PREV:
Part 4 - The Dry Life
I’ve won many lotteries in my life. The top five, in order:
- Being born (and put up for adoption instead of the other on-the-table option)
- Being born healthy
- Being adopted by my mother
- Meeting and marrying Marty
- Not killing anyone while driving a four-thousand-pound car, blind drunk
I once led a book discussion with a group of college kids. In the book (The Other Wes Moore), the author talked about life-saving moments of luck in our lives. I shared my drinking and driving story with the students as an example of mine. I asked them to think about how their lives would be different if their moment of luck had played out in another way. Would they be in this room? Would they be without trauma? Would they be living free? Would they be alive? I still become grateful, reverent even, when I think about surviving that experience without incident. I wonder about the infinite ways my life would be different had the universe not spared me on that day.
Decades later, one of my teen children asked me how old I was when I lost my virginity. I told them I didn’t know. I told them that I could tell them about the first time I
remembered having sex, but not the first time, or even several times, that I actually had sex. How’s that for knocking some of the sheen off any idealized visions they held of their father?
Speaking of my children, if there is a single benefit that came from my experience, it is that it prevented my kids from jumping into that fray too early or with careless abandon. We were always open about my condition and told them they may have it too. They didn’t even have to pretend to be an alcoholic. They got to say, "Yeah, my dad’s broken and I might be too, so none for me."
As for how different my life would be had I been unable to stop drinking in my early twenties, I cannot fathom the delta. I'm not going to iterate through all the ways my life would be worse. There's not time. It would suffice to say I would likely not have survived the last three decades. In our early married life, Marty was telling her mother how bad I was with money and the problems it created. In an effort to appease her young daughter, she said, “Well, at least he doesn’t drink.” Mama Nat has no idea how much truth was packed into that simple statement of fact. And I can’t tell you how grateful and fortunate I am that she doesn’t.
FIN
