Читать книгу Spiritual Awakenings II - Группа авторов - Страница 14

May 1959

One of the swellest guys I ever met was Tom. I find myself thinking about him often because he's my idea of a man, and because his story is a departure from the run-of-the-mill type of drunk. Tom never got drunk in his life until he was fifty-six years old. That's when his wife died. He and the missus were a devoted couple and their lives were wrapped up in each other because they'd never had any children.

Almost overnight she took sick and was gone, and Tom was left stricken and bewildered. Tom was a steady-plugging gentle type of person and he and mama had a love so deep for each other they had no need for a real, personal love of God. So, when his wife passed away, Tom had no one to turn to for comfort.

For a while he spent most of his time hunched over a freshly risen mound at the cemetery wishing he were down there with her. Life wasn't worth living and he walked about like a zombie, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but the raw spot in his heart. He just wanted to die because he couldn't think of any reason to live.

He wandered into a bar one day and never came out, he said, until two-and-a-half years later—and only then because his money and credit gave out. Never worked a stroke the whole time. He had turned bitter on life and claimed he was the most miserable man alive, hating everyone in particular and the world in general.

He'd spent his savings, sold his home and converted everything he owned that was salable into cash. Then he drank it up bottle by bottle. Six years later he was a withered wreck of a man, shaking out a bout with the DTs in the alcoholic ward of a city hospital.

There was a resident doctor there who had been working with AA and knew his drunks well. He had Tom on paraldehyde as he brought him through the DTs. Pretty soon Tom was crying for his medicine like a baby crying for its bottle. The doctor shut him off, but finally agreed to give him a little if he'd talk to a couple of guys from AA. Tom would do anything. Well, the guys came to visit two or three times a day but they couldn't get through to him because he was living in another world. As a last resort they gave Tom a kind of shock treatment—accused him of being a quitter and told him the facts of life in no uncertain terms. Tom came up out of bed and raved like a madman. The guys left. Sometime during the night something of what the men said got through to Tom. Next morning he lay quiet and attentive, listening to what his visitors said.

Tom had been sober five years when I met him at Men's Town, after hearing him talk to a bunch of drunks sent there by judges in the surrounding towns. What a man—alive to his fingertips, bursting with energy and a zest for living that would put to shame a teenager. When he listened to a man's problems he crooned and clucked in genuine understanding, his eyelids veiled with the heavy film of compassion.

Tom picked the toughest cookies of them all and the drunks he pulled back from the lip of hell would fill a city square. I'll bet his wife is beaming proudly somewhere up there to watch the likes of Tom as he lives each day to the fullest, giving everything he's got, piling up treasure in heaven that will take eternity to spend. You could tell by the look in his eye he had a new love, a love that would never fail.

It is assuring to know there are men like Tom in the world, lighting a candle here and there, cutting a swathe through the darkness. Someone's got to show the way, and it's guys like Tom who'll be doing it.

G.L.

Boise, Idaho