Green

I am an ingrate by nature.

I come by it honestly since I never saw gratitude as a boy. Nothing we had was ever good enough for our family because somebody else always had something better. When we got our first color television, Mom gave it the once-over and sniffed:

“It’s okay, I guess, but the Richmanns’ (our across-the-street neighbors) TV is bigger.”

I don’t think I ever heard the word “gratitude” unless it was used as a ploy to guilt me into finishing my dinner.

A chronically picky eater, I was often left alone at the table to sulk in front of cooling piles of creamed chipped beef or stewed tomatoes. After a half-hour, an eternity for a frustrated eight year-old, Mom would leave her cocktail in the living room and come back to chide me.

“All right, you can go to your room … but you should be grateful for this food, children are starving in China!”

The notion of gratitude was as foreign to me as the location of China on the globe in our den. I knew that it existed somewhere, but I had never experienced it. As for guilt, I was having none of that.

I jumped up from my seat and streaked out of the dining room, sassing over my shoulder as I jetted up the stairs.

“Then why don’t you just pack up that yucky stuff and send it off to China!”

Gratitude, I just didn’t get it … not until Christmas Eve of 1981.

When the holidays rolled around that year, I was a thirty-year old, sober gay man living alone in a studio apartment perched on top of a Victorian in Presidio Heights. My picture window faced westward and looked onto a teepee of green lights atop the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Building about a half-mile away.

After installing hundreds of Christmas decorations in my display job at a San Francisco department store, I didn’t want a single sprig of evergreen in my tiny place. The electronic obelisk that shined from afar was my only concession to Christmas in 1981. I just wanted to relax on my sofa-bed and let the holidays pass by with as little ballyhoo as possible.

I felt especially lonely that Christmas Eve, so I dragged myself to a nearby recovery meeting and stayed late to chat with some friends. Although I was tired when I returned home at 9:30, I stepped out onto my small wooden deck to take a last look at the distant tree before falling into bed. As I pondered the shimmering green cone, an image from two years earlier sprang to mind.

I was sitting in front of an ornament-laden fir with brightly colored boxes spilling out from beneath its branches. While my lover Geoffrey snored behind his bedroom door, I was suddenly overcome with the worst kind of loneliness, the loneliness with someone that I loved. When I started to sob, Lido’s head popped up from his dog bed and gave me a sad look.

As I continued gazing at the far-off tree, an old voice roared inside me.

You’re all alone on Christmas Eve. How pathetic!

My heart began to race as blood roiled throughout my body. With every sinew in my being, I resisted the urge to follow that voice into the darkest corner of myself. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to will the disturbing thoughts away.

When I settled into the blackness, the photo-negative of the electric tree stayed branded on inside of my eyelids and two words popped into my head.

Teach me … teach me … teach me …

I repeated them over and over for less than a minute and my feelings calmed down. When I opened my eyes, I was still alone, but I wasn’t lonely. I actually felt glad to be exactly where I was, in the present moment, in my own little place, my past misery as far away as that shiny tree.

Then a new sensation welled up inside.

My mouth opened and the words “It’s enough” escaped as easily as breath.

I know now that I meant, “I am enough.”

It took me a moment to name the feeling.

Gratitude.

I went back inside, got undressed and went to bed feeling full and light. As I drifted off, I thought:

Is this that spirituality I’ve been hearing so much about?

When I awoke on Christmas Day, I still felt full and light.

I was on my first cup of coffee when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and was surprised by how happy I was to hear my parents’ voices.

“Merry Christmas! Did you get our box?”

I grabbed the brown package on the floor next to my chair.

“I sure did. I’ve been waiting to open it.”

It didn’t take long to wrestle a small Fuller Brush carpet sweeper from the box.

“Oh, this is great!” I said.

And I really meant it.

After we hung up, I called my sister. I opened her package and pulled out a framed lithograph of Parc Monceau that instantly reminded me of the best year of my life, my junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris.

