The Geographic Cure

by David Eddie

Part 1: City boy

I’ve always been a city kid.   

Or maybe we can make it sound more adult/sophisticated and say: “urbanite.”

I was born in downtown Boston; grew up in downtown Toronto; went to high school in downtown Toronto; then moved to New York, where I lived in a downtown loft with my grad-school sweetheart, (let’s call her) Ruth.

That relationship didn’t work out, so I moved back to Toronto, where, first, I shared a downtown house with a couple of dudes; then lived by myself above a rattan-and-T-shirt store in Toronto’s Kensington Market, which is right downtown.   

Using my “loft-like” bachelor pad as an HQ, I chased women in “little black dresses” as they disappeared around the corner of various bars and parties and wedding receptions and brunch spots in the downtown core of the city.   

Finally I met the love of my life, the girl of my dreams, Pam, who both lived and worked downtown. We fell in love, moved together into a loft above a downtown bar. After cohabiting for four years, now contemplating a family, we moved into a small house, near a mental health facility, downtown.

We got married in a downtown church. Then, family underway, we bought another slightly larger house right around the corner from the first, i.e. still downtown, across from a large downtown park.

Sensing a pattern? Hint: rhymes with “shmowntown.” I even went so far as to say, early on in my courtship of Pam:

“Pam, you know I love you to the moon and stars and back. You’re the one for me, my queen bee, my goddess, my shield-maiden…”

…which, btw, for a man of Norwegian extraction, is the highest compliment it is possible to proffer. Shield-maidens were, in Viking culture, treated as equals, at least, and fought fiercely side-by-side, shield to shield, with their male counterparts…

“…I’d follow you anywhere—with one slight asterisk/codicil/caveat: I can never move to the suburbs. I’m sorry, it’s just the way I am. I’m a city kid. It’s in my DNA.”

Not that I was in any position to be issuing codicils or stipulations. She was doing me a HUGE favour by marrying me. But that’s how strongly I felt on the topic.

Her (haughty, miffed): “Dave. What makes you think I want to move to the suburbs?

(My thought balloon: “How about the fact you’re from the suburbs, grew up in one suburb after another, and all your family lives in the suburbs or ex-urbs or flat-out in the middle of nowhere?” But wisely, having begun to intuit the rudiments of marital harmony, I kept these thoughts to myself.)

“Nothing,” I said. “Glad we’re straight.”

Together, two lovebirds, two turtledoves, we flitted around the downtown core, enjoying all the amenities and perquisites of a modern metropolitan existence:

Along with our other downtown friends, we sipped mimosas and Caesars in the sunshine, on downtown patios, trading witticisms and bon mots, laughing and laughing, as we waited for our Eggs Benedict to arrive.

We bumped into neighbours, traded gossip and pleasantries, every Tuesday, at a nearby and, in my view, prohibitively pricey farmer’s market (the farmers practically limo’d or choppered in, to charge top dollar so we urbanites could hear the story of our groceries, e.g. “these mushrooms were hand-picked in a sustainable part of the forest in the interior of British Columbia,” etc.)

Our house was perched on the perimeter of a large downtown park, complete with community centre.

“Which makes our street,” I would brag to bored people who couldn’t care less, “kind of like the Central Park West of Toronto.”

Half a block away, intersecting with our street, was one of the city’s premier clothes/shoes/high-end glasses/Japanese stationary/specialty olive oils/etc shopping districts.

“Which makes it,” I would tell the same bored, couldn’t-care-less people, “kind of like the Soho of Toronto.”

In fact, name just about any trope of modern metropolitan existence, we could tick that box:

Did people in tights walk across tightropes stretched between trees and/or juggle in the park?

Check.

Were most of the dogs people walked in the park poodle hybrids, ending in the suffix “-oodle” or “-poo,” e.g. “goldendoodle,” “labradoodle,” “cockapoo”?

Check.

At the corner of “the Central Park of Toronto” and “the Soho of Toronto” was there a juice bar, where, for a mere dozen dollars (or more, depending on what ultra-biotic infusions, e.g. wheat-grass or spirulina, you asked the juice-barista/baristo to squirt in), you could become the delighted recipient of a concoction with a name like “Urban Detox” or “Green Goblin”?

Check.

Outside the juice bar, did cool urban moms and hipster dads—the women carrying yoga mats and iPhones, sporting oversized sunglasses, the men in bushy-yet-carefully-curated beards and tiny sports coats—stand around bullshitting one another or into their phones about their latest “projects” and/or their renovations and/or how their kid had recently enrolled in a “gifted program”?

(And I loved how they slipped that last tidbit in there, too—like if someone asked about their dog: “Oh, Bella? She’s a shitzi-poo. We just got her. We love having a dog. Good old canis familiaris, eh? Sorry to bust out the Latin like that. Our son Hugo is taking Latin in his gifted program, some of it must’ve rubbed off.”)

Anyway. Check, check, and motherfucking double-check.

We played ping-pong and swam in the community centre. Most mornings, Pam met with her exercise group in the park, to prance around to music doing lunges and “burpees,” whatever they are; and chat.

We took Ubers and taxis and streetcars anywhere that wasn’t within walking distance, i.e. a few blocks. I didn’t even have a driver’s licence! I let mine lapse in Manhattan, where having a car is more a liability than an asset; and never got around to getting it renewed.

