What A Difference

Yesterday, my blog entry, "Surfing the Night", was posted on the website for A Network for Grateful Living. I am amazed how much just seeing it so beautifully laid out, complete with a picture of a computer keyboard, cheered me up. I have been quite ill almost all of the time since posting that last blog.

But every day begins a new page or a new chapter in my life.

I keep thinking of one of the oft said remarks of my dear friend, Bill Smith (don't worry, 12 step folks: he always used his full name. In his obituary, it even said that he was survived by family and many, many friends in aa.).

Bill was a minister's son and a city councilman here in my city. However, this is not how I knew him. I learned these things after he passed away. I knew him as one of our city's oldest and longest sober aa members. When he died over ten years ago, he had thirty-seven years sobriety.

My first aa homegroup, which I joined nineteen years ago, met at 7 a.m. Some of my favorite people in the world were there each day. Bill was there every morning. He was a wise, gentle, spiritual, loving African-American spirit. I thought of him as the shaman of our group.

When people would get greatly discouraged, and, as my health failed, and my career and marriage faded away during the first two years of sobriety, he would often say one of two things -- or sometimes both.

One was, "Don't give up a moment before the miracle happens." This is posted on my Facebook profile.

The other was the one which kept going through my mind today. "WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY CAN MAKE!"

Yesterday, I was crying because I felt so completely isolated and unbearably lonely. I felt trapped without a car. Although I can manage to get groceries on the bus on my "better" days, when I get a bad cold or the flu on top of the already barely manageable chronic illnesses, I cannot drive even to get milk. It has been one and a half months since a friend took me to an aa meeting. I have not been to church since Christmas Eve. I have asked the churches with which I have been affiliated for a ride, with no results.

I haven't been able to leave here for any kind of vacation in three and a half years. I long to see the autumn leaves in the hills of the southern tier or Vermont. I want to feel the salt air and the splash of ocean waves. I need the fellowship of other family and friends.

Yesterday, I felt as if I was barely hanging on, about ready to give up on everything, because there has been almost nothing in my life prior to this that prepared me for being this alone. I rode out the rough rocks of the day's climb and was very content to find some peace in sleep.

Today, I received a Facebook request for a new friendship from a fascinating woman in South Africa. She had read my writing on the web site. She wanted to follow what I did and wrote.

I wept. I felt my world moving from the limits of my living room to a much vaster universe. I remembered my experience in India and all the amazing things, good and bad, that I encountered there. I recalled my voyage across the ocean, from New York to Rotterdam, en route to India. Oddest of all my memories are the vivid images of the airports in which we stopped going to and coming from India: Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Kuwait, Bombay, Varanasi, New Dehli, Tehran, Beirut, Istanbul, Frankport, London, LaGuardia, and home again to Corning-Elmira.

On this day, I am once again aware that I am part of a larger world. Perhaps my educational background and my years of disability have combined to give me a voice with which to reach out to others and to tell the story of those who have no voice. Perhaps something new will take shape in all of this.

I am grateful for a change of heart.

What a difference a day can make.