tales of copper city

Acceptance: An Owner's Manual

 1. Introduction: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Acceptance, and Me

I sometimes think that everything I know we learned from booze.

It started when I entered Alcoholics Anonymous (AA.) in 1969, in the basement of a Lutheran church that sat across the street from the Library of Congress’s Shakespeare Library and just a block or so away from the U.S. Supreme Court. The meeting held approximately 10 to 15 persons who met twice a week. I had just a week earlier enrolled in graduate school in Baltimore, and rode the Philly train to school four or five days a week, returning in the evening.

My wife Carole and I lived in the Methodist Building located right next door to the U.S. Supreme Court, a building, as I learned some years later was constructed to house members of Congress who voted for Prohibition and who were pledged to keep it.

This discovery was somewhat startling since my dissertation research on the political consequences of the disease concept of alcoholism, and it was not so long that I found out I had much to learn about alcoholism, alcohol problems and even Prohibition.  As it has turned out, alcohol, alcoholism, and alcohol problems play a huge part of the American story, and in my life as well.

I grew up in Texas without much experience with drinking. I didn’t drink in high school, and just barely at the University of Texas my first year, just one night in our residence hall (an ex-Army barracks) where I lived for a few months. Drinking was not permitted until 21 in Texas, and I didn’t make much effort to see what booze was all about. My family didn’t drink and I didn’t even wonder why. Even in the Army, I didn’t drink very much until Korea, and things changed fast. In Korea, at Camp Red Cloud, the nightly entertainment was going to the Enlisted Club and drinking. A bottle of Heineken’s was .25 cents. American beer was .15. A fifth of Tanqueray’s Gin cost $1.  Everyone drank Heineken's.

In Korea I drank, a lot, every night, for 13 months, and then I kept that up for the next 10 years, years in which I burned up two marriages to two beautiful women, and leaving a 4-year-old behind in California with her mother. It didn’t help that I wound up working in Washington, D.C. as a representative for a Life Sciences Division of a major aerospace corporation; my job included taking clients or potential clients to lunch or dinner, and having drinks was how we worked. In those days we lived on D Street, S.E., just around the corner from Mr. Henry’s where a schoolteacher by the name of Roberta Flack sang on Sunday afternoons. Then we moved to the Methodist Building about a dozen blocks away, closer to the Union Station that was soon to become a big part of my life as a student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Homewood Campus.

If you meet the Buddha... give her a kiss

Sheldon Kopp once wrote a book on Zen called, If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. Kopp was warning against false prophets.

But another Buddhist tradition warns that we frequently catch glimpses of the Buddha on the road, and we don't know it. Indeed, one of the tenets of most spiritual traditions is that enlightenment or grace or whatever you call it lies hidden in everyone and can show up without bidding. Our job is to be awake when the Buddha nature shows up. 

Which leads me to a story about Marilyn, a girl I knew in high school. Marilyn and I were in the band together, she one year ahead of me. She was pretty and she seemed a more mature and knowing person than most girls in school.

I figured she was for me. 

Acceptance as deepening self-awareness

Steven Batchelor's book Buddhism Without Beliefs has this wonderful definition of acceptance:  “Awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance."  He goes on to say why this seeing can be so deep and radical…”There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.”  

Even the self. Especially the self. (My words)

Acceptance is a big deal in A.A. I have tended to see acceptance as an adjustment to reality; acceptance of what is and learning to deal with it honestly without self-deception or the deception of others. In this way Batchelor turns acceptance back on ourselves. When we learn to accept we are not just seeing reality or life itself with a clear set of glasses, we are learning to see ourselves more clearly, coming to accept what ourselves in what we see, warts and all.  Recovery begins here..

This is a new idea to me, or it is an old idea I have forgotten. Nevertheless it is truly important.

Waking up in Singapore with a beard

In 1969, I entered the basement of a small Lutheran church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to attend my first meeting of that famous alcohol recovery program.

For the next 35 years I didn't have a drink.

The program saved my life, our marriage, and our future together. 

Life in the contingent (funky) dimension.. redux

I once wanted to write a short story about a man who moved to a town like Bisbee and bought a blue house. In the story, the man didn't truly understand why he came to that town and bought such a colorful house. He only knew that the life that was now behind him, a life of striving, was finished. What he wants now is a life lived differently. While the man cannot live his life over, he can at least live the rest of his life, long or short, awakening his heart to another world.

