A Trip to the Bakery

One Friday morning in March, I was lying on the sofa, shaking while holding the phone. I was listening to an AA named Mike and he was Twelfth-Stepping me. It would be many months before I realized that Mike had done, over the phone, a by-the-book Chapter Seven pitch. What I heard were words of hope and substance. I grabbed onto them with an intensity I didn’t know I was capable of. In fact, I had not allowed anything other than my own thoughts to penetrate my mind in years.