May??? It's May Again?

Gosh, I looked at my blog and realized it's been over a month since I've written anything. Just when I think things are going to slow down a bit, I find my calendar filled. Guess who fills it up by saying "yes" to too many things? Oh, well, staying busy keeps me happy and sober and useful. I'm looking forward to a vacation, though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to take one in July, which is not that far away.

I took the picture at the top one evening after work when Morris and I went for a walk through historic Monroe Ward in the downtown area. The picture shows the back of an old store on Broad Street. This area is typical of most cities; a former residential neighborhood turned commercial, followed by a decline as suburbs sprang up around the city. Now, though, people are moving back into the downtown neighborhoods. New apartment and condominium dwellers are revitalizing empty buildings, and events like weekly evening art walks & street festivals bring in people from surrounding areas.

I've been going to brunch, too. I got this plate of goodness at Northside Grill. Richmond is a restaurant town, and there's no shortage of great choices when it comes to dining away from home.

I took a segway tour, and it was a blast! I want to do it again. I went with several of my friends, and no one got hurt. Segways are very easy to navigate, so keep your eyes open for the chance to ride one wherever you live.
Segway of Richmond offers a choice of tours, and they provided friendly instruction.

The weather has been pleasant overall, so I've been exploring the city and going out with friends when I'm away from the office. I usually have my camera charged up and ready for any photo opportunities. The picture below shows the view from Gamble's Hill looking across the James River.

I've been to a couple of cook-outs, and there's nothing like your first hot dog or hamburger off a charcoal grill to convince you that summer is on its way. We were at a picnic in the country, and nearly choked on our food when the seat of Robespierre's camp chair suddenly gave out.

I try to be a good citizen these days. My face hasn't appeared on any "Wanted" posters around town lately.

A cook-out I attended at a friend's house last week featured a delicious Hummingbird Cake. My mom used to make these. Looks good, doesn't it? We also watched an old movie called I'll Cry Tomorrow, starring Susan Hayward, chewing the scenery and trying to dance. The 1955 movie was based on the autobiography of Lillian Roth and her alcoholic downfall. I love old movies.

Last Sunday a friend invited me to the Picasso exhibition (fabulous) at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. No cameras allowed inside, of course, but I took a couple of pictures of the new addition to the museum.

Those are a few of the things I've been doing lately. My life has been full and rich, both at work and play, and I would not be able to say that if I were still drinking. When I was newly sober I met a guy named Jimmy who was trying to get back into recovery. We hung out together quite a bit, but after a year without drinking, Jimmy drifted away from recovery. I was sorry to hear that Jimmy died a couple of weeks ago at the age of fifty-four. I'm sad about that, but there's some anger, too. Jimmy loved life, and he had the tools he needed to live happily but he put them down and the insanity returned.

The other day as I walked out of the museum, there were three goblets of white wine on an outdoor table. The day was bright, crisp, and sunny. The wine was the color of straw, and looked lovely in the tall glasses. A petulant voice in my head said "Why can't you have a glass of wine?"

Instantly, the response came "Because I'm an alcoholic," and I was glad that the answer carried no bitterness or regret. There was a time when I first got sober that these two voices would have held a debate in my head. As I walked across the green lawn at the museum, I chuckled. Remember the old Looney Tunes cartoons that featured an angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other? Just for today, the angel has the stronger voice.

Shelly

Sheldon & Son
Virginia Beach
For me, one of the unexpected pleasures of getting sober in AA has been the many fascinating people I have encountered. When I first got here, though, it was difficult for me to grasp how willing everyone was to lend a hand just for the sake of helping out a stranger who was trying to stay sober. I met Sheldon at my third AA meeting. He came right up to me at the end of the meeting, shook my hand & introduced himself, and asked me how I was doing. He told me about a meeting at another location the following night, and I started attending that one, too. In fact, I still do. After being in several meetings with me and seeing how lonely I felt, Sheldon asked me to his house for dinner one night. He was the first person to extend the hand of friendship in the fellowship, and we are still best buddies today.

Sheldon at work, with his gigantic printing press
Sheldon & I are an unlikely pair to the casual observer. He loves sports; I hate them. He's conservative; I'm liberal. He's industrious and I like nothing more than a nap on an afternoon off work. He gets excited about fishing; I yawn. He's straight and I'm gay. But we have found that these are minor differences. We complememt one another in our friendship, like a pair of salt & pepper shakers.