I didn't know how the story would end, but I knew what I wanted to name it: "The Blue House." I never finished the story but I knew it was important. And then I saw a painting in a gallery in Jerome, AZ titled, "The Blue House." The house was on the side of a mountain, like so many in Bisbee. And the gallery itself looked out over the vast valley that lay stretched out below another town that housed a Phelps Dodge mine. Seeing the picture began to open me up to the mysteries of the story and why I wanted to write it.

photo of Old Bisbee by Ted Weller

For nearly all of our lives we live in a kind of flat, horizontal dimension, the dimension of efficiency, of having and of getting, and of achieving. We live mostly in our heads. Our hearts are asleep. Cities on the plain surrounded by endless suburbs stretching mile after mile to the horizon are the perfect symbol for this way of life.

The ecologic confession

Here we are on another Sunday and once again we probably won't go to church.  I'm not protesting anything; many of my friends attend the church I love, and so it's not that either. It's just that it seems that our devotion, our ethics, about "church" are too small, way too small.

Devotion should be about gratitude and if there is anything we ought to be grateful for, it is life itself.  That's true for almost any age but its really true when you are 77.  Life itself for we humans is personal but we also sense that we are members of something larger, something far more significant. Our understanding of life ought to be expressed in an ethic, an ethic that expresses to what we mean by our membership in the community of life.

The best statement I have found for this view of an ecologic ethic is Wendell Berry in his book of essays, Another Turn of the Crank. Berry argues that health is a communal and ecological concept, referring to our membership and participation in communities, both civic and ecological. As Berry says, 

I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction of terms.

I believe that at bottom our most important ethic should reflect how we view life---how we view life itself underneath it all and what this means for membership in the body politic.

Headquarters, Idaho

The stories in newspapers a year or so ago about the foiled kidnapping in western Idaho, near Cascade, Idaho, take me back.  I know that part of Idaho, and especially the area further north, where Pierce and Headquarters are located. I first worked there in 1956, having hitchhiked there from San Antonio to find work with Potlatch Forests.  I returned several years later and worked a summer for a timber protective association, in brush clearing and fire protection.

My high school best friend, John Feeley was already in Idaho, working in the Potlatch Forest logging camp at Headquarters, and he called me and told me I ought to get up there. The pay was good, the logging camp food was tremendous, and it would be an adventure.  So, after much debate with my father and mother, in the summer of 1956, I quit my summer job at J.C. Penney and set out. Dad drove me up to Comfort, Texas, about 25 miles north of San Antonio, and I got out and stuck my thumb out. 

The Serenity Prayer and acceptance in everyday life

The Serenity Prayer is one of the best known prayers in the world.  Written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to serve as part of a sermon during WWII, it soon became a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and all manner of recovery groups.

I have written about the Serenity Prayer before here and, on the origins of the prayer, here.  Niebuhr's daughter Elizabeth Sifton, in her book The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, traces the origins of the ideas in the prayer to the famous Deportation Strike of 1917 in Bisbee.

Step-Children of a Lesser God, a little desperately

(I have written about hearing loss several times, over the years, the first time for The Bisbee Observer, and then once before in this blog. My hearing loss had stablized; now it seems worse. Hearing with hearing loss is work and it is a skill, and skills can go rusty. And the environments you hear in change, and I've been teaching again, and I need to always keep on the students, to get them to speak up, and to speak to me. Students often think a classroom is like a church; one must speak softly. I constantly remind them that their voice will be a primary part of their professional life. It's working but it's still work. I will soon see if hearing aid technology is really progressing, as I've heard it is. I attend a small recovery meeting once a week and people there speak in almost a hush. I sometimes can't hear someone sitting next to me.)

I bought the hearing aids I now wear, in 2010, probably my fifth set in almost 20 years, and each time I get new instruments, it takes me back to Austin and the Texas School for the Deaf. This was 1959.

"The Palestine Pit Barbecue and Beauty Salon"

"The Palestine Pit Barbecue and Beauty Salon," the sign read. A sign we always saw when we were driving home to see my family in San Antonio, driving home from North Carolina. That sign always brightened our trip.

Palestine, Texas, south of Jacksonville, and Tyler and Texarkana, East Texas towns I once lived in.  Not Palestine, however, although I had relatives who lived there, Nelda and Jack, cousins, and I'm sorry I don't remember Jack's last name. I think it was Cole. Nelda was Ronnie's older sister, a sweet woman, rather plain looking but still pretty, freckled, and I liked her a lot. She always seemed glad to see me, glad to see Mom, her aunt, and Dad, "Beach."