That's it, Kroger, you've gone too far.

Closing the Perkins store at the end of this month rips it with me.

First, you doubled the size of the Sanderlin location. I adjusted, learned the new layout, and scheduled more shopping time to board the shuttle bus from the produce to the frozen aisle.

Then you rebuilt the Plaza store, the one in my neighborhood. As long as I shop the Thunderdome on Thursday, rioting is unlikely. Even hoping the Midtown store will address critical sushi shortage in the two blocks between Fresh Market and Sekisui.

But thousands of Memphians have been buying groceries at the corner of Poplar and Perkins since, I want to say, the late 1960s. When it was Seessel's, it was the heartbeat of East Memphis.  Whether you were dashing in with your classmates after White Station let out, or indulging a late night craving for chess pie, it was the landscape we grew up with. My late friend Vic Vescovo used the black "courtesy phone" in there as an alternate home phone, dialing the house to "see if they needed anything" just as a front for seeing and being seen. I suspect he was not the only one.

Through the transitions to Albertson's/Schnuck's/Kroger, we hung in there, because we could start and finish a week's grocery shopping in under an hour door to door.

But what really kills me is parent company Delta Division's rationale, that their other stores at Truse Parkway and Sanderlin within a 1-mile radius can "better serve our customers."

Really, Kroger? Scanning the Wednesday grocery ads in a Memphis Press-Scimitar from 1966,  the groceries serving East Memphis were Carondelet, Dixiemart, Del-Farms, Stepherson's Big Star, Hogue & Knott, A & P, WeOna, PicPac, and Montesi's.  FIFTY YEARS AGO.

We might not have had sushi, but we did have some choices.

That Guy in the Bed Next to Me

      When I realized my son was using drugs - really using, not experimenting any more - I turned to escapism.
      When I wasn't crying (which was often), I was reading. In a year, I burrowed through Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and blazed on through World Without End; all five books in the Game of Thrones series; most of the novels of T. Coraghessen Boyle; short stories by Flannery O'Conner and poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Words filled up the places where fear and despair threatened to engulf me.
       What I failed to read - 18 inches away from my nose - were the signs that my husband was suffering too. "What are we doing this weekend?" he would ask, and often as not, I'd say, "Nothing."
       "I'll be glad to pick us up something for dinner," he'd offer. "What do you feel like eating?"
       "I don't care." What did it matter?
       Or he'd take another tack. "I need to go to this meeting in Hilton Head in October. Come with me."
      And I'd act like the trip was a punishment. My body might have checked into the hotel, but my head was still back home with my son's problems.
       In an odd way, it mirrored those early toddler years when a man loses his place in the pecking order, upstaged by an infant who requires all his wife's time and focus. Addicts, too, can be big mewling babies who gobble up any spare energy, and tantrum when they don't get their way.
      For a time, my husband must have felt he'd lost his son - AND his wife.
      Women are so sensible: when we're upset, we say so and we say why...volubly. I've never understood why men just can't say, "I thought I would have a different kind of son, and I'm grieving that."
      But, just as our marriage rebounded after the toddler years, we're in the throes
of a marital comeback. I diverted my paperback budget to a streaming movie subscription, and know what? Binge-watching Netflix side-by-side on the sofa is a lot less solitary than books.
   
     
       
     

The Three-Digit Phone Call

        "Hello, is this the Piper residence? Will you take a call from your son?"

      It's the psychiatric hospital calling on my adult child's behalf. The caller ID displays only the hospital's prefix in a distant zip code. Three digits tell me two things: he's safe...and he's sick.

