Thanksgiving--Gratitude, Service and Community

I’m pleased to share this new essay by Amy Halloran. She wrote this for Thanksgiving—her perspective on gratitude and community—and how our perspectives are changed by service—is a message for everyday. Here’s Amy:

I used to be very invested in Thanksgiving. I spent weeks poring over new magazines and old cookbooks, thinking about how to combine flavors and make a mutt-version of sweet potato pie or cornbread stuffing that tasted just as I wanted.

I wanted some control of the meal, or at least the expression of ingredients. I wanted to look the farmer who raised my turkey in the eye. I wanted to give the food meaning and impose my current interpretations of gratitude upon other people that I ate with the last Thursday in November.

Last week I was keenly aware of how little I cared about the origins of the ingredients at my parents' Thanksgiving table. I didn't even crack a cookbook until Wednesday night, when I started hunting for some graceful combination of cranberries and cornmeal.

I am no less interested in sustainable farming, but I am not as ambitious about cooking for Thanksgiving, or using it as a platform for food thinking. My goals have mellowed because I get to influence a big meal every day of the year, cooking for the community meals program run by Unity House. Trying to cram as many vegetables as affordably as I can into dishes that are still enjoyed is my mission.

Preparing for our Thanksgiving meal, I worked with a number of volunteers. Hilton Garden Inn made our turkeys and sides, and brought lasagna the day before so we could focus on getting ready for dinner. An eight-year-old raised $400 so we could buy butter and fruit and collards. One team of people came in to chop vegetables and make pies. Another team made sweet potato hand pies for diners to take home.

As everyone worked, I noticed that I didn't fuss over outcomes. I showed people ratios and recipes, and let them go to town.

I realized that baking and cooking can be an expression of community, not just of self. Maybe this isn't a newsflash to you, but it's a headline for me, someone who used to think of Thanksgiving as a place to grandstand skills and ideas.

 

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 Amy Halloran is a writer and teacher, chef and cook, advocate and author. Her new book is: “The New Bread Basket: How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists Are Redefining Our Daily Loaf” by Chelsea Green Publishing

Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect 200.

Last night a friend and I went to the regional corrections facility and led a one-hour AA meeting for women in jail. The nine incarcerated women were all races, ages from 19 to mid-50’s, and with varying amounts of experience with AA.

I have taken AA meetings to jail and prison before but it’s been years. This time I didn’t feel the curiosity of the place and its practices—security, the clanging doors, the inmates orange slip-on Keds. And I didn’t feel, as many folks report, the sense of relief of being let out when the meeting was over. I knew that I did not belong there.

But I did feel tremendous gratitude for the miracle and lucky accidents of my life and recovery. The women we talked to were not terribly different than I was 30 years ago. They had all the sincerity and all the denial that I had. And they had all the circumstances—bad boyfriends, dumb decisions, family hassles that I would have claimed to be my problem back then too. And each one of them reported that someone in their life—mother, friend, minister, counselor had begged them to get help, to change. I had that too and kept drinking and “making bad choices.” But maybe I had that one extra intervention or that one extra person who somehow penetrated my fog.

I did feel the privilege of being white and literate. We forget that social privilege is also a kind of intervention and a kind of cushion for women who “make bad choices.” I might have humiliated myself many times back in the day but I wasn’t arrested.

I am so glad I went to jail and I’ll go again. This morning I prayed for the nine women I met last night. I hope what they heard was one more tiny piece of info they can use to make a different choice.

Be of Service--It's So Selfish

In a recent Grapevine article I read of a longitudinal study that shows a direct, positive correlation between AA-related helping and sobriety.

Maria Pagano, PhD. developed methods to quantify and measure service work and related AA-helping (sponsorship etc). She also conducted in-depth interviews with AA members with more than 20 years of sobriety. (That is us out-of-the-woods folks). Her research found that AA related helping to be important to early recovery and in long-term recovery as well.

This is helpful to remember as many of us know that service is good for newcomers but may have shifted our volunteer or service work in later years to causes outside of AA.

Dogs, Drugs and Doing Good

Here is an excerpt from a news story from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve known Chris for years and I’m celebrating her appointment to the National Advisory Council on Substance Abuse. Sober 25 years Chris is clearly “out of the woods” but still and always able to tell a story on herself. You just have to love dog people and addicts!

“Chris Wendel hasn't touched a drop of liquor or smoked dope or snorted cocaine or "tripped" in 25 years. Instead she has made it her mission to help others who are still struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. "My passion is my sobriety and other people's sobriety," Wendel said. "That is my passion."


As chairwoman of the state Behavioral Health Planning Council, Wendel has spent the past three years organizing and directing the group of consumers, family members, advocates and providers who advise the state Behavioral Health Collaborative on how best to spend millions of dollars worth of federal grant money earmarked to address Behavioral Health issues in New Mexico. Soon, she'll have even wider influence. She was chosen to sit on the advisory council for the national Center for Substance Abuse Treatment.


Wendel feels her experience as an ex-addict is one of her greatest qualifications for the work the she does.


When Wendel's dog had surgery a while back, the vet prescribed a narcotic similar to Valium for the dog. Wendel said she immediately started calculating her weight compared to the weight of her dog and figured she could probably "get off" by taking four times the dose prescribed for her pet.


"I'm 25-years sober and I'm thinking about stealing meds from my dog," Wendel said. "My first reaction to every situation will always be that of an addict. But now I wait for the second reaction."

Ebby Dies in 1966

On this day in 1966 Ebby Thacher died in Ballston Spa New York. Ebby was Bill Wilson’s sponsor and the man who first carried the recovery message to a very ill Bill W. in Brooklyn 30 years earlier. Ebby’s role is documented in our Big Book in Bill’s story and of course in the many history books about AA.

The message that Ebby brought to Bill that cold, drunk night was not AA, of course—there was no AA until later that year. But Ebby brought the message and practices of The Oxford Group—an evangelical Christian movement that also saved drunks. Our 12 steps evolved from the six steps of the Oxford Group.

Ebby struggled to stay sober while Bill and then Bob went on to “found” Alcoholics Anonymous. But on this day we must remember there would be no AA and no Bill or Dr Bob without Ebby.

We never know the role we are playing in someone’s life or what our momentary good might someday be part of.

Thank you Ebby for carrying what you could and doing what you did.

Just Be of Service

Workplace craziness this week and the Grapevine comes to my rescue.
I have this page from January 2003 that I keep in my tickle file, It’s a story from a member who describes his early days in recovery when he was, “complaining all the time to my sponsor about my job.”

He goes on to say that he noticed that he was doing a lot of service in the program: a food commitment at one meeting, a greeter at another, making coffee at another, and he was never complaining about any of that “work.”

His sponsor’s advice to him was, “that I go to my job and treat it like an AA commitment”, and “just be of service.”

He says he stated applying that principle at his job, being a worker among workers, sand doing anything that was asked with gratitude. And he throws in this reminder: Keep principles before personalities.

How is that for a workplace prescription?

Yes, I know. Simple but not easy. But if I can even do this part of the time how much better I’ll feel and how much nicer work could be.