When I went to Sheldon's for dinner that first evening, we took a walk around his neighborhood. I was charmed by the number of cats that would run out to the street to greet him when they saw him coming. You might be able to fool people, but you can't fool a cat. If they were delighted to see him, he must be a nice guy. Toward the end of our stroll he said "You know, Bill, I don't mean to offend you, but I've been around a few 24-hours [fourteen years at that point] and I can honestly say that I have never seen anyone that looked as bad as you did when you first came in. I was really worried that you were gonna die."

Sheldon insists on trying McDonalds in Canada to see if it's the same as the ones back home; Robespierre looks on with disdain
Sheldon is now approaching his 18th AA anniversary, and our friendship has deepened over the past four years. We laugh and cut up like two 5-year olds, but we are also honest with each other when one of us gets off the beam. He gives me good counsel when I need it, and I try to do the same for him.

Not catching a thing
Neighborhood cats aside, Sheldon at times has an uneasy relationship with wildlife, like the time he was in his backyard, and nearly got killed by a bird. There's a grapevine on a low arbor along the side fence, and Sheldon parted the leaves to peer at a brown thrasher on her nest. The bird fixed a cold glare at Sheldon for an instant, and then exploded off the nest directly at his face. He took a strong peck about a centimeter from his eye, and fell backward onto the lawn - flat on his back with the wind knocked out of him. After cussing & catching his breath, he realized that his head had landed a few inches from a horseshoe spike.

A virgin at the drag show (Sheldon; not the drag queen)
Last summer, while we were vacationing at Sadie's summer home, Sadie was zipping Sheldon along the river on her sea-doo. He had been urging her to "Slow down! Slow down!" As he held onto Sadie, he sensed something over his shoulder, and discovered a very angry seagull bearing down on his head. "Speed up! Speed up!" Sheldon screamed, gripping Sadie tighter and ducking his head. The gull kept up for awhile, but they managed to outrun it before Sheldon went the way of Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds.

Sheldon dated a few goats before he found his true love
This past winter, driving home from from an evening meeting, a deer loped across Staples Mill Road, making a beeline for Sheldon's van. The deer felt it had a date with destiny, for it ran directly across a six-lane thoroughfare devoid of traffic so it could run smack into the front of his van. Sheldon attracts deranged animals.

Sheldon ♥ Sadie
The common squirrel is Sheldon's nemisis. He's indulgent with kitty-cats (I gave him some Hello Kitty stickers and plastic sandwich bags, and he put a sticker on his checkbook), but he shows no mercy to squirrels. I went by his house one time, and asked why he had the kitchen window open. "Shootin' squirrels," Sheldon answered.
"Bastards are eating up my garden."

My pal Sheldon has helped me grow into a better, healthier, happier person, and I've seen Sheldon grow and change, too. It's never too late to become the person we were always meant to be.

What Happened

March 2007

Sometimes when I would wake up, if the skylights were dim and the clock read five, I would lie there in bed and wait. If the skylights grew darker, I would know night was falling. If the light grew stronger, I would have to face another day. The hours on the clock held little meaning for me; time had become strange and warped.

If I couldn't fall back to sleep, I would get up. Within about twenty minutes, the trembling would have turned into violent shakes. Despite having promised myself that I would eat something - anything - when I got up, I would reach for the gin bottle. I knew the only thing that would stop the tremors was more booze. It was challenging trying to control the ice tongs sufficiently to pluck ice cubes and get them into the cocktail shaker successfully, and pouring gin without spilling it all over was hit or miss - pun there for the taking. I'd pour the drink, and many times have to leave the glass on the counter, bending down to take the first sips. I was too shaky to lift the drink without spilling it. Oh, and the glass would have been the least filthy choice near the sink; short, squat juice glasses that were tip-resistant. The days of elegant, chilled cocktail glasses were long gone. I was too weak to stand up long enough to load the dishwasher, so a dirty glass would have to do.

After the first drink, my shaking would subside - but so would any desire for food. The first drink would lead to another. And another and another until I blacked out and the cycle repeated itself. For many months, nearly every morning started with an episode of black vomit; I was bleeding internally, and blood would collect in my stomach while I slept causing sudden nausea when I awakened.