We were, in short, in the words of my friend Livingston, words invariably accompanied by smirks and snickers (he’s a businessman), “pomo Soho boho mofos.”

Lately, though, the bloom had begun to fade, or fray, or whatever the fuck blooms do, on our glorious urban existence. Cheek by jowl with our neighbours, everyone suspicious, wearing masks, confined to their quarters and in a bad mood, we started to wonder if perhaps Sartre was right: “Hell is other people.”

Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe it’s the absence of people. Maybe Dostoevsky was right: Hell is just a room with a chair in it… Either way, the pernicious pandemic COVID-19, along with its various villainous variants, was dragging on, month after month. Obeying the decrees of our COVID overlords, we could no longer: swim; go to movies; work out at a gym; get a haircut; see friends or family (much); shop for anything other than groceries and other “essentials” (and some day I’d like to read something by some philosophically-minded individual on the topic of what truly is, and is not, “essential” in this life); or go to bars or restaurants or nightclubs or the opera or museums.

Not that we did either of those last two, much, anyway, to be perfectly honest. Nor did I, a man in his fifties, go to rock concerts, to thrash  around in the mosh pit, then, drunk, pinwheels for eyes, clamber onstage, to launch my 6’5”, 250-lb (i.e. one-eighth ton) self onto the terrified crowd below for a little “crowd-surfing,” like I used to do in my twenties, all that often, either.

Still, the fact I couldn’t go to museums or the opera or crowd-surf, should the mood strike, irked me, somehow.

We were “socially isolated,” like everyone else. We turned into time-killers, minute murderers, hour assassins. We played Boggle, chess, cards, Scrabble, did the Jumble, watched TV and generally stared at screens until our eyes began (metaphorically) to bleed, a little. The news every day was the same: COVID up, COVID down, everything closed, stay home. Every day was taking on a “Groundhog Day” feel.

(On the odd chance that, like my mother, you don’t recognize that reference, Bill Murray stars in a movie by that name in which he, a weatherman, is forced to repeat the same day over and over again.)

Meanwhile, a shantytown aka “tent city” had sprung up in the park across the street. Almost overnight, living across from a cool downtown park had gone from asset to liability.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a NIMBY (or, as it may be, NIMFY, since the tents were across from our front yard) type. God forbid I should become homeless, especially during a pandemic, that’s probably exactly what I’d do: pitch a tent.

But some of these urban campers had ensconced themselves in little container-type boxes with chimneys poking out the top. Chimneys! It was starting to look like many of these park-dwellers were girding themselves for the long haul.

But, silly as it may sound to some, the last straw might have been: ping pong.

Pre-pandemic, my wife and I would happily trot over to the community centre across the street whenever we could, sometimes two or three times a day, to play our favorite game. She was and is obsessed with ping-pong. When we go on vacation, her first question of any potential destination: “Do they have ping pong?” If not, the search continues…

It may be I’m a tad tetched on the subject of ping-pong, myself. Among other things, I love how democratic a sport it is. Well, maybe “democratic” isn’t exactly the mot juste I’m looking for here. Put it this way: a tiny, wizened, old, (often) Asian woman, in a ludicrous outfit, no offense, can (metaphorically) humiliate, emasculate, eviscerate, enervate (sorry, my kid’s taking a vocab course in his gifted program, some of it must’ve rubbed off), and furthermore kill, crush, maim, cream, and destroy a huge, strapping, muscular young man in a state-of-the-art track-suit, who does stretches and hits the gym to pump iron between games, at ping pong.

I’ve seen it done. Many times. And it’s just not something you can say of many other sports, e.g. football or basketball.

Now, though, the community centre across the street was closed. Closed to us, that is. The park-dwellers were allowed to use it: to go to the bathroom; shower; shave, I suppose; and dry themselves using the hair-dryers in the change room.

But we, the nearby citizens, up to our eyeballs in debt trying to afford to live on “the Central Park West of Toronto,” were denied entrance to that same community centre.

Which is fine. Might seem like I’m complaining. I’m not. Like I say: me no NIMBY. I get the rationale. Why shouldn’t we lucky homeowners give ground, literally; make accommodation, literally; for homeless people and other unfortunates on the premises of our precious park so they could have something between their heads and the rain and snow, during a pandemic that had the entire world in its fist, that had turned everything we thought we knew and understood, pre-pandemic, upside-down?

Still, though: no ping-pong.

“So what, really, is keeping us in the city, at this point?” Pam said, or words to that effect, non-rhetorically, one day.

Our kids were going to “virtual” classes, via Zoom. She had recently “taken a package” at work. As a writer, I mostly worked from home.

(Truthfully COVID wasn’t that big a lifestyle change for me. Before COVID: wake up, drink coffee, type, make sandwich, type, press send. After COVID struck: pretty much the same.)

Me, cheapskate, perpetually focused on money: “Word. What benefits are we deriving, these days, from the sky-high property taxes we pay? And you know they’re just going to go up!”

Her: “Meanwhile, I’m sick of being stuck in traffic all the time! There is so much congestion and construction they might as well put up a sign: YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE. It’s making me nuts! I’m gonna lose it, one of these days, I swear to God. You think I’m joking, Dave, but I’m not!”

