How My Wine Turned to Water

Acknowledging Alcoholism

TRURO, Mass. — MY email inbox startled me with the subject line: A Voice from the Past. The last email I received with that heading was from Peanuts LoBianco, a deranged former high school classmate who claimed he had learned to walk on water, change water into wine and then walk on the wine. For all that, he still needed money from me.

This time it was an old girlfriend, from 1979, when I was 28 and she was 20. Thirty-five years ago! She wrote that she was helping her teenage daughter with a literature project for school, and had come across a poem of mine in The New Yorker. An Internet search showed she had become a lawyer. She also sculpted in her free time and maintained a website showing her artwork. We began a correspondence.

She was always a great reader. At one point she mentioned that The New Yorker made her think of John Cheever. In fact, she had just read a book about him, Raymond Carver and other alcoholic writers. I told her I had known both of them in graduate school at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but that I wasn’t much interested in the topic of that book. “It’s a little too close to home for me,” I said. “I’m always trying to cut down on the martinis, but they only get bigger and stronger.”

She wrote back that she, too, could not have read that book a few years ago, that she had struggled with alcoholism her whole life, was genetically hard-wired for it. But her mother had been sober for 30 years now, and she for four. She apologized for taking the fun out of the exchange and said she hoped she had not been too serious. . .

This voice from the past, my ex-girlfriend’s, awakened me to my own voice, which had been lying to me about my problem. I saw myself through her eyes, clear eyes once as glazed as mine. When I’d gone 30 days without a drink, a small but significant milestone, she sent me a coin from Alcoholics Anonymous stamped with the number 1, marking a single month of recovery. Unlike the last voice from the past, the classmate claiming the power to turn water into wine, she made my wine into water. I’m no longer tempted to walk on it. Walking a straight line will be enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/acknowledging-alcoholism.html?_r=0