Tiny White Box–Thoughts on Life, Death, Recovery, and Other Mundane Topics

While I was having lunch with a friend today, she was, according to reports and rumors, dining with a ghost. Missy watched me slurp soup and eat a sandwich while telling me about a conversation she’d had the other night, a conversation about me.

“Did you hear about Keith Howard?” Missy’s questioner asked. “He’s dead, I guess.”

“He’s not dead,” Missy responded. “He’s still writing and I talk with him.”

“Nope. He’s dead. I saw the obituary. It had his picture and everything.”

“He published something about having cancer,” Missy said. “Dead people don’t write about anything, not even themselves. The story just had a picture of him is all.”

For the record, I am not dead. Unlike the Wicked Witch of the East, I have no death certificate, no coroner who “must aver I thoroughly examined her and she’s not only merely dead. She’s really most sincerely dead.”

I live, and in the words of my favorite Elvis, “don’t bury me, ‘cause I’m not dead yet.”

As further proof of life, last night I attended a tribal meeting, a group of people in recovery gathering around a coffee pot and listening to one person talk for a while about what life was like before recovery, what happened, and what life is like now. Then the rest of the attendees comment on what they’ve heard or on what lies heaviest on their heart. 

At this particular get together, I was the primary blatherer. I’d like to tell you I was focused and well organized. I’d like to tell you I developed an argument composed of three pieces of evidence followed by a logical yet still stunning conclusion. I’d like to tell you there was not a dry eye in the church. I’d like to tell you these things, but more than that I want to tell you the truth.

My talk or “share” or, down south at least, “testimony” was no John Singer Sargent portrait of life in recovery, nor even a Salvador Dali surrealistic masterpiece, with images floating into and out of a meeting. No, my talk consisted of two broken mosaics, the pieces interspersed on the floor. Listeners were likely confused by much of what I said, how one point connected to the next. Instead of a tale, I gave them chains of flashing images.

Still, one of those pieces, the last one to fall out of my mouth, does contain something like wisdom. 

“None of us knows the future—not just 15 years from now, but 15 minutes. I could leave here this evening and crash into a giraffe on the highway, its head breaking through my windshield and its blue/purple tongue smothering me to death. If that’s my death, it’ll certainly be a memorable one.

“Each day the universe gives me an apple. A lot of those apples have been set aside, put down on a counter or just thrown into the trash. I didn’t feel like an apple—I wanted a banana or a Reese’s cup. I’ve taken single bites out of lots of other apples, then put them down, the toothmarks growing browner and browner. Some days I’ve eaten the whole apple, barring the core and stem. 

“Today, though, I vow–to myself, my higher power and each of you—to squeeze every bit of juice out every single day remaining to me and drink that juice with the deepest of drafts.. Then, if that giraffe falls onto my car and its tongue kills me, I’ll die with the knowledge that murderous long-necked beast didn’t get to eat my daily apple—because I’d already drunk it.”

Please, each of you, drink what the universe gives you. Today’s apple won’t come again. Tomorrow’s is never guaranteed.

And ghosts can’t squeeze apples.

You matter. I matter. We matter.