Sunday, February 14, 2016

Cool Seaweed

Cool: Part of or fitting the IN crowd; originally hipster slang. 

Bob H's memorial made me remember a seminal incident in my early sobriety.  I'm sure I've shared this before which shows how big an effect it had on me.  I doubt the actual veracity of the details of the episode as I have a tendency - as we all do - to rearrange what actually happened with what fits the narrative I'm trying to weave.  In general terms, then, trying to be as truthful as possible, this is my recollection. . . .

I was living in Indianapolis and struck up an acquaintance with a man named Bob Smith, and I shit you not on that name.  Bob was a bit of a rough character, an uneducated, lower-class, manual laborer of some kind.  In other words, not someone a cool guy like me would hang out with.  Luckily, I do have some pictures of myself in my early sobriety and "cool" is not the word most people would use.

Be that as it may, Bob used to pick me up and take me to meetings in this big, rumbling Oldsmobile, one of those cars that would hold three golf bags and the bodies of two snitches in the trunk with no problem.  I recall sitting outside my rat-hole apartment in that car and just talking, big V-8 rumbling away.  I'm sure I spent a lot of time emphasizing my coolness with Bob.

I move to Chicago after a few months of sobriety.  On my first trip back to Indy I swung by Bob's little house.  His wife invites me in and, as I stand in the entryway, Bob shuffles into the room.  I hardly recognized him.  Apparently, on all of those nights when I was whining about how bad I had it, Bob was trying unsuccessfully to fight off lung cancer.  He wasn't well enough for a long visit so I didn't stay long and I never saw him again.

But, boy, did that selflessness stick with me, that ability to put his ego aside to help someone else.

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