Flowers and hams of the past
A few of my students were the first to notice this flower during our morning walk. Some Mondays, I take a group for “PE” (laugh riot for anyone who really knows me), but Gruber PE is just strolling around downtown Tucson. And yes, I carry my coffee while I go.
We meander as a group. And here I am, once more, writing about walking. Damnit.
Today, a group of girls ushered me over saying, “Gruber, look at this flower. It looks like someone painted it!” And before I knew it, all of us walkers (about 15 in all) were crowded around this flower, admiring this flower, and often these are the moments that fill me with such joy and love I can’t possibly imagine how I’d want anything more: I am looking at, and discussing, a beautiful flower with children. For a living.
At one stop along the walk, a boy was sitting by a reflecting pool, gently stirring the water with one hand. When he noticed me he looked up and said, “Gruber, will you take a picture of me? Don’t you think I look just like Black Percy Jackson right now?”
“Honestly,” I confessed. “I don’t even know what White Percy Jackson looks like.” And then I took his picture multiple times until we captured the exact “hand-in-water” pose he was after. Which is apparently related somehow to Percy Jackson. Since I’m now working with adolescents, I should probably suck it up and read a Percy Jackson or watch the movie or something.
Later on, I was working with a student on her Google doc, and after I quickly corrected a sentence she looked me dead in the eyes and gasped, “Gruber, you are so smart!” And I started laughing. And this is one of the joys of teaching much younger students: most of them are seriously impressed that you can quickly write an intact sentence. I can assure you, my high schoolers never gasped in wonder at my ability to mend a comma splice.
Grudge Math. It’s a thing I’ve discussed on this blog. Grudge Math is where I add up all the shit that was rendered unto me and that I rendered unto myself, and while I like to tell myself, while engaged in Grudge Math, that I’m merely “thinking critically” or “analyzing,” what I’m actually doing is adding up all the sad, bad, unlucky things that shaped me. And on one hand, part of healing must be (for me at least) doing a little bit of this Grudge Math. I am the anthropologist of my own life, and in order to improve upon myself, I need a little data . . . I mean, at least Grudge Math is an activity (an art form, if you ask me). A “grudge,” all by itself, is just some formless lump of rage that sits around taking up space in our hearts. Right?
Booze and grudges go together like pecan pie and vanilla ice cream. An irresistible, toxic, pairing. At least, this is how it was for me. And it is impossible to get beyond the age of . . . say ten . . . and not carry, for some amount of time, in this life, a grudge. It’s just gonna happen. Someone is going to piss you off. Someone is going to do you dirty. Someone is going to hurt you wittingly or unwittingly. The grudge will come. Maybe the grudge is the inevitable pearl formed by the irritation of anger we feel when we are wronged. But, man, we can’t hang onto those grudges. I’m not talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness is something else entirely.
I’m thinking about grudges because it’s coming up on the “big holidays,” and these will be the first “big holidays” through which I have not had an alcoholic beverage and/or gotten drunk since I was probably, if I’m being “rigorously honest,” fifteen or sixteen. I have been Drunk-for-the-Holidays since the early 1990s. That is a horror. (See?! I’m doing Grudge Math! I can’t stop!)
Alcohol is only one (fairly significant) piece that will be missing from my traditional holiday celebrations this year. Everything has changed, and alcohol used to be my mode for dealing with real, true, hard change. Big change. I did not know how to feel Big Feelings without slathering them in alcohol. I simply couldn’t carry the weight of my own feelings — or so I believed — without alcohol. Frankly, I always marveled at anyone who got on in life without drinking. Never really understood pills, gambling, injectables, and so Old Me sometimes judged people who misused those coping mechanisms. Now I know there is no difference between the guy who shoots up heroin mid-morning and my insistence on continuing to drink secretly from five p.m. (and ever earlier in the stay-at-home times) into the wee hours of the night on a basis that I knew was insane, not to mention really fuckin’ dangerous. Hypothetical guy and me are both after the same thing: peace.
It’s just that when we’re “in our shit,” we are somehow convinced that we can achieve peace from without.
CONTENT WARNING: I am going to deploy a term often associated with aa — “sponsor” — - but I in no way speak for or necessarily belong to aa because from what I’ve been told by various sources the aa is like the CIA: you can admit it exists, but ya can’t admit you’re in it.
(Also, is The Pandemic over or what? What’s going on? If it’s not happening within a 2 mile radius of my house, I really have no fucking clue what’s going on in this country anymore, and around here people are seemingly carrying on like it’s Christmas after the Second World War.)
Anyway, because of the holidays, I’ve been going out with friends more lately. I’ve been doing more things socially. Which feels weird because — well, you know what I mean, reader. Global Pandemic, stage iv cancer, education, kids, life — all that shit.
And I was telling my sponsor about a beautiful bar I saw at a restaurant.
“I wanted to be there,” I told her. “I just wanted a martini and to be there, with the lights, listening to that jazz piano.”
And she responded, “What did you get in those spaces, aside from drunk or high?” And really, they weren’t any “things” that I couldn’t get anywhere else.
And I also feel like I just need to accept that bars are over for me right now. They are far too alluring with their damn Christmas shit everywhere and their drink specials and their cocktails and merriment . . . I liked being tipsy at the holidays. I really, really did. And the problem was, unlike most people for whom this is also true, I was unable to stop (without great, deliberate effort) once the process was actively underway. I might have two glasses of wine at the party, but once I got home, hold onto your hat. Because I always came home from these events with feelings.
And sometimes this was fine.
And sometimes this was not.
And, in the end, mostly it was not.
I can have closeness and camaraderie and (lord knows) loud music without alcohol. Truth be told, the nature of my work allows for all three on a regular basis. And as the holidays — the “drinky” ones — get closer I find myself leaning harder into my work and my writing, almost obsessively so.
But when I work too much or write too much, I never regret it.
I never really “feel bad” (on the inside, in my heart, where it counts) when I’ve worked too hard or written too late.
Who cares?
I am enough.
And I need to remember this the next time the crystalline glow of a bar causes my mind to wander from that capital-T-Truth.
The Truth is that peace does not come from without.
Not accolades, not money, not alcohol.
Not weed. Not melatonin. Not Ibrance.
Not this stupid ass “sleepy-tea” I’m drinking when,
if I’m being “rigorously honest” I’d rather have a mug full of hot spiked cider.
The fact is the feelings come and go like the birds that sit on the power lines crisscrossed over our neighborhood.
Landing. Leaving. Landing. Leaving.
And then sometimes, just like those birds, those feelings shit all over you.
That’s the part I never liked. I don’t do so well with, what I’ll call my, Three Big Shitty Feelings: Grief, Regret, Fear.
The holidays always bring up the Three Big Shitties because they’re all about other humans and our relationships to other humans, and about love, and connection, and the past.
Tradition itself is about the past.
That ham is about the past.
And I’ll end this by stating something truly controversial: I like ham more than turkey. If I’m being rigorously honest (as I am wont these days) I don’t care much for turkey at all.
