Give or take five minutes, Félix arrival each day is as predictable as the sunrise. Our five dogs gallop up to the gate at around eight-fifteen and when he arrives with his own two mutts you can hear the thundering welcome from our kitchen. He'll dismount his bicycle, lock the gate behind him and slowly …
Tag: AA
Keeping sober in an unsober world
When alcoholics sober up one of many quandaries they face is how to reconfigure their social world, beyond their previous circle of friends—many of them unreconstructed alcoholics—and also beyond the initially supportive, but ultimately confining, cocoon of Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and other recovering alcoholics.Sooner or later Stew and I felt as if we should graduate …
A small branch of a huge tree
Two weeks ago I visited the local Alcoholics Anonymous outpost, in the town of Sosnavar, pop. 800 or so and a kilometer away from us, and was struck by the awesome superficial differences—and similarities—among the millions of members and tens of thousands of branches of this remarkable organization.In Sosnavar meetings are held in a stone granary dating …
A loud hurrah for a sober Stew
Of all the suffering connected with alcoholism, the secrecy and the loneliness have to be the most painful. There are many people, I'm sure, for whom drinking is a harmless way to celebrate friendship and family, to mark life's landmarks, to share a joy. Not for an alcoholic, whose life becomes ever more circumscribed and …
El Rancho Santa Clara 