Resurrection Rite of Sobriety : Recovery: Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day the sobriety message sank in, and ‘here’ remains a good place to be.

Five years ago this Easter weekend I was a grudging resident of one of San Diego’s better-advertised drug and alcohol treatment centers when the word was circulated that they were going to bus some of us to the Alcoholics Anonymous Spring Roundup for breakfast Sunday morning.

I was about a week into sobriety, unhappy about life in general, uncertain of how I had managed to get myself into this wretched mess and eager to get out of the center and on with my life, even if I had to do it sober.

I can remember thinking bleakly about the irony of it--they were going to round us up, drive us to a round-up and corral us there for what I didn’t know, but I was sure I wasn’t going to like or enjoy it. Maybe that was the kind of treatment drunks should expect.

Breakfast was in a huge and well-decorated ballroom, jammed with people and full of laughter. The joie de vivre of the place was an absolute affront to my dour outlook that morning, almost jarring.

I was still lamenting my permanent parting from Black Label Jack and other drinking companions, and the experience of newly found sobriety was only marginally better than the misery of alcoholism at that point. I was in no mood for happiness, certainly not ebullient happiness.

One inescapable thought made the moment even worse. Here were hundreds--maybe thousands--of recovering alcoholics and all of them but me were happy. They thought they were having fun. Well, what should one expect from a big bunch of drunks who, obviously, didn’t know any better?

Breakfast was good. Table conversation mostly was about the prospects for the Padres in the new baseball season and similar matters, only occasionally and briefly turning to the occasion and why all of us were there. Afterwards, I settled back in my chair determined to endure the talk that was to come without revealing my well-developed sense of disdain to my table companions.

The speaker, Tom P., a Midwest manufacturing executive, followed the ritual sharing of AA litanies, and he was good. He was really good, perhaps powerful, as he went through his “drunkalogue,” the story of his addiction to drugs and alcohol and his eventual recovery from both after several personal tragedies and failed attempts at sobriety.

He eloquently mixed humor with irony and triumph with despair. In my mood that Easter morning, I found myself quite perversely relating to the irony and despair parts better than the humor and triumph parts.

Worse, I realized that, yes, I was being perverse and, yes, that was part of my sickness, and, yes, I should be here even if I really didn’t want to. It was a discomforting realization that did little to improve my morning. It deflated my sense of disdain and it damaged my carefully nurtured melancholy, and I didn’t much like that.

In one aside, Tom P. told of an encounter with a down-at-the-mouth man at an AA meeting in a bleak church basement in a small Georgia town.

“How are you doing?” Tom P. said he asked.

The man grunted and replied: “Well, I’m here. But I’ve been there, and here is better.”

It wasn’t the first time the room broke up with laughter, but it was the first time I laughed with everyone else, and I surprised (shocked?) myself. All the other people were laughing at Tom P.’s anecdote, I thought, but I realized I also was laughing at me.

Yes, here was better than there. Yes, the others were also laughing at themselves because they also had been where Tom P. had been, where the dour man had been and, indeed, where I was at that moment.

The realization that I wasn’t the only person in the world with reflective insights into drinking and sobriety was both humbling and uplifting. Not only were all these fun-loving drunks having a lot of fun, they were doing it deliberately and they actually knew what they were doing! It was not a convention of the damned or of the deluded. The problem was me.

I was like the man in the story, but I felt my disdain drain away. I laughed easily the rest of the morning. As I opened my mind the day became valuable and the time happily memorable.

There are lots of other “theres” I could be this Easter morning, and not all of them bad. But I will be at the roundup for breakfast, as I have been every year since my first, and I will laugh a lot and reflect a lot that “here” is a good place to be.