My body was starting to shut down. Standing upright for more than a few minutes put me at the edge of collapse. My thoughts, ranging from despair to apathy, were like confetti blowing in a silo, hitting me in the face and then whirling away. Sometimes I would think that I could still get a grip on things, but more & more frequently I just wanted for it to be over. I dreaded each new day, and death seemed like the kindest outcome. Arrangements were made, a will and all the related legal papers prepared, but when I went to have them signed I could only make it as far as the lobby, so that's where we did our business. A few hours later, I fell into a seizure at a dear friend's house, and was taken to the hospital.

I told the doctors that my problem was alcohol, and they ran all sorts of tests. My organs had started giving out, and none of the test results looked promising. I wasn't allowed solid food, but I got insulin, oxygen, anti-seizure medications, and bags & bags of blood and potassium. I didn't know it at the time, but I was going through a physical detox regimen. It would take half a year to determine what liver function remained, the doctors said. Once stabilized, I was told that if I drank more alcohol I would die. After four days, I was sent home.

"Well," I thought, "this is the end of the line. No more alcohol. Look what it did to me, and how lucky I am that they got me back on track. No more drinking for me." By early evening, I had the cocktail shaker in my hand.

For two nights I drank. Life during the previous years had seemed like a dull nightmare, where the edges are blurry. Now, this was like a lucid dream in high definition, and it wasn't fun to watch. Now, I did not want to drink and I could not stop myself. Before, I had been able to soothe myself with the idea that I could stop drinking at a time of my choosing if I truly had the desire. I suddenly realized that this thing was far bigger than me; more powerful, stronger.

Man, I thought I'd hit rock bottom before, what with the vomiting, tremors, starvation, seizures, and then having hoses and tubes inserted into every orifice on my person. But on this second night after returning home, this drink in my hand when I wanted so badly to live, well, it crushed me. Terror is the best word to describe my predicament when I realized I could not stop drinking even though I wanted to stay sober. I was utterly defeated and I knew it. I just did not know what to do about it. The answer would be revealed to me while I slept.

Upon awakening the next morning, I found a local website for Alcoholics Anonymous. I read everything they had to say about alcoholism. I found the listing for a meeting very close to my home later in the week. I looked at the information about the meeting over and over. I knew I would go. I made that resolution with some excitement & fear, but as I sat there contemplating my decision a sense of calmness settled over me. The turning point had been reached when I decided to ask for help; my clumsy prayer was answered. It was April 7, 2007.

And from that moment up to today, I have not found it necessary to take a drink.

Out Like A Lion

It occurred to me this morning that it is the last day of March, and I'd better get cracking if I want to post a few pictures of springtime in Richmond. Spring made a lovely debut in town this year, but has been shoved aside by a petulantly departing Winter. Rather than exiting gracefully with a promise to return when invited, Winter has made a last stand, shaking her fist defiantly. There was a dusting of snow on my deck this past Sunday when I woke up. Nevertheless, Spring is here, and I have a few photos to prove it.

Cherry blossoms in the Malvern Gardens neighborhood

A stunning saucer magnolia tree blooms in Byrd Park

A Queen Anne home in Barton Heights welcomes Spring

Early celebrants enjoy the afternoon at Boat Lake in Byrd Park

I spent one Sunday in mid-March with Brenda & her daughter Emily. After a delicious brunch in Carytown, we went by an open house at a home for sale in Byrd Park. I recommend this as a cheap form of entertainment. We dropped by the 1918 Mediterranean-style house built for the Lathrop family. It's a small place - only 6,750 square feet of living space in the main house. The additional 432 square feet in the separate garage apartment may tip the scales for you if you need more room.

Come on in and look around!

Look at it this way, even if you knew someone who lived in this house, you couldn't go visit and rummage through every nook & cranny of their home. Nor would you want to. With a realtor's open house, you have their tacit approval to open doors & cabinets. Open houses are a nosy person's dream come true.

The main staircase in the reception hall

Dining Room

Living Room

Yes, We Have No Burnett's

The moment one learns English, complications set in. — Felipe Alfau

Somehow, certainly not by careful design, much of my worklife has been spent communicating with others by telephone. In my younger days, I was an employee of the good old Bell System, back when people could choose between telephones with buttons or dials. When I began working there, no one had a cell phone & nearly every household had landline service. Subscribers in rural areas could still get party lines.