I didn’t think she was joking. Enjoying a soupcon of hyperbole, perhaps. To be honest, most of her kvetching about traffic went in one ear and out the other, since I didn’t even have a driver’s licence, and biked everywhere.

But I understood what she was saying. The root word for Satan means “that which blocks your path.” That’s why people go so postal in traffic, in my opinion: because other people in cars cutting them off and blocking their way are, to them, almost literally, Satan.

Certainly, I mused, it would be far from ideal were Pam to go “round the twist,” as the Brits say; grab a sniper rifle, and start picking people off from atop the community centre across the street.

She’d probably wind up in jail—at which point I would in turn lose my own shit, drink more than ever, rant and rave, hear voices, see demons. As a man perpetually hanging on by a very thin thread at the best of times, I’d always felt it was lucky/handy we lived around the corner from a mental-health facility. That way, if I snapped, it would just be a hop, skip, and a jump into the arms of numerous shrinks, nurses, and other trained professionals.

Still: Pam in jail and me in a padded cell would, I felt, be less than a wonderful circumstance for our offspring. I thought about it all for a minute, then said:

“Yeah. Fuck it. Let’s sell our house. Get out of here.  Move to the countryside. Like you’ve always secretly fantasized. Don’t insult me by trying to deny it! You could get a horsie, like you’ve dreamt since you were a tomboyish teenager, don’t even try to deny that, either.”

At “horsie” her face lit up. Then quickly turned skeptical.

“Dave. Seriously? Come on. You? You would move to the country? Stop it, you’re wasting everyone’s time.”

“Pam. Look to me into my eyeballs,” I commanded her sternly. “Why would I kid about something like that? I mean, we love each other, right? We enjoy one another’s company, right?”

“…yes.”

“Let’s sell our house. We’ll get top dollar because of the so-called cachet of the neighbourhood. Then here’s the plan: we grab the dough some fancy-pants suckers give us for the house, and move to some hick burgh nearby. If we’re going to be ‘socially isolated,’ let’s go all the way! Green acres, baby! Just rent, at least at first. That way, we can always come back to the city if we wind up missing our friends, or craving decent Chinese food.”

After a pause: “Wow. O.K. let’s do it. Downsize. Simplify. Get back to nature. Refresh. Rejuvenate…”

“Yeah, all that stuff.”

Long story short, we did it.

I mean, it wasn’t quite that simple/straightforward. That, as I say, is a condensed, composite picture for your derrieres.     

Still, it’s true that, without a whole lot in the way of further ado—and, as evil tongues might say, even less in the way of planning or forethought—we cashed in the crumbling, 145-year-old pile of bricks (my joke there was the new owners would come in, go “a-choo!” and the whole thing would collapse into a pile of rubble and dust around their ears; but I like the people who bought it, so I’m glad that hasn’t happened, so far) we had called “home” for 21 years; stuffed the unbelievable amount of crap we’d accumulated over that period of time, having had three kids grow from infants to teenagers and beyond under that roof, into two trucks; and moved lock, stock, and two smoking barrels to the country.

Part 2: Country boy

Green acres, baby!

As in: “Green acres is the place to be/Farm living is the life for me/Land spreading out so far and wide/Keep Manhattan just give me that countryside.”

(To which Zsa-zsa Gabor—or was it Eva [oh, yeah, it was Eva, Zsa Zsa was the mostly-famous-for-being-famous one]—replies: “New York is where I’d rather stay/I get allergic smelling hay/I just adore a penthouse view/Darling I love you, but give me Park Avenue.”)

…and if you recognize that reference—or, worse, now can’t get the theme song out of your head—well, a couple pieces of advice: first, please be careful going up and down the stairs to get your Metamucil. At your age, a tumble could be serious—or even turn deadly! Also, keep doing lots of crossword puzzles and the Jumble and whatnot to keep your cognitive skills sharp. And ping-pong! They’ve done studies! Ping-pong, I guess because of all the split-second decisions you have to make while playing, is great for you, cognitively, apparently.

O.K., enough about ping pong.   

But the land really is “spreading out so far and wide,” around us, now. We (four-fifths of our family, that is: our oldest son having flown the coop) live on a hundred-acre farm, in the middle of nowhere, a country-type dog completing the pastoral picture.

(O.K. he’s a poodle hybrid: a “St. Bernadoodle.” Still: big dog. Six months old, now, he’s already huge, with big paws indicating he’s just going to get bigger. The coyotes around here—pronounced, in the country, it seems, “kay-oats,” as opposed to “kay-oat-eez”—which the breeder warned us about when we bought him, won’t fuck with him, I’m thinking/hoping.)

“Middle of nowhere” almost literally: the nearest town isn’t even all that near, and isn’t even really a town. It’s like: gas-station-liquor-store-grocery-store-bank-hardware-store-pizza-place and it’s in the rearview.

Our current driveway is longer than the city block we used to live on. True story! Our nearest neighbours—well, does it even make sense to call them “neighbours,” now?  Hmm, here’s an epistemological/ontological tree-falls-in-the-woods-type question for your asses: if you can’t see your neighbours’ house from your house, is that person still your “neighbour”?

Maybe it’ll help you formulate a more accurate mental image of our newfound rusticated existence when I say: To the amazement and astonishment of my city-dwelling friends, on any given afternoon, now, you can find me, your humble narrator, bouncing around on a “lawn tractor,” mowing grass.

