have only a partially completely bachelors degree and a partially completed masters.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. prepare Wednesday’s author interview.
2. be home when the vet shows up to treat my aged Head Cat.
3. Do 30 minutes on the elliptical, lift weights, and stretch.
4. pay the mortgage (such a pleasure for anyone who’s been a practicing drunk.)
5. eat dinner with Charlie and try to stay awake long enough to watch a movie

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Bananas, oranges, folded-over potato chips, and sugar-free fudge sauce on crackers

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Oh golly, can I decline? All the people I’ve known who’ve got a lot of money seem to be obsessed with either owning things or doing things that cost a lot. I really, really just like hanging out as I am now.

5) Three of my bad habits:

1. Doing too much
2. Doing more than too much
3. Doing one more thing after I’ve done more than too much

6) 5 places I have lived:

1. Greensboro, N.C.
2. East Northfield, Mass.
3. Houston, Texas
4. Charlottesville, Virginia
5. Singers Glen, Virginia

7) 5 jobs I have had:

1. Restaurant owner (and chief cook)
2. Summer Stock actor
3. T.V. Talk show host
4. Convenience store clerk
5. public radio reporter

5 peeps I wanna know more about:

1. Syd
2. Kathy Lynne (gotcha!)
3. Shadow
4. Molly
5. Michael

Sometimes blogging is such a challenge to me. Robin and Linnie tagged me–which just makes me glow, for I love feeling part of bloggersphere.  The problem is, I’m not quite sure what this means. Since sobriety means honesty, I thought the best thing to do would be to admit my ignorance and say (loudly and clearly): HELP!

Happy Monday, everyone.

I was driving back from going out on a story, tired of listening to my book on tape, in the mood for a little vintage rock and roll, punching the radio dials–and, suddenly, there were the Animals singing “We Gotta Get Out of this Place.”

I was right back in 1965, dancing my toes off a huge college parties, arms waving over my head, singing along. Beside me is Tom Spear–a friend of my eventual first husband’s–tall, dark, handsome, drunk out of his mind, singing “we gotta get out of this place” with the fervor of a true believer.

Tom was the only one among us who got out-of-it drunk on a regular basis. He also made horrible anti-gay slurs–said really vicious things about same-sexers–even though in every other area, he exhibited great kindness and empathy.

Ten years later, he was dead. After finally coming out of the closet, he blew his brains out–getting out of what I guess had been a truly hellish place at last.

I think about Tom every time I hear that song. I also think about him whenever I smacked with the realization of how hard society makes it for most of us to be who we are.

To me, sobriety has brought that particular hard time to an end. I’ve gradually passed through self-acceptance into self-comfort. I actually like me–and like most everyone else, as well. That doesn’t mean that both myself and other folks don’t annoy the spit out of me with great regularity, but it does mean I remain fond of us both anyway.

How I wish it had been easier for Tom Spear to be who he was. And I wish those of us who called ourselves his friends had known how to make our shared place one that he hadn’t felt such need to get out of.

You know, it struck me while e-mailing a friend that once I stop talking about whatever’s going on in my professional life, I have very little new to report. I could get by with cutting and pasting a pre-written paragraph that goes something like “Charlie and I are both fine, our Head Cat (who has feline HIV and so is in precarious health) is taking a nap in the sun, our other cat is causing trouble, the gardens are doing well, and I plan to eat three square meals, work out, and, if I’m lucky, take a nap.” And how interesting is that?

I had much more to report when I was still drinking and using–all sorts of interpersonal struggles, financial disasters, abandoned projects, damage done and received, hurt feelings, imagined slights, and so on and on and on.

I like being boring a lot better–I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience life without melodrama.  Even though my friends probably do find my e-mails a bit boring sometimes.

It’s a little after 8 in the morning, and I’ve just put the final tweaks on an NPR story. It’s a wonderful feeling to work and work, push and push, and then–poof!–the story’s done and there it is. I like working in intense bursts that actually end with a real sense of completion.

At home my desk sits directly in front of a window that looks out to mountains over our back gardens. The early daffodils in those gardens are just beginning to pop open, the day lilies have begun to peak out of the ground, the lawn is greening, there’s a blue bird perched on the fence. Behind everything sits Little North Mountain, a low ridge that runs for miles along one side of the Shenandoah Valley. Today it is decked with cloud shadows.

