Dorothy

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A peaceful spot alongside the Green River, Utah.

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Himself: Made the topic Choice……that’s what we have now where we didn’t before. Herself: Swam, no school, wrote, cooked, and came down with a common cold. Balance: Sometimes napping is balance too.

Why I thawed both the hamburger and the chicken at the same time, I do not know. That tells you that I don’t know much about cooking out of the freezer, doesn’t it. They, of course, both thawed at the same time leaving me shaking my head.

I love the horseradishy BH&G 1939 meatloaf, but I wanted something new. I found a Texas Style Meatloaf that called for a lot of catchup. Just to make life difficult, I used chili sauce. Instead of Cajun Spiced chicken breasts, I made chicken fajitas. By the time I was done with all this cooking for the New Year, I discovered a new cold was creeping up upon me.

After dinner, I didn’t lie down and die like I should have. I strayed to a meeting just down the hill, where looking out the door I could see a local bar I used to frequent infrequently.

“I don’t think I used to drink there very often,” I said to G. “I think I only dropped in there when I needed one more drink to get me the one more block home.”

When it was my turn to share, I told them about my friend Dorothy, in her late sixties, who had lived just one block away from where we were now sitting. She was a marvelous artist, she’d attended the Art Students League in New York, and she was a truly frightening periodic drunk. She was always urging me to go to AA, then she would go out and get drunk again……always very drunk and always in trouble.

Once I found a neighbor’s boys chasing her down the street with machetes. Another time, my kids and I had to haul her out from the bushes where she had fallen in up to her waist….head first. Then there was the time she fell off the kerb and was run over. Her drunks were never boring. She always got sober again looking as if she had been run over by a Mack truck.

She would have loved to have an AA club house just one block away. She would have urged me to go, but I don’t know if she would have come herself. I think she would have loved to have been remembered for her marvelously fluid paintings instead of her passionate drunks. Last night, instead of going out and getting drunk myself, I used her disease as an example to help keep other drunks sober just one more minute, one more hour. I remembered the beautiful art she created.

She might have approved of that.