Another true story! I have the pictures to prove it (though I think some of my urban friends suspect they’re photoshopped). We went from quite literally zero lawn (in the city, our postage-stamp-sized front yard was an urban-fashionable “wild garden,” while our postage-stamp-sized backyard was paved with patio stones) to so much grass it would be impossible to mow it all with a mere hand mower.

…well, I suppose it’s theoretically possible. But it’d take days—maybe a week!—of non-stop, back-breaking labour; at which point the grass of the area you first mowed would’ve started to grow back again. You’d soon find yourself doing very little else… You’d become a Sisyphus of lawnmowing.

And btw/fyi, as a sidebar, I’m slowly learning about country ways, and it seems that proper procedure, if you roll up our driveway and spot me on my mower, is to lower your window and shout out:

“Missed a spot!”

Then drive off sniggering… Oh, and while I’m on the topic of rural etiquette, further sidebar: out here in the hinterlands, you’re not supposed to say “street.” Early on in our newfound environs, Pam asked an old friend from high school, who by coincidence lives on a nearby farm and thus is our ambassadress/guru in all matters rural, what “street” such-and-such a place was on.

“Pam, in the country we don’t say ‘street,’” Pam’s farmer friend laughed. “It’s a ‘road.’”

Also: when driving, or walking, or even biking, here in the sticks, you’re supposed to wave at every single person that goes by in their car. Even if you can’t see inside their car, to see if they’re waving to you. Even if they have tinted windows. To be on the safe side, we wave every time. If you’re in your car, you can just raise your index finger on your steering wheel. That’s an acceptable greeting. Still, it can be exhausting.

Back to the story.

So one day a guy came over to fix the fridge… And, sorry, btw, but my country tales are full of relatively minor incidents, e.g. “a guy came over to fix the fridge.” That’s just the way it is in the country. There’s very little in the way of hair-raising action, out here, e.g. drive-bys, bank robberies, etc—though some of that stuff also happens, out here, once in a while.

Anyway, one day a couple of months into our stay our fridge went on the fritz. One of the beauties of renting: when something like that happens, you just pick up the phone and say to your landlord: “Uh, looks like you have a little problem.”

So the landlord sent his guy over, and as he was monkeying around behind the fridge, he said:

“So. How do you like country living, so far?”

Me: “We love it.” Then added, as if casually, but secretly full of boyish excitement: “We bought a lawn tractor the other day.”

“Arrr,” he said—okay, maybe he didn’t really say “Arrr.” Maybe that’s a writer’s embellishment. But he did say: “Buying a lawn tractor is the first step to becoming true country folk.”

O.K., maybe he didn’t really say “folk,” either. Maybe he said “people.” Another writer’s embellishment.

Point is, we’ve adjusted pretty quickly to rural life, all in all. All things considered. We are currently the proud owners of not only a lawn tractor, but also not one but two chainsaws. Another true story!

It’s all very peaceful, out here, same way they portray it on TV, and in the movies. It’s had a healing, calming influence, on me, anyway. All that’s out here is grass, trees, corn, and, um…other shrubbery (hey, I’m still working on my rural vernacular).

“What do you do up there, all the time, anyway?” my mocking, sneering, superior, snickering-up-their-sleeves city friends will sometimes ask. “Watch the corn grow?”

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk… Hey, in your face, city slickers: watching corn grow is fun, I’ll have you know. So is watching the trees and…other shrubbery…grow and/or…“come into leaf,” or whatever corn and other shrubbery does.    

Fun, and instructive. Corn is also an excellent yardstick for the question: “How much have I accomplished, recently, really?” The corn, as I write this, in late June, is already knee-high (it’s supposed to be “knee-high by the fourth of July,” in the American phrase). Corn, like “the lilies of the field” of biblical fame, toils not, neither does it spin. But in a couple of months, it will be as tall as I am, at which point it will be of great service to humanity and beast alike, turned into cattle feed and maybe even whisky, for those who don’t mind a little alcoholic refreshment now and then (like the old me, about which more later.)

The trees toil not, neither do they spin, either. When we moved here, on the 27^th of February, snow still on the ground, the trees were, in Shakespeare’s haunting and (I think) beautiful phrase, “bare, ruin’d choirs” (i.e. no birds singing in them). Now they’re covered in leaves, providing shade, shelter, and exuding oxygen for all the creatures in the vicinity; among all the other excellent benefits they provide, 100 % free of charge.

So what, then, have I accomplished, really, in the same period of time as the corn has grown from nothing to knee-high and is soon to feed cattle and other livestock and maybe provide festive potations for human celebrations; and the trees have gone from “bare, ruin’d choirs” to glorious, oxygen-spewing, shade-offering shrubbery-kings?

Well: got sober, for one.

Part 3: Sober boy

Might not sound like a big deal to you. But it’s huge to me.

I was a bit of a “bare, ruin’d choir” myself when we moved up here.

So how did I get to that point? How did I get to a point where “getting sober” was actually a thing? A hill (of marbles) I had to climb, or die on? A hill I had to roll a rock up, like Sisyphus, or be crushed as the rock rolled back down and right over me?

