So, Why Not Me?

Robert Holbrook Smith, better known to people in recovery from alcoholism as Dr. Bob, was credited with having helped more than 5,000 alcoholics find a solution before his death in November of 1950. He remains a glittering role model in that, before becoming the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Smith toiled drunkenly for years as a proctologist, a surgeon who specialized in the treatment of diseases of the colon, rectum, and anus. It's too simple a leap to say that if I were to hold that distinction, I would need to remain drunk on the job, too. More likely, if I knew I was to have a prostate procedure performed by a drunken man from Akron, I'd pop a few scotches myself.

I once met a obstetrician who said he had caught babies while in a drunken blackout. I've met a pilot who claimed to have flown Boeing airliners from New York to Sweden while intoxicated with a stewardess (as they were then called) in his lap. I have a friend who loaded bombs into B-52s during the Vietnam war while stoned on LSD. So many near-misses, if you will. Hence, it's comforting to know that Dr. Bob survived years of behaving like a wickedly sauced, unrepentant intruder to eventually transform his life and to help countless others find peace.

So, in this initial post, let us say that I shall (despite my narcissism and sense of entitlement to hard-won cynicism) search with diligence to find in each day the essence of what poet Emily Dickinson once remarked:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all...