Decisions…Decisions

Aldine Street near Frankford Avenue. When my drug/alcohol client told me that was where he lived, I could not help but remember that was the area where my first date lived…my first date almost 45 years ago.

She was very cute, blond, Germanic-looking and near as wet behind the ears about romance as I was. We dated a bit at the end of my freshman year in high school and were still on the cusp of the era where you waited until marriage before having sex. I actually never even considered having sex; I never even got around doing much petting. It was very strange - she went down the shore for the summer and we split ways but seeing her at a fall dance, it was very obvious she still liked me. But like has happened to me so many times in my life – particularly in the arena of romance and dating – something stopped me from calling her. Just like something stopped me from asking the best friend of my best friend’s date, to go with me to the senior prom. That one I wrestled with more. That one I really commiserated over. And that was maybe not the first, but it was near the beginning of a near endless column of delayed and then departed decisions that would mark the trail of my life.

Why didn’t I make that call? Why didn’t I follow up that contact? Why didn’t I go to that event? Why didn’t I respond to that letter? Why didn’t I write that story buzzing around in my brain?

Nine years ago, about 5 weeks removed from my latest relapse into my addiction to crack cocaine, the decision I was grappling was the walk from the job I’d had for 18 years. I wanted to live my dream, go to Ireland and write a book. Three years prior, and more than five years after I’d decided and acted on a decision to stop drinking and drugging, I’d fallen into a relapse run that marked 1997 as the most dangerous and near deadly year of my life. But on that year’s final day, I’d experience a profound spiritual experience that would change my outlook on life. The second of the 12 steps, came to believe that a Power Greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity happened to me with shakes, tears and a near-fall down stagger as the feeling overwhelmed me that More than luck was involved with the escape I’d just had from a prowl to get high. A broken heart from a romance jilt, in fact, had precipitated the prowl and the relapses that took place from the next April through August probably had something to do with my refusal to give up on that woman. I did give up when I met her with my ex-good friend with whom she’d moved in.

August of ’98 was the end of that particular run and that was the first of three straight Augusts where I’d threatened to leave that job. The relapses though scared me into staying. Plus I was in this Masters program at the University of Pennsylvania whose hospital had been my employer all those years. Indeed I’d gotten that Master of Liberal Arts degree in May ‘00, and when the safety net of a sort-of-promised layoff was removed, the fear and fret of leaving triggered the July 25 and August 7 relapses that year. None has happened since.

“No major changes until a whole year sober” was the advice my recovery program espoused. My more practical and down to earth friends and family told me I was crazy to consider leaving. But the more impractical, the dreamers, the chance-takes told me I had to follow my heart. Importantly my mom, without whose blessing it would have been very hard to go, while she did not exactly endorse the idea, did say, “Jimmy you have to do what you what you believe you have to do.” As it turned out my final day at that job, it was on her 81st birthday. I was about ten days into my Ireland pilgrimage when I first called back home, and the joy and blessing in her voice put a bounce back in my steps that had temporarily gotten heavy.

As I look back on it, perhaps that Higher Power had wanted my faith in His/Her love and protection to be the only safety net I required. Leaps of faith, they call them, and doubtless that was the most profound I’d ever taken.

So now it is nine years later. I work ‘in the field’. The wild, rambling, too long and poorly edited book did not sell many copies. The no work, or part time work honeymoon ended about 4 years ago as I have to pay the bills. I just finished my 5th book but this is only the 2nd I got published, and for this one I hired a real (and expensive!) editor. At 100 pages it’s near three hundred shorter than the first one and it is called Twelve Steps to Change a World. But some of the - what if? How come? where to? buzzards are circling around it and me.

I have a website and some hard copies of the book. But I’ve had little luck taking the non-addicted through the 12 steps which is the intent of the book. I’m fretting about the cover as a lot of people tell me it doesn’t work. (Including one niece who was in the first row of the ‘go for it’ crowd nine years ago.)

But the safety net of no return to the drug or the drink is now as solid as the rock called earth. Recovery was affirmed in me the day I walked out of that job and onto that plane and into the palms of my Creator’s will. As the plethora of things I cannot do with the pittance of time off I am allotted in this job I switched to 11 months ago, I am getting antsy again. But the money situation is far tighter than it was nine years ago and with this job at least I am helping some people.

Faith…protection….love…guidance….change. The piece-by-piece, day-by-day, year-by-year way those 12 steps have taken me to a place of fulfillment and meaning is almost magical in its apparentness. And one needs not walk on the high wire of substance addiction to fall into the benevolent hand of this God who only wants for all of us to be happy.

May the good Lord help me to overcome the fear and the procrastination and the whatever and guide me to guide more of His children back into the loving bosom of His will.