Point of View

Today, at no charge, I’m giving you the Unofficial Insider Idiot’s Guide for Dummies to this Saturday’s Hope Recovery Festival. You might think because this information is free it’s not worth much. You would be wrong. I guarantee you will learn more useful inside dope here than I ever did. If you don’t I’ll give you triple your money back!

That, my friends, is what the first steps of peer recovery look like, a person in recovery getting to know a person who needs recovery and offering a helping hand. That, though, is only a first step. These excerpts from the texts I received from Donald after I left are the true first fruits of peer recovery.

Near the beginning of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, he introduces the catalyst for the book: the madeleine, a small sponge cake, the taste of which transforms him: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs… The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.” Today, I had a Proustian moment, although not as carefree.  

. No, I don’t hang out with discarded crucifixes, portraits of Protestant bigwigs from long ago or aged Torah scrolls. Instead, like the Christians in the catacombs, I gather with other fallen people who are trying to recover their lives. Luckily, these fellow sufferers are carriers of wisdom, always pithy and sometimes funny. Over the years, I’ve collected some of that wisdom, and would like to offer it now.

I don’t mean it’s unlikely I’ve been working that long, for I suspect some of you see me as a great-grandfatherly figure, a doddering old fool who’s lucky not to have oatmeal on his chin and his address pinned to his windbreaker in case he wanders away. No, it’s the newspaper reporter business you may find unlikely.

One of my favoritest of favorite days, though, comes next Saturday. Hope for New Hampshire Recovery’s annual Recovery Festival is at Arms Park September 30 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Arms Park is a new and much, much larger space than Veterans Park, the festival’s previous site. Taking up space about two-thirds the size of a football field, the festival has grown from a trade show for businesses in the treatment-recovery industrial complex to become a genuine gathering of the recovery tribe.