When it was time for the Christmas holidays (Remember those? We were able to say "Merry Christmas" back then without offending anyone), I would volunteer to work the skeleton crew so that most of my co-workers could leave early on Christmas Eve. We didn't get many calls on that day anyway, and I'd get to leave early on New Year's Eve as a trade-off. I recall one Christmas Eve when I got a call late in the afternoon from an elderly woman.

She was in a nursing home and was being moved to another room. She needed to get her phone service moved as quickly as possible, because they were moving her that very day. When I told her we could not move her phone until the following week, she immediately started wailing. She sounded so frail.

"Oh, Lord! You got to move it today, else I won't be able to talk to my family on Christmas!"

I felt quite bad for her, but the technicians were booked solid, and only emergency orders had a hope of being worked the following week. I was already expediting her order because of the circumstances.

She continued to whine and moan, and I did feel sorry for her. I had questions, though, and said "I'm so sorry the nursing home is moving you to a different room with no warning. That's very unusual."

"Mmmm, well, yes. I suppose so."

"Why are they doing that?"

"It's this lady I'm in this room with. It's all her fault! She keep worrying me & worrying me. And when I hit her, they move ME!"

There's always more than meets the eye. Here she was acting pitiful, and she'd just been caught beating up her roommate. I told her her service would be moved at the end of the following week, and wished her a Merry Christmas.


Wilton, circa 1750-1753
The photographs on this post are of Wilton, a plantation house owned by the prominent Randolph family. Yes, Morris & I were out exploring again. It was a chilly day with drizzling rain, so the pictures look a little gloomy. I decided to be adventurous and play around with some button called picnik. Usually, I limit photo manipulation to cropping and adjusting the contrast, but I experimented with some of the more mundane picnik features this time. I didn't want my pictures to look too freaky.

Front view of Wilton
It took a lot of money and many slaves to support the lavish lifestyle of the landed gentry in Old Virginia. By the time a few generations had passed, the economic climate had changed. The last of the Randolph family to live there was Robert, who died in 1859. Here's what a northern visitor in 1833 had to say about the house:
"...spacious wainscoted rooms, high ceilings, broad staircases and fine hall give you a very magnificent idea of the grandeur of the former proprietor who so long ago had an establishment that wants for nothing but a fitting up, to vie with modern elegance. But such ruin! - Broken down fences, a falling piazza, defaced paint, banisters tied up with ropes etc. etc. - the general aspect of the house is that of forlorn ruin."

Center Hall at Wilton
The illicit photo of the interior was snapped when our guide, Tom, dashed off to the bathroom before we began our tour. Honestly, what is it with us Americans? You can go to Europe and practically lick the walls of 12th Century structures, but over here we act like something 100 years old will turn to dust if it's looked at cross-eyed. Photography, with or without flash, was not allowed inside the house.

One of the most striking qualities of Wilton is that the entire interior is elegantly paneled - even the closets. The early Randolphs were very wealthy indeed, and the house reflects their importance in colonial society. But consider this: hot, humid summers + no window screens + mosquitos. Sure, the place looks great now that it's renovated, but in its heyday on a summer night it would have been filled with a bunch of hot itchy sweaty malarial rich people. I'll happily accept reduced circumstances with window screens & air-conditioning.

Rear view of Wilton
Zooming back to current times, I once again find myself in a job that requires a good amount of telephone conversation. The wonderful thing about answering the AA hotline is that you never know what to expect. It is quite common for callers to pay no attention to what we say when we answer the phone, and we do get a lot of wrong numbers since ours is one digit different than a local television station's phone number. I fielded calls all day when the nation's TV stations went digital two summers ago. I finally started telling callers that unless their television was causing them to get drunk, I could not help them.

The previous office manager told me a story that still makes me grin. It goes something like this. She answered the phone one day with the usual "Alcoholics Anonymous, how can I help you?"
"Uh, yeah, my wife handed me this number and told me to call it. Who did you say this is?"
"Alcoholics Anonymous."
"F%CKING BITCH!!!" (shouted to someone in background as the call was disconnected)

The Chesterfield Apartments
Richmond's first AA meeting was held here in June, 1943
A few weeks ago I got a call from a blurry-sounding woman asking a question. After a bit of confusion, I understood that she was asking about a brand of liquor, Burnett's, and whether we stocked it. I told her I couldn't help her.

"This isn't the ABC store??? Who is this?"

