More Gratitude

 Grateful:  Warmly or deeply appreciative of kindness or benefits received.

Dude who led the meeting this morning is older and a retread with about a year and a half of sobriety.  It's not hard to see when someone has crossed the line from not drinking to sobriety.  I'm always ruefully shaking my head when I all too often run into those individuals who have a lot of surface sobriety but nothing that has sunk in deep.  I think he's chosen gratitude as the topic the last two times he's led the meeting.  There are always some funny stories when we talk about gratitude.  There are some people who took the elevator down to the basement and then pushed the button for the sub-basement.  I characterized myself as a High Bottom drunk for a while when I was new.  A guy in Chicago pulled me aside one day: "Do you have a wife or a girlfriend or any kids?" (No.)  "Do you have a house or a nice apartment?"  (No.)  "Does anyone in your family like you anymore?" (My MOM likes me, I said defensively.  That doesn't count, he said.)  "Do you have any money?" (Not very much.  Not enough.  Grumble.)  "I've seen the piece of shit car you drive so don't talk to me about your car and all you do in here is complain about your job so I know that isn't going too well."  (Silence.)  "You're not a high bottom drunk.  Why in the hell do you think you're a high bottom drunk?"

There was a guy in Portland who said that in his drinking days he had a Burnside Cadillac.  (Burnside was the main east-west drag there.)  "What's a Burnside Cadillac?" I asked him.   "A shopping cart with all my shit in it," he said.  There was a guy in Cincinnati who talked about living in a condo with a pool.  "I thought you were homeless," I said.  "I lived in a cardboard box on the banks of the Ohio River," he smirked.

A new woman talked about the cop car that often parked outside of the restaurant where she worked about closing time.  Good time to catch an easy drunk, closing time is, and she was grateful  she didn't have to sweat his presence.  I remember when I got my first ticket in sobriety.  I saw those sickening red and blue lights whirring in my rear view mirror and my stomach clenched in fear until I thought: "I'm clean and sober and don't have any drugs or drug residue or open containers in my car and there aren't ten empties rattling around under the passenger seat.  I have a valid registration and I'm not driving on a suspended license and the car's insured and it's really in good working shape."  So I got a ticket for speeding.  The patrolman was quite nice and his radar clocked me at the speed I had my cruise control set for so I could hardly bitch about the ticket.  He took a minute to explain to me that they were targeting this stretch of highway (he even had a sort of cop flyer printed up) because they had had a few bad accidents where cars crossed the median and drove into the opposing traffic at highway speed which seemed reasonable and responsible and more than fair.  I'm not saying I was glad to get a ticket but I was speeding, you know?  I could have driven the speed limit and not gotten a ticket.