Long Ago and Far Away

A good many years ago, when I first joined AA in Manhattan, I had long been intending and yearning to go and live somewhere abroad. However, one of the first AA tenets I learned was that one should not make any major decisions until one had at least a year of sobriety. I obeyed. When I succeeded in earning that one-year chip, I took off for Mexico. The town I settled in was an Eden of beauty and serenity: lovely colonial architecture, a climate of perpetual springtime, flowers everywhere, roses blooming year-round, hospitable and friendly Mexican inhabitants, and also a considerable and cosmopolitan population of Americans, Canadians, Europeans. Some were resident artists and writers, others retirees. The one thing the town didn't have was AA.