Salt Spring Island Lamb

“Hey—how are you?”I open my arms wide to be hugged by an old friend. “When did you get here?”

“Last night—a whole group of us were on the same ferry from Swartz Bay.”

“Do you want to walk down to the market in the morning?

“Sure—I’ll see if K. wants to go, too.” Over and over, my belonging is affirmed, every pair of arms around my shoulders defying alcoholism’s deep call to apartness.

In 1939, Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote: “We aren’t a glum lot . . . We absolutely insist on enjoying life.”This lamb jams. It will tromp through field stubble, dirty-toed and tapping, to impromptu guitar-and-harmonica blues late into the night. It will dangle over a shared bathroom sink while I spit toothpaste and then shuffle along a pancake breakfast lineup. It will drift and gab through daytime service announcements until stung by firepit smoke and whiffs of singed flesh, the highlight Saturday barbeque: Salt Spring Island lamb.

After the feast, the entire assembly meets in the hall for the main speaker and dance. But first the sobriety countdown. The lamb is my applause when the chairman counts backward—fifty years, forty-nine years, forty-eight years—and each person stands up for their years or months or days sober. We clap faster and louder in unison to thirty days, twenty-nine days, twenty-eight days, right down to the last day, today, as someone rises to walk through a standing ovation to the podium where the old-timer with the longest sobriety waits to give the newest newcomer a word or two and the textbook Alcoholics Anonymous. Their conversation is rarely heard, but profoundly witnessed, as we whistle and holler and stomp unashamed, for this day, we are all sober.

I believe in the Holy Spirit’s power of Deep Audio Disruption to heal the soul’s diseased marrow. Alcoholism is generally beyond the pale of still small voices.

When the evening’s guest speaker is introduced, this lamb is my place in a chair and a story. Somewhere, I fit. Themes are repeated by a foreign tongue, often from Los Angeles or elsewhere in California, but in a language we all understand: stay close to the fellowship, follow the program, stay sober, and stay alive. Some 350 chairs scrape the concrete floor while the speaker is thanked, then the committee and cooks, and next comes the crush to the bathrooms and, for the smokers, to the doors. The podium gives way to the local band.

My lamb will do the chicken dance sober. I will dance with anyone or alone and get bumped around. Forget talk. The lamb is a 1 a.m. dance too close to the speakers, too close to the electrical for someone so wet with sweat, but I don’t give a damn. Faces I know and love appear and disappear in the gyrating elbows and backs and my body is freed of alcoholism’s relentless whine, you’re all alone and there’s not enough. Take a look at this, you demon drink: the barn is full and the crop is in.

Sunday morning I’ll drive back onto the ferry, my tent rolled in the trunk. Soon, the fall term at UVic begins and I’ll be hunched over the keyboard coaxing out words that balk at grades. Night will find me alone, grazing through the kitchen cupboards, resisting sleep. In a drawer, almost forgotten, Pink Eye will count.