Even though its a bit cold and windy, I’d like nothing better than to get outside today. Those back gardens need attention! Charlie and I let our flowers go to seed in the fall so the birds will have extra winter food, but it’s now time to clear them out. There’s early weeding to be done and beds that could use a good aerating with a garden fork.

Before I got sober, I used to put tremendous pressure on myself to get everything done as soon as it needed doing. Before I got sober, I would have gone to work more aware of what I wasn’t going to get done today, then anticipatory of what I was going to  get done. Such silliness. It’s Thursday, I’ve a new story to start, and the gardens aren’t going anywhere. Flowers grew for millions of years perfectly well without my assistance.

And you know, if I let those weeds grow for another couple of days, they’ll be all that much easier to grab hold of. Every thing has its season; every day has its tasks. And I had to become a substance abuser in order to be able to accept the simple, simple truth of this. I can’t control a lot about the way my days are, but I sure can control the amount of fun I have–and the amount of satisfaction I get–through living them.

Charlie, my husband and most tremendous pal, says there is no such thing as an inanimate object–that every blasted one of the “machines” in this sweet old world are periodically out to get us!

No, he’s not paranoid, just experienced. And this weekend, when my computer failed to save a whole afternoon’s worth of sound editing and script writing, I was ready to agree with him.

This is what happened. I’m on deadline on a national story, so I make myself keep slogging Friday afternoon when I am dog-tired. I save the files, slap them on my zip-drive, take them home to finish up, and Saturday morning they are just not there! Worse–when I drove into town to check–it wasn’t on my work computer either.

If I weren’t a committed sober person, I would have lost the whole weekend to unproductive frustration, and so ended up at work this morning seriously behind on my story. As a committed sober person, however, I took a deep breath and went to work rewriting, reediting, re-everything. No, I did not do it with joy in my heart, but neither did I do it harboring rage there, either.

I could feel myself using the program. I swear, being a sober drunk and recovering pill-popper has had so many advantages–at least in my experience. I’ve learned not to be so reactive to life’s little punches in the gut–even when those machines just might be out to get me!

Okay, I got really steamed at work a couple of days ago. It was a bad day in the office all around for all of us–which I should add is highly unusual.

So, in time-honored sober-person fashion, I took myself to a meeting right after work.  What was unusual for me–in fact I can’t remember ever doing (unless called upon to do it) in 17 years of sobriety–was that I brought up a topic. I sat there and splatted out a bunch of words about how frustrated I was with my colleagues and how awful and un-sober that frustration made me feel. And I asked the group for help in dealing with my frustration.

And I got help. Of course, some of what people said was not particularly useful in my case (for example, the suggestion that I speak up about what was bothering me, and speaking up about anything has never been my problem). But then I also all kinds of really neat advice, ranging from the practical (put the initials of the person annoying you on a post-it note, slip it in your shoe, and stomp on it), to a reminder that I was essentially letting annoyance with my colleagues function as my Higher Power. And–perhaps most useful of all–I felt this blast of empathy, understanding, support and down-right affection from everyone in that meeting.

Good grief, Charlie Brown–I felt so much better as I drove home. I’ve been thinking about that meeting a lot since then, how I’d been sober 17 years, and had never asked a meeting to focus on my problems. And it was not because I’m shy, believe me. It’ was because I still maintaina real macho attitude toward life that tells me to handle everything I possibly can on my own. How dumb is that, I ask you?

Sobriety is never static, never done. It will not, believe me, be 17 years before I bring up another topic!

I met a truly extra-ordinary person today through my job. Working as a gad-about reporter, I’ve met everyone from Tom Cruise to Desmond Tutu, but the young woman I met today made as strong an impression as anyone I’ve ever shaken hands with.

She’s 23, African-American, works full time in non-profit, is the mother of two, guardian of 2 more, in recovery on several fronts, as well as being a survivor of some really horrific abuse in her childhood.

But none of this is not what most impressed me about her.

What got to me is that this young woman’s heart still sings.

By this I mean she’s still reaching out to other people, to new experience, to life–with undaunted energy, curiosity, and optimism. That kind of living, to me, is what living in recovery really is about.

Wow! I felt humbled before her. And terribly grateful to have met her. No matter how broken our worlds may be, there are people like her around to remind us that a wonderful life is out there, just waiting to be grasped.