Of Thanksgiving and Booze

the first martini
was once as important as
thanksgiving itself

The haiku above isn’t very good and the poem below is incomplete, but I wanted to publish something here about booze and Thanksgiving.

I took my last drink of alcohol on August 14, 2012. I woke up the next day with a God-awful hangover – nothing new there – and absolutely no memory of anything that took place after 4 pm the day before. I’m told I walked, talked and ate a turkey dinner with my wife, my sister and brother-in-law, and two of my best friends on North Shore Drive in Grand Haven, Michigan. But were it not for a photograph of my friend and I holding that turkey just after it came out of the oven, I would not be able to prove I was there. The next morning something in my soul told me the next black-out – or maybe the one after that – would kill me, and I was finally desperate enough to reach out for help.

I finally received the gift of desperation, as we are fond of saying in AA, and let others help me. I joined an intensive out-patient recovery program at the University of Michigan and began to attend three or four AA meetings every week. I’d made several previous attempts at sobriety, so I knew I was traveling a difficult road. As I passed each early milestone – 30 days, 60 days – I was both proud and terrified, knowing that early sobriety is a fragile companion.

The prospect of Thanksgiving – looming ever larger on the horizon as October approached November – especially scared the hell out of me. For as long as I can remember, booze on Thanksgiving was right up there with feasting and family in my mind. I’m not talking about drunken decadence or brawls, but my family tradition was one of starting to drink in the morning and continuing to drink throughout the day. I was once able to do that, but now I knew it would kill me or send me back to a place from which I might never escape. You may think that over-dramatic. It isn’t.

It wasn’t as if I have terrible memories of overindulgence on Thanksgiving. To the contrary, drinking on Thanksgiving was an honored family tradition. The first two stanzas of a poem I’m working paint the picture pretty well.

OF FATHERS AND THANKSGIVING 

Thanksgiving morning my father
tore stale white bread for stuffing
and drank his first beer early,
a Camel straight smoldering
on the counter nearby,
the radio soft with arias
from Chicago, across the lake,
or the Lincoln Center, in New York.

Later he wore a white shirt and tie
while serving Manhattans or Martinis
to family and friends 
until we moved to the heavy oak table
where bottles of red and white wine
were passed from hand to hand
and we watched shrieking winds—
made visible by the gulls’
futile efforts at flight—
drive freighter-rocking waves
high up onto the sandy shore.

The poem (as I currently envision it, at least) goes on to state that my father always seemed sober on Thanksgiving but I was not sober when, years later, I tried to follow the family tradition of drinking on Thanksgiving. The thrust of the poem, I think, is that while booze nearly killed me, not every memory associated with booze is a bad memory. Some days which included drinking were good days, and that’s the paradox . . . one of the things that makes quitting booze hard. Trust me though, it can be done.

That’s all I’ve got for today. Not a complete poem and no photos, just a few thoughts about booze and Thanksgiving. If there’s something here for you or for someone you love, so much the better.

Happy Thanksgiving, and God Bless us all.