25 years ago at Thanksgiving dinner at our family friends’ house in a suburb of Detroit, I took my last drink of alcohol. I’m sure I had a glass of wine at least. More than one glass? A beer? That I don’t know. I was never picky. I loved all alcohol. If the occasion called for wine, that’s what I’d be drinking.
I remember driving north, probably on I-75, then I-94, to their house. I have no idea what suburb. Was it still Southfield where they lived or had they moved on? I remember the barren fields, the low winter sun, the flat landscape on the highway. Did we pass the huge tire on the side of the highway, did we pass one of the first super-flashy moving digitized billboards I’d ever seen in my life?
My mother lived in Farmington Hills, Michigan at the time. Paul and I would drive up on the weekends and visit her, stay in her ranch condo, rent about a dozen movies from the arty-farty video store a mile away, lock ourselves in the den and watch movies all weekend. Sometimes we would fight, inevitably we would have sex, sometimes we’d go out to eat, even if just for lunch, sometimes take a walk in the sterile “neighborhood” that was like all of the other hundreds of condo neighborhoods in the suburb I grew up in for a few years when I was still in elementary school. The condos and sprawl came later, after my family moved away to a suburb of Toledo.
I had skirted around AA for about a year, hanging out at Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings with another friend of mine from college. After the meetings, we’d go out and get drunk at one or two of my favorite townie bars in Kent.
When I finally went to my first AA meeting, after being invitied by a woman who I banquet waitressed with at a sprawling restaurant in Hudson, Ohio, I felt happy and at-home right away; not like I felt when I was around the dragged-down energy of the people in the ACoA meetings. The alcoholics were a happy, gregarious lot; the codependents were pissed off and low.
It only took me a month to know why I was so comfortable in the AA meetings. These were my people.
Last drink, Thanksgiving Day, November 1987.
And that’s all she wrote.
twinklysparkles 
Congratulations.
Thanks, Miss K!!! Still groovin’ on the groovy CA vibes of having gotten to meet you, even if it feels like eons ago.
K
happy anniversary, twinkly.
ptd
Thanks, pt. Maybe you remember. You were there for some of it.
Katherine
Congratulations. A lot to be thankful for. Good for you.
Thank you. I am not sure if I’d be alive if I hadn’t quit. In any case, getting sober has given me a full life. Drinking was a strange numbing hell for me. I am sure I don’t always sound grateful, but I am aware that being sober was a necessary step to me going forward into a full life.
AND….I’m running, even enough that my quads are sore. This is new. It takes a lot to get me to feel new work in my muscles.
Ciao! Katherine
Yay to feeling alive, to making smart and LIFE giving choices, and to feeling soreness to the point where you will still go out for more.
All good things.
Happy Anniversary, Twinkly. I had my 25th on Oct. 15 so we are practically twins. Kindreds, most definitely, which is why I am so happy for you today.
Thanks, Lydia. I didn’t realize our dates were so close. Good stuff, right? I am so glad that I’m sober. You know how it is.
Happy Belated Anniversary to you, too. It’s good to know you are out there.
Thanks for the kind wishes! Katherine