"This is Alcoholics Anonymous."

"Huh? Who?"

"This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We're who you call if you want to stop drinking."

"OH MY GOD!!!" she screamed, and slammed the phone down.

Downtown (the smaller version)

Hop in my car, and I'll take you on a quick tour from the countryside of central Virginia to the bustling Tidewater region. The picture on the left was taken in front of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, but we'll start in Montpelier, Virginia, and we'll explore that area before we leap to the east. I don't have any details on the equine statue, anyway; It was a cold night and I snapped the photo from the warmth of my car.

From the previous blog post, in addition to exploring Morris's grandmother's house, our travels took us through portions of Hanover, Louisa, Orange, and Madison counties. We made a calculated decision to take backroads - true backroads that veered off of the two-lane byways - that were paved but off the standard roadmaps. This allowed us to see places like Beaverdam, Bumpass, Fredericks Hall and Cutalong. Some were just crossroads, others were towns that declined when rail travel fell out of favor.

When I ride through these areas, I often wonder how I would like living in such a bucolic setting. In my fantasy I can visualize an old cottage, surrounded by flowers in the spring, and a comfy chair & a book next to a crackling fire in wintertime. I think I would enjoy living in the country, as long as I had a reliable connection to the Internet. And no job to slog off to each day. And a Useful Man (link to The Old Foodie, a very interesting blog) to take care of tasks that would confound me. In other words, I'm better off in my maintenance-free home unless an unexpected & sizable windfall drops into my bank account.

Downtown Montpelier

House in Downtown Montpelier

Church of our Savior (Episcopal)
Montpelier

The Aaron Hall Free School

Just south of Beaverdam, near a place with the alluring name of Old Bandana, we happened upon the Aaron Hall Free School. Boarded up but well maintained, it was obviously an historic property, and we stopped to take a closer look. Aaron Hall, a farmer, bequeathed funds upon his death to establish a school for his neighbors who could not otherwise afford formal educations for their children. What an act of love! The central portion of the structure is obviously the oldest part of the school, constructed with rough-hewn logs in 1844 at a time when this section of Virginia had no nearby schools.

I love exploring city & countryside with Morris because we share a curiousity about our surroundings. I like taking pictures, and Morris never gets impatient when I pull over or turn around for a photo opportunity. No road is too narrow and no village too obscure when we set out for a drive. We took one road near a dot on the map called Rising Sun, but turned around when it began looking suspiciously like someone's driveway.

When we return to our homes, each of us likes to research what we've discovered via the Internet or area libraries. A wealth of information from reliable sources is at our fingertips nowadays. The Library of Virginia, the Virginia Historical Society, the National Park Service, and Virginia Commonwealth University have established websites where we can view court records, maps, essays on history, and old photographs.




Downtown Beaverdam

The old train station in Beaverdam

Terrell's Store, across from the Beaverdam train depot

The Court Cafe in Louisa
The outside looked promising, but the Court Cafe was obviously more bar than restaurant, since at midday we were the only two patrons. People probably swing from the ceiling lights at night. Still, we had good food & very friendly service.

A railroad building in Louisa

A simple country church at a crossroads called Cutalong


Old and new buildings in downtown Norfolk

Madison Hotel
Norfolk

Delicious fare on Granby Street
Norfolk

Colley Avenue Pharmacy
Norfolk
I made a spur-of-the-moment trip down to Norfolk to see Suzanne, who was in town from Amsterdam visiting her mother. I doubted I was going to see her, because we didn't talk until the midpoint of her stay, but I was able to arrange a day away from the office on short notice. We had a fine time. We rode by our old high school, stopped & sat awhile in front of the house where I grew up, and had a nice dinner in Norfolk.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
George Eliot

I've got two friends, Suzanne & Brenda, whom I've known since childhood. We have so many shared memories and stories.We have seen each other through the calamities of life: loss of romantic relationships, financial uncertainty, ill health, crazy thinking, financial uncertainty, change of careers, and the death of loved ones. We have celebrated each others' joys & successes. We have shared hours of unbridled laughter. We have seen one another at our best and our worst, but we remain constant. Old friends know us better than we know ourselves, in some ways.
And a youth said, Speak to us of Friendship
And he answered saying:
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
Kahlil Gibran

Cake made by the owner's wife at Jenro's Diner
Virginia Beach