“I saw it in an antique store and remembered that park was right near where you lived,” she said.

“Oh, Barbie, thanks so much. It’s the most thoughtful present ever!”

Then she put my seven-year-old niece, Katie, on the phone and her high-pitched voice peppered me with delight as she breathlessly listed all of her presents.

“I got a bike and a sticker book and a doll and a new dress and a …”

My sister’s voice in the background told Katie to hand back the phone.

“Merry Christmas, Uncle Win! We love you!”

I echoed back the words that usually fumbled on my lips.

“I love you too, Katie!”

And I really meant that too.

“If this keeps up I’m going to have to wrap her in wet sheets!” Barbie stage-whispered into the phone. “I’m exhausted. I stayed up all night wrapping those things and she tore through them in three minutes! She’s so hyped up on presents and sugar!”

“Christmas is for children, huh?” I replied with a big smile that she couldn’t see.

“You said it, little brother! Merry Christmas!”

“Same to you, big sister … from one overgrown kid to another!”

I hung up and took a shower. I had planned to stay home and watch TV all day, but I was feeling so good that I decided to attend an all-day recovery event in a nearby church basement. Just yesterday, I had considered anyone who showed up there on Christmas Day to be the world’s biggest loser.

As I walked along chilly Sacramento Street, the warm Christmas lights and family voices emanating from the bay windows didn’t make me feel bad. I was too eager to get to the meeting and share my newfound gratitude. When I grabbed a cookie and took my chair in the recovery circle, I marveled that I was the same guy who wanted to puke in my mouth whenever someone proclaimed that they were a “grateful alcoholic.” I had murmured the party line “I’m grateful” a few times, but I only meant that I felt lucky to have dodged some of the bullets that riddled the lives of other alcoholics in the room.

But my gratitude that Christmas Day was different. I felt thankful for no reason, no cause-and-effect, just a pure feeling.

After the meeting, I button-holed my sponsor by the cookie tray and told him about my experience on the deck. He told me that the words “teach me” were my first true prayer.

“But I don’t believe in God,” I retorted.

“It doesn’t matter, you were willing to reach outside of yourself for help,” he said.

I just stared back at him.

“It’s what we do, you know,” he added. “Congratulations, you’ve been given the gift of willingness.”

It sounded a bit airy-fairy to me, but I couldn’t deny that it felt real.

When I returned home that afternoon I was full of cookies, coffee … and a peacefulness that lasted into the night. I had the next day off so I slept late. By noon, I was listless and bored, so I picked up a book and read it all the way through until dinnertime. It was so funny that I laughed out loud a few times, a rare experience for this reader.

As I warmed some leftover meatloaf and broccoli for supper, my mind drifted to the future and I began to dread all of the post-holiday mayhem that awaited me at the store. When I got into bed at ten o’clock, my serenity had been displaced by a mild case of apprehension, so I re-read some of the book’s funnier parts before switching off the light,

Gratitude was a seedling that took root in me that Christmas Eve. Once felt, it elbowed its way into my fallow spiritual garden, overrun with the weeds of bad memories, and cleared some space to make room for more green shoots in the years to come.

POST SCRIPT: When I moved to Minneapolis in 1989, I shopped around for some gay meetings. I found one called “Gratitude” and soon learned that it was nicknamed “Grab-A-Dude.” I knew then that I was in the right place where such transgressive, irreverent humor would sustain me through any hard times to come.

When confronted with challenges these days, I try not to let my mind leap into the future, grab for the worst outcomes and make me upset. When I remember, I try to grab for gratitude instead. It isn’t so hard for me now. All I have to do is run my eyes over the walls of a home that I love, listen to my husband’s out-of-tune singing as he prepares dinner or pat my little dog on his most beautiful head.

My spiritual program tells me to “keep my memory green,” so I try to remind myself that these little blessings didn’t seem possible for me before recovery … and that these “Gratitude Grabs” are all around me if I can just stay out of my own shadow.