Finding Warmth on a Cold New York Christmas

By Edward Grinnan, New York, New York

Until that year I had hardly ever missed going home to see my family for Christmas. Only once before, in fact, when, right after college, I was trekking in the Peruvian Andes during a fairly improvisational journey to parts more or less unknown. That year, my mother later told me, most of the discussion around the holiday table was about when they’d ever see me again.

“We had no idea,” she told me later, “because you didn’t call.” Did I mention that my mother was a bit of a worrier? I called her a prayer worrier rather than a prayer warrior.

Truth was that now, at age 30, I had given her more to worry and pray about than any loving mother ever deserved. A reckless, artistic and footloose youth had transmogrified into something much darker and more disturbing than my mother knew.

And this Christmas, 1983, two weeks after I turned 30, I had to tell my mother I wasn’t coming home. That coming home was too dangerous. At least for me. At least for now.

“If you get on a plane for Detroit, Edward,” my sponsor in the 12-step program I’d joined warned me, “you might not make it back. The holidays can be tough. Everyone will be toasting and celebrating. That’s fine for most folks, but for people like us it’s a matter of life and death.

“It’s your first Christmas sober ... your first month, actually. You should stick close to your meetings. You need all the support you can get right now.”

Of that I had no doubt. I was on shaky ground. In the years since I had finished graduate school and drifted down from New Haven to New York, alcohol had subsumed my life like some treacherous rip current I kept getting caught in.

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I’d been in enough trouble at school, taking four years to complete a three-year master of fine arts program. Even then I spent my final semester living at the student health center so I could be supervised and medicated.

New York and its environs were altogether a more dangerous game. The girl I’d moved here with from New Haven quickly left me ... and I couldn’t blame her. If I could have left me I would have.

But that was the problem. I’d walk past the huge churches and cathedrals in this great city and cry out for help, but no answer ever came except the plaintive echo of my own dissolute voice.

Finally, on a cold, rainy day in the East Village, an old friend smacked me over the head with one of those cheapo street umbrellas until she got me to a 12-step meeting on Perry Street.

Yes, it was grim and crowded and the man talking was clearly nearing the final stages of AIDS. My mind said, Why bother to stop now, dude? Go out in style. Yet even as I thought it I couldn’t help but grasp the courage of a dying man who wanted to meet his Lord sober.

I was introduced to others and everyone was eager to give me their phone numbers. Since I didn’t have a phone, that seemed pointless ... until a collection was taken and I was awarded a wealth of coins to use at pay phones. “No excuses now,” someone said.

For the past month I’d trudged to meetings once, twice, three times a day. I turned 30 in a huge “sober party” that was as wild and fun as anything I’d ever done.

As Christmas neared, though, I pined for home, for the beautiful clean snow of Michigan and midnight Mass with my family at St. Owen’s. What I wouldn’t have given to be back there with them, like it was before everything had gone so wrong in my life.

There wasn’t anything about my family that was bad for me. I came from a good family and they were supporting me in my decision to play it safe this year. There would be plenty of time to go home later when I had a few stable months under my belt.