First of Many Journeys
With My Favorite Traveling Companion
While we had a lot of friends who didn’t get us, there were some who did. Among those were our friends Breen and Sherri. They seemed to be thrilled that we’d found each other, and became our favorite other couple. Breen lived down in Maryland, in the DC area, while Sherri lived in South Philly. On Easter weekend, we had gone down to spend a couple days with them at Breen’s place, there. We had a good time with them. I had previously sponsored Breen, while Sherri was sponsoring Kathy, in the program. Meanwhile, I had just recently broken down and gotten a sponsor, myself, at the South Philly group. After 4 years, I was just beginning to go all the way through the steps with the help of a sponsor.
Driving back up to Pennsylvania on Easter Sunday, we were planning to meet Kathy’s parents at a nice restaurant in Bucks County for dinner. It would be the first time I met them. On the drive, she told me some stories that should have given me pause. The last time she’d seen them, her mother was throwing all of her clothes out on the front lawn. I heard about another time when her father had come after her car with a sledge hammer.
While the thought did occur to me “what the hell are you getting yourself into, here?”, I didn’t give it much credence. Love’s like that, I guess. So far, things seemed to be working out just fine between us, and I didn’t see this meeting of the parents as that big of a deal. All I knew was, Kathy and I were together, and whatever was happening with that was fine by me. So, I have to go meet a couple of crazy parents? No problem.
As it turned out, they seemed perfectly fine to me. Kathy will say “That’s why I would only agree to do it in a public place. They would both be on their best behavior.” They both did seem to like me. It was hard to say, really, because her mother talked, practically non-stop, the entire meal. Her dad reminded me a little of my grandfather, Big Pete, a man with a gruff exterior but a spark of real intelligence in his eyes. Like Pete, he’d clearly endured some hard years, but seemed like a decent enough man, to me. I liked him.
Kathy finally met my parents on Mother’s Day, when they had her over for dinner. They liked her right away, too. She was feeling funny about the fact that she’d been sneaking into their house to steal away their son in the wee hours of Friday mornings for months at that point, and was just now meeting them. She was kind of intimidated by them, but didn’t let that stop her from being herself with them. I couldn’t help but remember another girl I’d started dating, earlier in my recovery, who was so intimidated after meeting my family, she immediately stopped dating me, for no stated reason. I figured it was probably for the best. Thankfully, that didn’t happen with Kathy.
We decided we would take a trip together, up through New York, New England and try to make it to Nova Scotia. She had a sister in Poughkeepsie she wanted to visit, I wanted to show her Nova Scotia, the most beautiful place I’d ever been, we would stop at my brother Jim’s on the way back down to New Haven, where we were going to meet up with Breen and Sherri at the 5th East Coast Convention of N.A., there (“Jails to Yale” it was billed, since it was on the Yale University campus, and many addicts, myself included, had been in jail). I had been to the first 4 — in fact, I had chaired the registrations at the 4th, and played guitar and sang a song I’d written about the work on the Basic Text at the banquet, there. That seemed like another lifetime ago, though it was just a year.
Our first stop was at a fundraiser meeting in the Poconos, near the Delaware Water Gap, that I had some kind of a commitment at, then we planned to go camping. We had a lot of trouble finding a campsite afterwards, driving around in circles and having our first good argument. We finally decided to go back to the fundraiser, where there was a dance going on, and a guy there who lived nearby invited us to stay with him for the night. He lived with his parents, way up on top of a mountain.
He’d apparently told his Mom that we were married, so we got to sleep in our own room together. It was in that room, that night, that we decided we were meant to be together, and would get married. The next morning, not realizing he had told his mom we were married, it freaked us out a little bit when his mom called Kathy “Mrs. Bridgeman”. I’ll never forget that night. A place we weren’t even supposed to be became the place we decided we’d be together for life, at.
On the way to Nova Scotia, we decided to camp out near Sturbridge Village, a place I was fond of from when I’d lived up there, and we picked out the names of our first boy, or first girl, that night. We never needed the girl’s name, but when our first son was born, 5 years later, he got the name we picked out that night — Jonathon Alexander, though he has gone by “J.B.” for most of his life. Breen first called him that when he was around 2, and it stuck. The girl’s name would have been Megan Elizabeth.
We never made it to Nova Scotia — that was a bit ambitious, especially considering the car we were driving, a little old Datsun that Breen had given to us, that could barely climb the big hills in Eastern Massachusetts. We got as far as Salem and Marblehead, Massachusetts before we ran out of time and steam, and had to start making our way back down to my brother’s place in Windsor, Connecticut, and to the convention at Yale.
We had a wonderful visit with Jim and Gethyn and their kids. I remember watching a Little League game of Daniel’s, and just feeling really good to be there with the girl I was planning to spend the rest of my life with. They had seen me at some of my worst moments, back when we lived in Windsor. Kathy did something that made a powerful impact on my family during that stay, something nobody in the family had ever done, to date — she beat my genius brother, Jim, at Trivial Pursuit.
It appeared that our paths were now locked together, for the rest of time. We’d only been together for less than 4 months at that point, but we both knew, this was it. Now, we were on to Yale for the convention.
