Moving down the blog roll, I paused to delete a couple of links to sites that used to be writers' blogs but have evolved into publishers' marketing pages, which is all right if the writers are putting their time into writing books, good for them, but it means that no blog posts are actually showing up on the blog roll and the sites are only taking up space that keeps new blogs from being added. I am likely to want to buy new books by e.g. Louise Erdrich, whose Birch Bark Blog has grown into a full-sized publisher's site for the new Birch Bark Books imprint. This new site is easy to find on Google. It is no longer an individual's blog.
This brings me to Laura McKowen. Her Substack is now hidden behind a paywall. She's not updating the web site that's on my blog roll. I still follow her, sort of. I'll mention her here because some people may want to follow her Substack.
I am not and have never been even in her intended audience. Knowing he had alcoholic genes, my Irish and Cherokee father kept our home alcohol-free. I grew up with stories about what happens when people who have alcoholic genes use alcohol other than the way nature clearly intended it to be used--as cleaning fluid.
A beloved elder "had two more brothers that died back in the 1930s. They would beg outside bars, dig in garbage bins and drink whatever kind of alcohol or take whatever kind of pills they could find. They started drinking beer with friends, and what it did for them was make them so sick they wanted anything at all to make them feel better for a little while. They were in bad shape before they died. They were like old men. Neither of them was even thirty years old. Seeing how they died at least turned the two younger brothers in the right direction, but you can see how much damage they've done themselves." Both of the younger brothers were sober men with disabilities that showed when they talked; neither ever married or had children.
An elder I never knew had had a long healthy life, with grandchildren, before some loss or illness unknown made her want to alter her consciousness. "She's in a hospital, on a locked ward. They talk about 'hitting the bottom'--she went down fast and hit that bottom hard. Most of your cousins just forget about her. Well, she sort of adopted her husband's family and forgot about us for a while, before you were born. Anyway A and B go out to see her when they can."
A man who served in the same war with my grandfather, though they didn't apparently work together as buddies, didn't go down quite as fast. Apparently he'd been the neighborhood drunk for years. People felt sorry for him, but the story they told about him was just too good not to share. "Some neighbors found him lying on the ground. He said 'Are you dead too?' He must have been so sick he thought he'd died...and A said, 'Get up, [name]! You're not dead! If you were dead you'd see the fire!'"
Then of course there was the man from whom we rented a house, at times, before inheriting the house where I live now. Things he had done for beer money had included throwing lighted sticks of dynamite into the river to kill a lot of fish, some of which he then netted and sold. He seldom got up any more, but would draw a hand out from under the sheet to show visitors the first joints of two remaining fingers, and the stub of bone inside the "webbing" that had been the base of a thumb. He could still expand his hand; you could see a little knob at the inside edge of the hand move the "webbing" in and out. "What I got for dynamiting fish," he said. "It's not fair to the animals. Never fish with dynamite." He had been a carpenter, even a "house carpenter" who built wooden houses, and the ones that have not burned down are still standing. After the fishing incident he did some unskilled labor. His sober wife, who still worked though I was bigger and taller than she was by age ten, got a pretty good widow's pension for twenty-some years after he died; they were about the same age.
And there was another old man who always hailed my brother and me as "boys." Probably he could see the difference, Dad thought; he was just saying he intended to treat us the same way. He was the only man we actually knew who'd ever been a coal miner. (We knew an old lady who'd been a coal miner's daughter; she was "the one from Appalachia," accepted that identity with pride, organized car pools to go back for visits. It was not disreputable to be a coal miner if you lved in Appalachia.) The way this neighbor had become a coal miner was that he was a mean drunk and, though he used to be strong and hardworking, nobody wanted to work with him. He was known for going home drunk and beating his wife. She was relieved when he got work in a mine fifteen or twenty miles away, and rejoiced when he moved on to one fifty miles away. During Dad's school years the man "got saved" and became a total abstainer from alcohol. He was still bad-tempered and disreputable, Dad said. "He was mean to his kids--they all left as soon as they could and never came back. You should say hello if he speaks to you, and it's all right to take a lift if he offers you one, I suppose, but try to steer clear of him. If he needs any help I'll do the visiting." Mother added: "Remember that song Ernie Ford used to sing? Coal miners were proud of being rough and mean. Nice people didn't want to know them." Oh, people in the towns that never had coal mines, in the Appalachian Mountains, just love people who think we all had connections with the coal industry. Only after gerrymandering put mining towns into our state delegate's constituency did we discover that, "If you think coal is ugly, look at poverty."
