Back Home from St. Louis.

I had as good a time in St. Louis as is possible given the enormous amount of crap I had to get done. I wish I’d had my mom with me. Mom knows how to just start working and not stop until it’s done. I can’t figure all that out and then I end up hiring people to do work I could do myself. But oh well. This is going to cost me several thousand dollars, and I’m not doing everything that my agent wants me to do. I won’t get out of the house as much as I want, but in the long run, life is going to work out fine.

I went to a baseball game with Jimmy Legs, and breakfast with Lawnboy and Lawnwife and the Lawnchildren. And I went to two AA meetings Sunday morning that I needed like a transfusion. I saw Mike S and Frenchie, and Pam, and Annie and Deb, and even MBK. Seeing MBK was the real crux of the second meeting for me.

For those who don’t remember, I used to work with MBK. Not directly, but in the same hospital. She was a supervising nurse and I was an operations guy. When I showed up to that Sunday morning meeting the first time, six months sober and newly hired, I was terrified to see her there because I was afraid she’d expose my alcoholism to the bosses. It didn’t occur to me that I was a much greater threat to her than she to me.

When I got my new job at MECMC, which is a big-name, prestigious organization, I said some crass things about my old institution in that meeting that she heard. I felt like a shithead for a long time. I even wrote her a letter apologizing, but I never heard back from her. At the time, she just rather sternly said: “You don’t want to be the guy who’s bashing his last job at your new one.”

She was right. And I took that advice. So yesterday when I saw her, I told her, “I still feel like a shithead for what I said when I left.” And rather sternly she said, “It’s ok to let that go.” So I will. Amends and forgiveness are incredibly powerful. We hang on to things, they writhe into our flesh and our brains and feed on us. And then someone says, “let it go.” And it rolls away. And like sunlight on mold, the things die.

The house is the house. I’ll make it through it. There’s physical stuff and legal stuff and I’ll manage it all. The house is what it is and it will sell eventually. While my real estate agent is insisting on many repairs and upgrades, the fact of the matter is, people know what they’re getting when they buy a 100 year old home. It’s a good house. It served me well and it will serve someone else well. I’ll miss it.