follow up: bird, book

well, the mockingbird did end up coming back the night after it got shushed from its tree. singing loudly, of course. and it just so happens i had a migraine the night it came back, as well as the following night, so i couldn't say i really enjoyed it... but at least it's back.

i also finished knapp's book. and i'm sharing a few more quotes from it below, for whatever they're worth, before i take the book back to the library:

"Al-Anon, the twelve-step program for friends and family members of alcoholics, estimates that every alcoholic's drinking affects at least four other people. We worry parents, lovers, co-workers, anyone close who crosses our paths. We lose our tempers with them, we blame them for our troubles, we push them away. We never quite let them in, let them know us too well, because we're afraid that if they got too close they'd be appalled at what they'd find. Accordingly, a great deal of the active alcoholic's energy is spent constructing facades, an effort to present to others a front that looks okay, that seems lovable and worthy and intact. Inside versus outside; version A, version B. The double life grows more sophisticated and more deeply entrenched" (176).

" . . . I'd never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and maintain. Like a lot of people I know (alcoholics or not), I'd spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I'd just wake up one morning and be done, like a roast in the oven. . . . I saw growing up as something that happened to you. In some ways giving up an addiction involves reversing that equation, understanding finally that growth comes from the inside out, from trying and failing and trying again. When you quit drinking you stop waiting. You begin to let go of the wish, age old and profound and essentially human, that someone will swoop down and do all that hard work, growing up, for you. You start living your own life" (238-9).

and now my kitty is meowing pitifully, accosting me. she has wandered into the living room from the bedroom where she was sleeping on the bed (next to me until i got up to blog). she's saying, "why are you not in bed with me? i'm tired. be with me. pet me. love me. pay attention!" or maybe that's just the more mellow version of what she's saying. i'm probably not accurately translating her sauciness, her sassiness. but it is clear, whatever she's saying, that i'm required to be fully present with her and not dividing my energy between her demands and this computer, so i'll get off now...