Spiritual Kindergarten

The recovery meeting I stumbled into in May of 1978 was held in a church basement on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When not converted into a landing strip for wayward alcoholics such as I, the room also doubled as a day-care center for neighborhood kids, an irony that was not lost on me, even drunk as I was, at my very first meeting.

What struck me most, besides the warm welcome I received and the genuine empathy I could feel all around me from the recovering drunks who were in attendance that night, was the group of little chairs connected to the room’s daytime alter ego, that had been pushed carefully and sensibly into a corner to make room for the adult-sized folding chairs that volunteer members laid out carefully in precise rows, each chair slightly offset from the one in front of it to facilitate eye contact with the speaker’s table set up at the front of the room.

Drunk and disoriented, I sat in a row somebody pointed me toward and absently held the cup of coffee that someone had stuck in my hand. I didn’t really drink coffee, but that hadn’t seemed to matter. I felt like a plebe, shuffling forward, arms out, receiving my standard-issue blanket, uniform, and toiletries, everything I would need for my time at the Academy.

Sitting there, I saw what I would eventually come to recognize as AA’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions hanging from a pair of window shades on the wall behind the speaker’s table, mingling almost indistinguishably with an assortment of children’s paintings from the daycare center, whose bright colors and wildly emphatic designs added a distinctly festive counterpoint to the room’s otherwise sober decor. 

Try as I might, I couldn’t really concentrate on the window shades; even though I was employed as a proofreader at a small typesetting shop, I had come to realize that, as a result of my drinking, words and their meanings had begun to escape me and I was having a hard time even comprehending posters and advertisements on the subway.

However, I was intensely drawn to the children’s paintings and, not really understanding the exact relationship of AA to the church and its other tenants at that stage of my unexpected yet incipient sobriety, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to decipher what their hidden meaning was and what relevance it might have to this odd new venture I had stumbled into.

Mostly, though, it was the chairs that got me—the tiny little chairs off in the corner. Unbidden, they evoked a visceral memory for me of my first day in kindergarten, a day filled with both terror and wonder, and in my mind’s eye I could see a picture of myself as a child seated in one of those chairs, holding back the tears as my mother waved goodbye from the doorway.

All in all, it was a pretty accurate picture of what was to come as I stayed sober day after day, slowly allowing my body, my mind, and my spirit to heal, and it was as if I were in kindergarten all over again, separating from my dependence on alcohol and learning a whole host of new things I had never even imagined.

Even today, those little chairs get me. A number of years ago, my wife’s mother moved from the northeast down to Florida and was going through her basement deciding what to leave and what to take. She came across a tiny wooden chair that had been my wife’s when she was a toddler. It was old and slightly beaten up, but my mother-in-law had it cleaned and repainted and passed it on to us when she left. 

We have it in our living room, pushed gently into a corner, and every so often, if we have guests or somebody wants to sit next to the couch to watch TV, it gets pulled out and used. It’s oddly comfortable, and even though my body is grossly outsized for it, there is a certain familiarity, a timeless fit, and sitting there I realize that  kindergarten never ends.