On Sunday, I rode out to an antique mall northeast of town with Morris to visit a vendor who has a massive collection of magazines, postcards, photographs, and ephemera. Morris looked at postcards, which I usually look at also, but Sunday I got caught up in a box of old bills, report cards, business correspondence, advertisements and the like.
One 1956 company newsletter featured the story of Susie, a squirrel who would come to the back door & knock until someone brought her peanuts & "peacans." A letter from 1938 complained haughtily that the electrical work had not been completed when the writer & his wife went to their river home for the weekend. Another business letter from a firm's president extended get well wishes to one of the owners, and said he'd enjoyed seeing him at the fox hunt when they "rode to hounds." An invitation from St. Benedict's School announced their Final Ball at Tantilla Gardens, a long-gone Richmond ballroom, where you could "dance beneath the stars" courtesy of a roof that rolled back above the dance floor. A receipt from a local bakery showed that someone thought a half-dozen of their eclairs was well worth forty-six cents.
It's caused me to wonder over the past few days at all the slips of paper that have passed through my hands over the years.
When we left Antique Village, we rode out through the countryside of Hanover County, turning off the highway onto River Road. We were searching for Hanovertown, a dot on the map and a place of which we had never heard. Sure, there's Hanover Courthouse, with the Houndstooth Cafe at the intersection of Routes 54 & 301, but Hanovertown? It seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, and there was little to indicate that there had ever been a town there.
This market featured self-checkout, like many of the large grocery stores in town. Instead of an automated cash/credit card machine, there was an old metal breadbox with a slot cut in the top.
Hanovertown, not even a wide spot in the road these days, was a thriving village in the late 1700's. Originally settled in 1676 as Page's Warehouse, it was Hanover County's first major settlement. When the House of Burgesses decided to relocate Virginia's Capital, Hanovertown lost by only a few votes to Richmond. The quiet, bucolic landscape today does not hint that Cornwallis burned warehouses here in his failed Virginia Campaign in 1781, or that this land saw another bloody battle during Grant's Wilderness Campaign in 1864. Prosperity of landowners was made possible through enslavement, when the lives of some human beings were considered simple investments. Here is the text from a newspaper advertisement:
--Spencer Roane, May 28, 1805
The previous evening, Saturday, I was invited to speak at an AA meeting in the Manchester section of Richmond. Manchester, now part of the city of Richmond, was a separate town until it consolidated with Richmond in 1910. Manchester sits opposite the James River from downtown Richmond, and was a working-class town from early times. Its nickname, Dogtown, can be found as early as 1887 in a Richmond Times newspaper article. Today, Manchester is starting to show signs of renewal but its revitalization, though promising, is still tenuous. In general, most people would not want to walk the sidewalks in this area at night.
Saturday night, a few friends & I went to Belle's studio (shown below) for a meeting of the Dogtown Drunks. Belle had invited me to speak on the 4th & 5th steps. The room was packed. Most in the crowd had walked over from The Healing Place, a men's treatment & recovery center that takes in the homeless with addiction problems.
It was the first time I had been to this meeting. When I was introduced to speak, I looked at the faces that surrounded me, mostly of younger, African-American men, and hoped that I would have something to offer them in the way of hope & recovery. Our life experiences differed, but we had at least one thing in common: alcoholism or addiction.
4th Step: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5th Step: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
I talked briefly about how each step provided me with a foundation for the steps that followed, and the principles behind each step. I mentioned how my first sponsor looked over my 4th step list, and gave it back to me, telling me to include my good qualities in addition to my faults so that the moral inventory would be complete.
Mostly, though, I told them about the gift I received when I finished my 5th step.
Two days after I sat down with my sponsor to complete my 5th step, I was at home alone after an early meeting. Without warning, a tide of anger rose up in me that was all-consuming. Anger, undiluted & elemental, at the man who had molested me when I was five. It burned through me, and left me shaking and weeping. I felt drained, and I sat and sobbed. I finally cried for the first time for the little five-year old boy inside me who had been betrayed by a neighbor. I had finally let myself feel the anger.
The emotions and conflicting feelings I had tamped down, suppressed, and ignored for years came up and out. I felt like I had gone over a waterfall in a wooden barrel. The wave of profoundly visceral feeling passed, and I dashed the tears from my eyes, blew my snotty nose, and just sat there. I felt clean and empty. And I had another gift coming.
I sat there, still a little stunned, and an awareness dawned. I realized that, up until that moment, I had held a deep & unacknowledged resentment against my parents. It was a revelation. Now, finally, I could understand that my parents did the best they knew how to do at the time. I saw that when they asked me "Why didn't you tell us?" it was not an accusation. They were also hurt & bewildered. They were first-time parents in the 1960's thrust into a situation with no frame of reference. As a sense of forgiveness grew in me, my shame & guilt slipped away. Those feelings had become obsolete; I was the only person who had ever given them form & substance.
I shared an abbreviated version of my 4th & 5th step experience to the Dogtown Drunks, and I told them why I thought it was important. It is estimated that roughly 80% of alcoholics and addicts experienced abuse in some form as a child. I do not understand the correlation, but I knew that the chances were good that a fair number of the men & women in that room had suffered mental, physical, or sexual abuse as children. I also knew that the 4th and 5th steps are a pathway to freedom, and that the secrets we keep...keep us sick.
The 5th step was scary for me; more frightening than my moral inventory. Sure, I could make a list of my character defects. But, to sit down with another human being and share all that stuff? I put it off as long as I could, until I started feeling restless, irritable, and discontented - in other words, sick again.
I could not have predicted the outcome of taking the 4th and 5th steps beforehand. It took a leap of faith to do something I did not want to do. When it was all said & done, I could look the world in the eye. I could be alone at perfect peace and ease. My fears had fallen from me, and I could feel the nearness of my Creator. I felt like I was in the midst of something spiritual. A few readers will know exactly what I'm talking about.
On Saturday night, in the dim light of Belle's studio after I'd sat down, men began to share. I had been guided by something other than myself. I had shared once again what was uncomfortable for me. One by one, from here & there around the room, the secrets began to be told. It was a very humbling experience for me to be in that room Saturday night. Some men left that meeting afterwards to return to The Healing Place. Some left to spend the night outdoors, wherever they could find a little shelter. I hope they slept peacefully.
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3 comments:
Wow.
Speechless.
I'm crying for that five-year-old boy. And crying again for how you're helping those men and so many others find their way. You just continue to bless me through your sharing and your writing.
Thanks, Bill. That's powerful.
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