How did I go from fun-loving, friendly, social drinker to cautionary tale, a guy who goes to four AA meetings every week, and introduces himself as “Dave, alcoholic”—like it’s my last name, now, instead of Eddie?

For life, apparently, now—it’s a deep-seated AA belief: once an alkie, always an alkie—I have to introduce myself, in meetings at least, as “Dave Alcoholic”—unto the end of my days. Maybe beyond! Maybe my gravestone should read:

Here lies Dave Alcoholic

With bottle of booze he used to frolic

Until he became sloppy and shambolic

Ruining parties like a baby with colic

Now he lies here like a pollock

In this country graveyard, so bucolic

Okay, maybe “pollock” is a stretch. It’s meant to be a tip of the hat to the mob idiom “sleeping with the fishes.”

Arr, maybe the “baby with colic” bit is a bit of  a stretch, too. Not to throw her under the bus, but Pam came up with that one, reading over this story.

Hey, you try rhyming with “alcoholic.” It’s not easy.

Anyway, it’s moot. I’ve instructed Pam very carefully on the verbiage I want on my gravestone: “Sorry about everything and I take it all back. Yours truly, Dave.”

Me, to her, if once, a thousand times: “You think I’m kidding, Pam. But I’m not.”

Her: “Don’t worry, Dave. I’ve said I’m gonna do it, so I’m gonna do it, just as you ask.”

The “disease,” or “allergy,” or “condition,” or whatever it’s called now, of alcoholism, snuck up on me over the decades.

“How did you become bankrupt?” one character asks another in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

“Two ways,” the other character answers. “First slowly, then quickly.”

And that, in a nutshell, is how I became an alcoholic, when I can bear to think about it: first slowly, then quickly.

Why me? I’ve often wondered. We all drank.

We thought it was all so fun and funny, and ourselves so cute and clever, in our twenties. To be specific: we thought drinking was fun, and getting drunk was funny. The hijinks and shenanigans—even blackouts: “Dude, I do not remember how I got home last night”/”Dude, I’m calling you from my balcony, there’s a girl in my bed and I have no idea who she is”/”Dude, you were hilarious last night, do you remember anything about it?” etc.

My friends, aka “gang of villains” (I say that with affection: they were great guys, and still are) and I even had what we thought of as funny, booze-related nicknames for the days of the week:

Moan-day, Tues-days-till Thirst-day, When’s-Thirst-Day-Comin’, Thirst-day (Thursday being “the true start of the weekend”), Fried-day, Saturation Day, and Son of Saturation Day (Sunday was “the most under-rated day of the weekend”).    

But the decades passed, and towards the end, there, when the clerk at my local liquor store, where I was going every day by that point, was calling me his “brother from another mother”—well, that might have been the point someone who was less of a knucklehead, who had a less cement-like carapace around his cranial cavity, might have been given his first clue maybe it was time to quit, or at least scale back.

But I didn’t.

Alcohol, for me, was like Chekhov’s rifle.

Anton Chekhov, playwright: “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise, it has no business being there.”

I didn’t notice the (sniper) rifle hanging on the wall in the first act (roughly, my twenties). I didn’t spot the villain tiptoeing onstage and slipping the rifle off the wall, in the second act (roughly, my thirties). Nor was I aware of the red dot on my forehead in the third act (roughly, my forties). And when the trigger was pulled, well…

“Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful,” as The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, aka “The Big Book,” one of the central texts of that movement, puts it.

To that list of adjectives I’d add my mother-in-law’s: “insidious.”

Probably said to me, though I don’t remember, exactly, as your humble narrator poured himself a third pre-dinner drink, at her house.

At Pam’s parents’ house, there was a rule—unspoken, to be sure; unacknowledged, even; but no less iron-clad. The booze, and ice bucket with tongs in it, came out on the sideboard at precisely 6 p.m.—earlier if it looked like dinner was going to be early. You could pour yourself one pre-dinner drink—no problem! Go ahead! Help yourself! Then, if you so desired, a second one, called in her family a “halfer” for reasons lost in the mists of time (well, obviously because at some point, maybe many generations ago, it was half the size of your first, but that notion had long since passed into mythical/canard status: everyone’s second was the size of the first, easily).

But if you went ahead and poured yourself a third—well, still! no…problem, help….yourself—but at that point you open yourself up to sidelong glances and comments and wisecracks  from the gathered family members, spouses, and so forth.

And so that’s why I speculate it was probably as I poured my third pre-dinner drink that my mother-in-law sidled up to me, and quietly—and lovingly, always lovingly, I was always astonished at how Pam’s relatively conservative family, most of it anyway, always welcomed a writer and obvious madman into their midst—said: “Just remember, Dave. Alcohol is insidious.”

“Ominous warning—which I failed to heed,” as it says in “The Big Book” at one point.

That’s from an early chapter called “Bill’s Story,” outlining the tortuous journey of “Bill W.,” who, along with “Doctor Bob,” was co-founder of AA, from successful businessman to drunk hanging on by a very thin thread; then going on to figure out a program that would help save the lives of thousands of men and women in similar situations.   

One of the first things he tells in his story is how, as a young (American) WW I soldier in England, Bill W. comes across a gravestone which reads:

Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier

Who caught his death

Drinking cold small beer

A good soldier is ne’er forgot

Whether he dieth by musket

Or by pot

Bill W., the young soldier, future founder of AA, musing on this inscription, says, simply, to himself: “Ominous warning—which I failed to heed.”

