Saturday, January 4

01/03/2009 at 10:50 am (Uncategorized)

Every winter my friend Emily (the one I had one Cosmo and one glass of wine with at Wildfire) and her sister, Anne, throw a retreat weekend at their parents’ house in Door County, Wisconsin. The house, which could double as a modern art museum, has floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Green Bay. Emily and Anne each invite three or four of their friends and the criteria for being invited is you cook well, appreciate good wine, and can enhance the weekend in some way.

Last year, we all read “The Intuitionist” before showing up and one of the women facilitated a book discussion. Another woman who sang like an opera singer led a sing-along. Another friend masterminded a literary game of charades. And I led a yoga practice.

Emily emailed me and invited me to this year’s retreat. It’s January seventeenth through the twentieth. I emailed Emily that I’d be there, but I don’t know, I don’t think I can go and not drink. Maybe I’ll take a little drink break and quit again after the retreat. When I asked Charlie what he thought of this idea he said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do. That’s your decision.” But his downturned mouth was disapproving.

I decided to go to a meeting and see how I felt afterward. A young guy, maybe twenty, twenty-one, spoke after I mentioned what was rolling around in my head. He had just been to Cancun with a bunch of his friends.

“Everyone told me I shouldn’t go,” he said glumly, looking down at the table. “I had more than a month of sobriety. But I went. I drank a ton. I had a lot of fun, but now I’m starting all over again—making another stab at it.”

A handsome, professional, together-looking man in his fifties grabbed my arm after the meeting.

“I think you know it would be a bad idea to go,” Brent said.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I know.”

“Door County will be there next year,” he said. “Then you can go and drinking won’t bother you.” He waved at a woman who was about to leave and motioned her over. “Hey, do you know Kat?” Kat walked over and gave Brent a hug. “You ever been to Marytown before?” Brent asked me.

“No.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” Kat said. “It’s a beautiful Catholic church that’s open twenty-four/seven. There’s a continuous prayer chain. You can walk in anytime and someone will be praying.”

“I feel a real spiritual connection there,” Brent said. “You guys doing anything? You want to go?”

Kat looked at her watch. It was almost ten o’clock. “Yeah, I can go,” she said.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

We drove there separately and walked into the church together. About twenty or thirty people were there praying in the pews. Kat noticed a guy from the program standing by a side door and led us over to him. She introduced us to Sam, who is new to the program. A scowling priest swept over and whisked us down a hallway.

“You can continue your conversation here,” he said and left.

Brent led us to a meeting room down the hallway. We sat down and Sam told us he is a flight attendant and he’d gone to work drunk, gotten into an argument with another flight attendant, threatened to beat him up, and gotten into a heap mess of trouble. The airline sent him to treatment and he was now going to meetings to save his job.

“I go home after work and have Perrier in a wine glass,” he said. “It makes me not miss my wine so much.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Kat said. “That’s a huge trigger. That wine glass will get you drinking again.”

I was glad I hadn’t commiserated with Sam. I was about to share that that is exactly what I do.

“Brenda was thinking about going on a retreat,” Brent said, changing the subject. He told Kat and Sam what I’d said during our discussion group. “There was a guy there who went to Cancun after one month of sobriety and blew it,” he added. “He was pretty down-and-out, wasn’t he Brenda?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But he also said he had a lot of fun.”