I've never felt inclined to drink cleaning fluid. I have friends and relatives and readers who struggle to remind themselves that for them, too, alcohol is cleaning fluid. Most of us in my home town have Irish or Cherokee ancestors, or both. For about three out of four Irish people and three out of four Cherokee people, a dominant gene for alcoholism makes the rule "One drink, one drunk." Responsible use of alcohol means don't ever drink it. In other ethnic groups alcoholic genes that produce different patterns of alcoholic behavior are recessive, but for us, social rules based on the idea that there's anything normal or healthy about drinking alcohol are harmful rules that have been deliberately used against us. (Those rules have been used to discriminate against the alcoholic minority in those groups, too.) We are best off when we reject those customs altogether; when even the Communion wine served in thimble-sized cups at church is unfermented "new wine," a.k.a. Welch's grape juice. People who feel a need to imbibe stuff that weakens their grip on reality are not the kind we want doing responsible jobs. Alcoholism is one category of "disability" that can and should remain potential rather than actual, without ever limiting anyone's opportunities in life.
In short; I believe Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, but if He'd been present in the body at a wedding here and someone had brought wine, He'd be more likely to turn the wine into water. Maybe into soda pop, which, we in the Southern States have a right to affirm with pride, has displaced wine as a party drink in our culture. So let it remain. Let stupid German ideas about a real man not actually being an extrovert, but having built up a high tolerance for alcohol as the depressant that acts first on the conscience and produces temporary extroversion, rot in the grave with Hitler. God gave sober Americans the ability to defeat beery Germany for a reason. We should celebrate the superior merits and achievements of our AA-friendly culture; we should help European visitors discover how much healthier and more productive they, too, can feel when they learn to drink coffee or soda pop or, at least when they're in parts of the US where water has not yet been made nasty, plain water, with meals. Maybe they could even stop destroying their cultural heritage with their never-ending tribal wars. European civilization would be a fine idea, if tried...but that's not the point of this post.
I have reasons to believe that I inherited alcoholic genes, but I've never tested the hypothesis. In the diplomatic community a lot of drinking went on. My husband was a heavy drinker when we met. I said, "I don't want to live in a house where alcohol is drunk." Ours was a house from which some expensive bottles were taken to parties, or to his big house in Maryland where up to six couples could stay in guest suites if they were too drunk to drive home, but if my husband reached for a glass I said, "If you're drinking, I'm driving," so most of the time we both stayed sober. Though he was not an alcoholic and said that some of those parties were only fun if you drank fairly heavily at them, he liked being sober enough to spend less time at those parties. He credited sobriety and daily meditative walks, in fact, for what turned out to have been remission from cancer, during the years when we celebrated that it hadn't been a more common and treatable kind of cancer. I never tried to nag him out of drinking. He had one friend who was a mechanic; when that friend came out to do maintenance on the car they'd drink at least one six-pack out in the yard. My husband was the one who noticed that he felt better on weeks when that had not happened. And that it's not necessary to have physical Irish ancestry to laugh out loud, or even sing out loud, in the company of Irish-Americans.
Laura McKowen is a recovering alcoholic who decided to publish books that are no longer anonymous. They're not case histories; they're about things she learned from life experience, going beyond the basic alcoholic story, that may be helpful to other people who are or are not alcoholics.
The "anonymous" twelve-step groups have produced books. Unfortunately, anonymity means that any details that might make a story fresh or funny have been cut out. People tell the same story over and over.
My name is (kindergarten name or "street name"), and I am an alcoholic (or addict). (Number of years or even months) ago, I was drinking or using (whatever). I passed out and forgot to come to work a few times, like fifteen or twenty times, so my employer told me not to come to work any more. That made me feel bad, so I reached for relief in a bottle of booze/pills. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital feeling terrible. (Optional: They told me I had done something I was lucky to have survived.) (Optional: I had destroyed my own (body part/s).) While I was still in rehabilitation, I joined this group. I knew I had to replace my addiction to alcohol/drugs with an addiction to the group and I'm so thankful to have met such congenial people. When I feel like reaching for the bottle, I call my recovery buddies and, if we can't get to a full group meeting, we have a meeting of our own in somebody's house. (Optional: I know I will never work as a (surgeon, pilot, teacher) again but I am just glad to be alive and employed as a (dishwasher, salesman, massage therapist). I am just taking my life One Day At A Time...
It's a good story, but in these groups' "Big Books" it may be repeated fifty or a hundred times. For the person who needs to be reading and telling that kind of story, it's good to read it over and over and find that the same general process worked for the surgeon, the teacher, the truck driver. For the rest of us... well...
This web site has its own anonymity policy. Knowing that all blog hosting sites fund themselves by tracking our "interests" and selling our profiles to advertisers, we never mention anyone's real-world contact information. So all I'll say about the person who recommended Laura McKowen's blog is that person really worked a twelve-step program as a spiritual discipline during the last ten years of per life. One thing that person did was to recommend Laura McKowen's blog, and books as she wrote them, both to people at an earlier stage of recovery and to people who don't feel a need to get drunk or stoned.
Because McKowen's message is not limited to "just replace the physical/emotional addictions to substances with a purely emotional addiction to your group, call meetings when you feel tempted to drink or use other drugs, and take it one day at a time," but goes on into insights into work and family life and spirituality, I think sober women will appreciate her writing too. It's no longer available free of charge. If you have a disposable income, you might find her writing worth supporting.
No comments:
Post a Comment