Likewise, I failed to heed my mother-in-law’s “ominous warning”…

To the list of adjectives re: alcohol that includes my mother-in-law’s—cunning, baffling, powerful, insidious—I’d add: “patient.”

Alcohol waited for me, patiently, in the tall grass, biding its time, until it was time to strike.

Non-metaphorical snakes are never, in my understanding, both poisonous and constrictors. But the metaphorical snake of alcohol was both, for me: first it bit me in the ass; then tried to squeeze the life out of me.

Alcohol, vaunted throughout the millennia as a “social lubricant,” isolated me and made me “a stranger to my fellow man” (and woman).

Alcohol turned me, once the most honest of mortals, into a lying liar, filling the air with lies; turning my (downtown) house into a House of Lies.

I alienated friends, whom I loved; family members, whom I loved; and my wife, whom I loved…

Arr, anyway, blah blah blah, you’ve probably heard it all before, a thousand times, from a thousand other alkies.

(Leaning too close, eyes blurry, unfocused, and bloodshot; swaying, slurring, maybe grabbing your shirt, breathing high-octane fumes into your face: “My wife hates me, my kidsh hate me, my friendsh all hate me… You prob’ly hate me too…”)

Let’s cut straight to: Feb. 27, 2021. Moving-to-the-country day. I’m a little drunk—and therefore, obviously, ipso facto, res ipsa loquitur (sorry, kid’s taking Latin in gifted class, etc.) still drinking, at that point.

I’ve slipped out during the morning on my bike and grabbed two 1.5 litre bottles of wine, aka the equivalent of four normal bottles. It was a Monday, so the liquor stores were closed, under COVID decree. I had to go to the Wine Rack.   

The bottles are stashed in my backpack, in the car. Me “surreptitiously” sipping, sometimes guzzling, the wine throughout the day, on the down-low/q.t. Number of people I think I’m fooling: everyone. Number of people I’m actually fooling: zero.

Re: moving, I was trying to be helpful. Thinking, in my semi-zombified, stuporiffic brain, I was being helpful. Humping boxes, chairs etc out of our city house, into the truck, sipping; driving to country, humping same boxes, chairs, tables, etc into new house, taking sips, with the help of our three boys; and her sister and her husband; and one of their sons, i.e. my nephew.

But perhaps I wasn’t, in reality, being as helpful as I thought I was…being. The truth is: Pam, her sister (my sister-in-law), our mutual brother-in-law, and our three sons probably did the lion’s share of the work; as I sipped and sometimes guzzled and carried the odd thing. At a certain point Pam and I crossed paths, her carrying a chair and me carrying a box and she said: “Dave, you’ve been holding that box for five minutes. Why don’t you just go sit on the back porch?”

Me: “What? Why? I’m trying to help.”

Her: “Dave, you’re drunk.” Then, having had occasion to utter this line before, she hissed: “I love Sober Dave. I hate Drunk Dave.”

Ladies and gentlemen: It was like an arrow in my heart. An arrow of the non-Cupid variety, definitely. Definitively.

Maybe more like a harpoon to the gut. Drunk as I was half the time, and even drunker the other half, I still felt things, once in a while. And I felt that. I felt harpooned. What was I doing? I loved Pam to the moon and stars and back. My goddess, my queen, my shield-maiden, mother of my three beautiful children—basically, finally, ultimately: what was I doing? Not just that day, or week, or month—but big picture: what the fuck was I doing?

I resolved then and there to quit. This time for sure.

So when we got to our new house, and had partially unpacked: “Pam, just give me two days.”

“For what?”

“To quit. This time for sure.”

She sighed, seeming sad—weary, even.   

Me: “What?”

“I’ve just…been down this road so many times before.”

But she agreed to my terms. The Big Book: “Passing all understanding is the patience mothers and wives have had with alcoholics.” (Remember, “The Big Book” is written in 1930s lingo, with 1930s-type sensibilities: they couldn’t even conceive, yet, at least in the early iterations of that book, of female alcoholics; or gay ones.)

I took to my bed, in the bedroom of our new rusticated domicile. Drew the blinds. For two days I lay there, in the crepuscular semi-darkness: throwing up in a plastic wastepaper basket; not eating, not even apple sauce or yoghurt; couldn’t even keep water down, truth be told (and you know you’re sick when you can’t even keep water down); getting up on wobbly legs many times in the day and night to stagger over to the bathroom, which seemed like a long way away even though it was an “ensuite”; worried one of these times I might not make it all the way to the toilet—that I might non-metaphorically “shit the bed.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: do you suppose any of this is easy for me to admit?

I say unto you: it is not. I tell you all this with deep sorrow, shame and embarrassment. I guess what impels me to include such hair-raising, spine-tingling details in my narrative is the off-chance you, or someone you know, might have gone through something similar, or is teetering on the verge; or have already walked through that particular fire; and that hearing any of the above might help.

That you might benefit in some way, even if only from my anti-example…

One of the phrases that jumped out at me, from the start, in the AA literature, comes from the “Twelve Traditions”—different from the 12 steps, the “traditions” came later—of  Alcoholics Anonymous.

Tradition Five: “Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.”

