Read Online Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees by Grace Mattioli - Free Book Online

in her ears.  This man had her same
proclivity to move from state to state and city to city, and he referred to
himself as a “geographic.”  With each move, he had conveniently erased his
past mistakes only to make new ones.  He stopped moving once he got sober,
but sobriety took years.  Meanwhile, he lived in denial of his alcoholism
and his inability to stay in one place.  Each new place was more than a
clean slate.  It was an opportunity to be a new person.   A person who might magically lose his desire to drink.   A person without pain.
    Silvia
was sitting forward with her shoulders back and her head straight up, as she
listened intently to the speaker.  He too had grown up in a household with
a drunk for a parent.  His mother started drinking when his father left
her and their three children for a shot as a film star in Hollywood.  As
her drinking progressed, so did her erratic behavior towards her children, who
did not know what to expect from her and, eventually, from the world.
 They remained in a constant state of fear, always on guard.  The
speaker grew to hate his home and left it as soon as he could at the age of
eighteen.  He wanted to get as far away as he could, but he had very
little money, so he hitchhiked to Los Angeles.  He said that he may have
secretly wanted to find his dad, but that he had never found him.
 Instead, he found a group of free loving acidheads who encouraged him to
come with them up to San Francisco.  “And that’s when it all started,” he
said, as if he was exhausted merely by the act of talking about his past.
    There
began his twenty-year career of drugging, drinking, and moving.  He
started over more times than he could remember.  He lived in twenty-five
different cities in ten different states, many of which he had moved back to
repeatedly.  Every move brought with it a set of high hopes, which he
knew, somewhere in the back of his head, would soon be shattered.  With
each new move, he drank more and more, and quitting seemed more and more
hopeless. Eventually he gave up on trying to quit , and
one night, he ended up passed out on a sidewalk in the lower east side of New
York, where he had just moved back to for the third time.  It was on this night
that some homeless guy stabbed him in his right leg.  “I thought I knew
what bottom was until then.
 This was truly bottom, though,” he said.  He was rushed to a
hospital, where his doctor urged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous.  He
took the doctor’s advice and he had been sober ever since that night.  His
move to south Jersey in 1985 was his last.
    Silvia
felt that the speaker may have been there to warn her to change her ways or she
too would be going down the same tragic trail.  But her story could never
possibly be that tragic.  For one thing, she was not an alcoholic and had
no intention of becoming one.  For another thing, this move to Portland
would very well be her last move, or at least that was what she was telling
herself at this moment.  Besides, her habit of moving was not a
compulsion.  It was bohemian. Gypsy.  It was
just something that she needed to get out of her system.  It was just a
coincidence that both the speaker and Silvia grew up in alcoholic households,
and grew into people who liked to move from place to place on a very frequent
basis.  She would not end up as some broken down person telling a room
full of people about her regrets and mistakes and how AA had saved her life.
    Frank
wanted to leave right after the meeting had finished, and Silvia, feeling weak
from trying to differentiate herself from the speaker and convincing herself
that she would not end up anything like him, did not have the energy to make
her father stay and try to socialize with the others.  She wanted to get
out of there herself, away from the speaker, away from the doomed version of
what she might become. 

 
 
     
    **********

 
 
     
    Frank
insisted on driving home and stopping off