Monday, October 31, 2011

How I Enjoyed My Summer

I was texting back and forth with a new friend the other day [Read: Scruff, hot young man, hoping for a couple of dates] and he asked me to explain why I had said that life was 'pretty darn cool'.  Being in need of a blog topic.....

I am not a wealthy man. I don't have a lot of material possessions. I don't have large amounts of liquid assets. I am never going to be rich like my grandfather.  By the time I was born, my father had blow through his dad's money and our family had fallen from upper middle class to poor.  I use to take on a feeling of loss as I dealt with financial issues over the years, as I watched others enjoy a finer life.  I felt a bitterness and a resentfulness as I dealt with the pain of not having.  At some point I got a different perspective.  I figured out, call me slow, that the greatest pain felt in this was that felt by my father.  He died at the age of 44, under and apple tree, from an undiagnosed heart condition related to alcoholism.  He drank himself to death due to the disease of alcoholism, guilt, and fear. 

When I attended Indiana University my first year out of high school, I learned to drink.  I had what I thought was a significant income for a poor boy from rural America from scholarships and the Social Security Administration.  I was not prepared for an influx of cash and for a lack of authority figures.  I made bad choices.  I made bad decisions.  And, I spent a lot of money on drinking.  

When I got out of college and fell in love I was taught how to use drugs.  That relationship was a fast ride down a destructive path that ended with me giving up drinking, smoking, and shooting up drugs.  I have been clean for 18 years.

It was during the process of getting and staying clean that I learned how to live and how to be a man.  In that process I learned the importance of seeking out and listing those things for which I am grateful.  Identifying what I am grateful for keeps me wanting those things in my life and, thus, makes me work at keeping them.  

But, gratitude is not just a mental exercise.  Gratitude is both attitude and action.  My favorite example is my car.  I don't have a fancy car.  As a matter of fact, it was an inexpensive purchase as new cars go.  It was, however, the first new car I had ever purchased.  It is small, gets great gas milage, and it fits my needs very well.  I have a good attitude about this little Yarus, but, attitude is only part of gratitude.  The action I take in regards to this is that I see to it that the payments are made monthly.  The car company did not have to give me a 0% interest loan.  They did not have to give me a loan at all.  But they did.  It is my responsibility to show my gratitude for their actions by making sure my actions keeps up my end of the bargain. 

Also during the process of getting and staying clean, I learned how to clean up the wreckage of my relationships.  I have done that.  I have gone back to all of those people I have harmed not with the intent of saying that I was sorry, hell, I had said that so much over the years that if I were to be believed then I would have been the sorriest SOB on this green earth, no, I did not say I was sorry, but I did make things right.  I paid any money that I still owed.  I replaced that what I had stolen.  I admitted where I had lied.  I fixed what I had broken.  For some people it was best that I not approach them because the damage was so great to even see my face would have caused more harm to them than I could repair.  So I made amends to those people by staying out of their lives and by fixing someone else's mistake that closely resembled mine.  There were trips to shelters, donations to non-profits, kindnesses to strangers.  I also had the opportunity to repair the relationship with my family.  The black sheep son/brother is now a productive member of the family providing not only for himself but for others in the family who are with difficult times.
our neighbor, my sister, me

So, Josh, here, at long last, is the answer as to why my life is so cool....

My sister was recently diagnosed with cancer.  She and my mother and her husband all live together in Yuma, AZ.  My sister is the most precious person in the world to me.  She has always had my back. No matter how high, how shitty, how thoughtless I was, sis would cover me.  My summer was so cool because by staying clean I was and am able to be there for her through this ordeal.  I took time off from work to ride with her and mom to the hospital that is 4 hours from their home.  As it turned out, mom had to have a cardiac procedure done days before sis was to have surgery.  Mom then ended up hospitalized, and then hospitalized again.  I had both mom and sis in hospital 4 hours apart from each other. I was able to take my nearly 30 years of nursing and help sis out with the confusion that is American Healthcare and to be her advocate.  I was able to save mom from her final hospitalization as the care started to deteriorate at that facility.  I was able to meet a challenge and not depend on a drink or  a drug to get me through it.  Don't get me wrong.  I did nothing special, nothing heroic.  I just showed up and did the next right thing.  And that is where the coolness is.  That is where my gratitude is.  I can be there for those I love and I can be there doing what needs to be done.  I may loose them tomorrow, or they may loose me, but this summer, damn it, I got to help.  I got to be present. I got to me a brother.  I got to be a son.  I got to be a man.

I do not measure my wealth by where I am in this world, but I do measure it by the distance I have traveled.  And in that methodology, I am the wealthiest son of a bitch in the room....

1 comment:

  1. Nice... this post is synchronous with my own process of late.

    See: http://www.reachingintotheuniverse.com/2011/11/01/gratitude-for-life/

    ReplyDelete