“Alcoholic who still suffers”: that phrase really jumped out at me. Because it really is a form of suffering, for some, anyway. But it’s a unique form of suffering, isn’t it? In that the sufferer might not realize he/she is suffering—in fact will often think  he/she is having a great time.

So if any of what I’m saying, dear reader, rings a bell at all, that’s the reason for my horrible hair-raising, spine-tingling “share,” which some might deem an “over-share”: in case you are, or on the brink of being, or have been, or know anyone who might be, “the alcoholic who still suffers.”

Withdrawal is the worst. It’s also the most dangerous, as any doctor will tell you. Drinking will kill you over time; but withdrawal could kill you on the spot. You could have seizures, a heart attack, a stroke. My wobbly legs might have worsened into the aptly named “ataxia”—aptly named in my opinion only, because it “attacks ya,” causes you to lose the use of your legs completely. I’ve known people who contracted ataxia in withdrawal, fell down the stairs, and wound up in hospital.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” An oft-quoted remark; and whenever you mumble this dictum in company, re: something that sucks that happened to someone (ideally, obviously, someone other than you), everyone nods knowingly.

But Christopher Hitchens, the somewhat recently deceased essayist/memoirist, public intellectual and polemicist, was closer to the mark, I feel—at  least when it comes to some of life’s trials—when, in the throes of chemo/radiation, towards the end of his battle with throat cancer, he said to his friend Martin Amis: “Nietzsche was perhaps mistaken, don’t you think? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and kills you later on.”

But withdrawal didn’t kill me. So two days after taking to my bed, I popped out of it (O.K. maybe “popped” is a stretch), and began on wobbly legs to attempt to resume being a normal human being—a “normie.” (In informal AA parlance, me = “alkie,” you = “normie.”)

And, I’m pleased to report: so far, so good.

Part of what’s saving me, every day, is a slight quirk in the space-time continuum, an exception/asterisk when it comes to the way things normally go.

I don’t know what that means, either. Put it this way: one unintended, unlooked for, but, as it turns out, in the grand scheme of things, not unwelcome side-effect of moving to the country without a driver’s licence is:

It’s kind of like rehab, for me.

In that: a) I’m in a bucolic setting; b) I’m under more or less constant supervision; and c) it’s difficult for me to slip off undetected and “score” a fix of my beloved booze.

In the city, if I wanted to obtain a dose of the fiery liquid I had, apparently, to my surprise and horror, become addicted to, I could quietly hop on my bike and be back with a bottle in my backpack lickety-split, before anyone noticed I was gone.

Out here, though? Well, I suppose I could hop on my lawn tractor and attempt surreptitiously to tootle off to the nearest liquor store.

But it would take several hours; and, after a while, someone in my family would probably become suspicious.

Pam, to my youngest son, Adam: “Adam, have you seen your dad lately?”

Adam: “I think I saw him go down the driveway on the lawn tractor. But that was a couple of hours ago. He was muttering something about mowing a neighbour’s lawn.”

And when I returned, bottle stashed in the storage compartment located conveniently under the seat (see, I’ve given this some thought), there would be a frowning, arms-crossed, un-welcoming committee to greet me.

Not to mention the stir it could create in the not-so-nearby not-really-town. These hayseeds—oops, I mean noble country folk—like to gossip, so I’ve heard; and the sight of me rolling up on my lawn tractor to the liquor store might well make the front page of the local paper:

AREA MAN, IN ATTEMPT TO FOOL FAMILY

VIS-À-VIS HIS ALCOHOLISM,

DRIVES LAWN TRACTOR TO LIQUOR STORE

Sources say recent city transplant has no driver’s licence!

Mental health professionals on high alert

“There is only one thing worse than being talked about; and that is not being talked about,” Oscar Wilde once said, no doubt to universal laughter and delighted applause.

But had Wilde been able to fast-forward through time and spot me driving my lawn tractor to the local liquor store, he might have had to revise his aphorism, or at least append an addendum: “…except in some circumstances, of course, like one that recently came across my radar of a fellow driving a lawn tractor to a liquor store in an under-populated area, where he was spotted by the local citizenry. In a case like that, even I, Oscar Wilde, would probably have to concede that sometimes it is better not to be talked about.”

All of which to say: In AA, they pooh-pooh the so-called “geographic cure,” i.e. the notion that you might be able to leave behind your demons and addictions by transplanting yourself to a different geographic locale.

If you are an alcoholic contemplating trying to snap out of it by “a change of scenery,” or whatever, going to live in the mountains, or a seaside town, or, as in my case, on a farm near some hick burgh—oops, I mean, “lovely rural hamlet”—AA types, stuffed to the eyeteeth as they are with aphorisms, slogans, sayings, etc., will vie with one another to say something like: “Wherever you go, there you are.” And/or “Escape isn’t a solution.”

But I think, having moved to a 100-acre farm in the middle of nowhere with no driver’s licence, I may be a lone exception.

And lo and behold, mirabile dictu: I haven’t touched a drop since Feb. 28/March 1, 2021 (I can’t really count the first day I was in bed puking—or can I? It didn’t really feel like much of a red-letter day, let alone really a day at all).

Like the trees, I was a “bare ruined choir” when we got here, as I say. Now I’m starting to bud; my leaves popping out and rustling in the wind.

Sorry about all the arboreal imagery: my kid’s taking a course in poetical tree-imagery in his gifted program. Helping him with his homework last night, I came across the following lines from Philip Larkin:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Just kidding about “kid in gifted program” stuff, obviously. I came across those lines on my own, reading poetry for my own reasons.

I’m not sure why Larkin refers to trees as “unresting castles.” And why they might “thresh.” I mean, don’t castles just sort of sit there?

But the lines stuck with me. Because that’s exactly what I plan to do, out here in the godforsaken hinterlands: begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And stay that way.

Early days, still, I know. I’m just a few months in, now, as I write, and in AA they definitely emphasize “one day at a time” and practically hold flashlights under their chins as they tell you campfire tales of people who were sober for years—decades, even—then relapsed, went back down that horrible rabbit hole.

So: fair enough: “One day at a time.”

Well, O.K. let’s start with an example of a recent day: Father’s Day, last Sunday, as I write.

My first completely sober Father’s Day for—well, maybe ever. I had a beautiful day. Eggs Benedict for brunch. We played ping-pong (we’ve installed a table in the basement), including doubles. My family is all very evenly matched, so it was a fierce battle all the way around: fun.

Oops, sorry—I forgot I promised: no more ping-pong-related verbiage. At one point during that day, also, I did a Zoom AA meeting. In my “share,” I told my fellow alcoholics:

“I’m having a good day, this Father’s Day. You know, you come to these enough of these meetings, sooner or later you hear someone say ‘I’d be dead by now if it weren’t for AA.’ Me, I feel like I was dead already. I was dead in any meaningful sense of the word: insensible, horizontal, unaware of everything going on around me, arms practically folded over my chest, my spirit in a dark and lonely place. If anyone thought of me at all it was fondly to remember the guy I used to be, the guy they used to know. No one ever asking for my opinion—none of my kids asked the opinion of the corpse on the couch when it came to, say, which college he should go to or whatnot. And I was an advice columnist, for a national newspaper, for 15 years! Now, though, people—at least, the people in my vicinity—are asking my opinion again. Might seem minor to you, but to me, it’s huge.”

Not sure they understood what the fuck I was talking about. I’m still not sure AA types get me, any more than most other folk. *Sigh*. What can I do? As Popeye used to say, in a cartoon that aired, no doubt, long before you were born: “I yam what I yam.”

Later, before dinner, I told my wife about my “share,” and how it seemed like it didn’t really go over; that it puzzled and possibly nonplussed the other alkies. She commiserated.

That night, at dinner (shrimp tacos, my favourite), my youngest son, Adam, asked my opinion about the best possible way to cook a steak. He was going up to a friend’s cottage, and was planning to cook a steak for himself for the first time in his young life.

Pleased all out of all proportion to the importance of the question, so happy, as a dad, to be asked my advice about anything, really, after all those years of being a zombie, I said:

“Well, first of all, Adam, what many people don’t realize: you can’t cook it straight out of the fridge, you have to let it come up to room temperature on the counter first. I like to put salt and pepper and a little olive oil on it, too. Then when it’s time to cook, you have to get the pan really hot…”

Pam nodded and smiled, kept her own counsel, as I spoke. But later, unwinding  with a drink (her, not me), muttered something to the effect of: “Why didn’t he ask me about how to cook steaks? I’ve cooked plenty of steaks in my time. It so happens I’m great at cooking steaks, my favourite food.”

“Pam,” I said. “Please. This is what I was telling you about. I told you I told those AA mofos in my meeting how happy I am my kids are asking my opinion about stuff, now, after not asking for all those years.” Pause. “Plus, darling: it is, after all…Father’s Day.”

Yes, I played that card. Hey, if you’ve got a card like that up your sleeve, sooner or later you put it on the table. Right?

“…so let me just enjoy the moment, O.K.?”     

“Fair enough,” she said, and did.

Speaking of Father’s Day cards, later I got one from the two boys still living under my roof (the third one phoned). I keep it on my desk—and, I think, always will: to remind me what I could still lose, if I even have a single martini (because then I’m off: it’s just the way I’m made); and the ground I’ve gained, lately.

I’m pretty sure, in fact, I’m going to have it framed. Maybe a shrunk-down version laminated to carry around in my wallet. It makes me verklempt just to look at. One kid said how he would “love [me] until the day one of us perishes—and even after” and that suddenly “it feels like I’ve got my father back.”

The other wrote: “I’ve been coming to you a lot for advice recently, and I think you’d be surprised how much I learn each time” and how he finds himself awash in admiration “after a brilliant joke, which you crack often, at least in my opinion”; and that not only that he loves me “beyond words.”

Every word made my heart soar. Maybe you think I’m making it all up, that it’s just another “writer’s embellishment,” especially the “brilliant joke” compliment which I obviously couldn’t help myself but shoehorn in there, even though it probably has very little to do with my point about Father’s Day.

But I assure you it’s all true and verbatim. I am prepared to produce the document in court at a moment’s notice, and even submit to scrutiny by handwriting experts, to prove the veracity of my claims.    

So what, then, ultimately, is my point about Father’s Day, exactly?

Simply that it was a good day. I’ll take that Father’s Day as my Groundhog Day, any day of the week. If I can have days like that until the end of my days, I’ll die a happy man.

At which point anyone can put anything they want on my gravestone.