       How is it possible that my heart can both leap and sink at the same time?
       When I see "510," I think: "Thank God!" and "Oh no!"      
       Since it's the third hospital in a year, I have learned a few things about talking to my inpatient. I don't ask how or why he got there, because his account will be unreliable. Anything he says in the first few days is likely to be incoherent, belligerent, or maudlin. His mood will be unstable for up to fourteen days. When his conversation turns to ranting and blaming, I disengage. "Why don't we talk when we're both less out of sorts?" Click.
        I don't promise anything, If he needs something, his social worker will tell me. I don't negotiate with the disease. It's not my job to find benefits, a bed or a flight.
       It's my job to keep myself from drowning.
       I read somewhere that congruence exists when one's talk, actions and feelings match up. I am a long way from congruence. As far as what my son HEARS, my walk and my talk are consistent:  when you're ready to consider a long-term treatment situation, we will help. Until then, it's yours to figure out.
       As for what I FEEL, I FEEL like getting on a plane and flying to his bedside. I FEEL like putting him in a taxicab from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River just to set eyes on him. I FEEL like sending money.
       But those actions constitute a rescue. Rescue occurs when you do something for a competent adult that they can do for themselves. And if he's competent enough to find the dope man, he's competent to find the Drop-In Center. Ditto for the medication: if he can find money for booze and weed, he can find $10 for the prescription that would keep him stable all month.
        "Act your way into right thinking" was just one of those yellowed 12-step phrases that hung on the wall at my home group...until I had to do it.  And I do mean acting: I deserve an Emmy for some of the performances I have given in the last year while my son plays Relapse Roulette.
       But maybe the congruence is starting to happen. Consider: when a hospital begins discharge planning, their first attempt is usually to reunite the patient with family, especially for youth. My son's doctor asked me to consider bringing him home. I did.
      I got very still and pretended he was arriving at the airport at 8:45 that night  - with no agreement about rehab, no ownership of his illness, no movement forward -  and I did a gut-check. (It's an old therapy trick: you make your mind shut up a minute, and listen to your gut, because it will tell you the truth.)
       And it felt...sickening. The prospect of living the last four years over again filled me with a palpable dread that made me all but swoon.
       I was polite but resolute when I emailed the social worker to decline being part of any homecoming plan.
       Poet Charles Bukowski once said he'd rather drive from New York to LA in reverse than live certain parts of his life over again.  That goes for me, too, brother. As of a few months now, the thought of hitting rewind is WORSE than the anxiety about what the next years will bring.
       Am I "acting my way into right thinking?" Or just acting? Some days it's both.

Yes, This Will Be on the Final

Jill Piper's Totally Unscientific Quiz for Addicts' Moms.

          An addict's mom has to be on her toes to get through the day. How would you handle the typical situations below?

          1.Your adult child's phone bill comes.  Do you:

                   a. Stuff in drawer with others

                   b. Divert that amount to new custom-fitted bras

                   c. Pay it because as long as she has a phone you know where she is

          2. What's the best binge food for crying jag:

               a. Birthday cake

               b. Rotel dip

               c.  Ashes

           3.     Your friend's child just finished medical school. Do you:

                a. counter that your kid is taking a “gap year”

                b. manage icy smile 

                c. say Serenity Prayer through clenched teeth

           4.     Micro amounts of cash disappear from your wallet when your adult child                        drops by. Do you:

                  a. Leave a few $1's and $5's lying around so addict won't get to your real                      money

                  b. Hide wallet in zip compartment of vacuum cleaner

                  c.  Tell yourself you must have bought something you forgot about

5.     Your son lives in a house with no utilities. Lately he's been asking you to pick him up so he can shower & use your computer to “look for work.” You:

                   a. See his number on the Caller ID and let it go to voicemail

                   b. Figure if he's resourceful enough to buy drugs, he can figure this out too

                   c. Drop everything and work on his problem

                    

                6.  My favorite film or TV show about addiction or alcoholism is:

                    a. I 'll Cry Tomorrow with Susan Hayward

                    b. My Name Is Bill W. with James Woods

                    c. Nurse Jackie with Edie Falco

                    d. The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland

                    e. Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon

                7. Who's more gratifying to blame:

                    a. Child's second grade teacher

                    b. Husband's side of the family

                    c. Self           

                 8.  Your son wants $5 for cigarettes. You:

                      a. give him $5  if he promises to go to a meeting

                      b. withhold $5 until after he's been to a meeting

                      c. buy pack of cigarettes and smoke them yourself

Self-Scoring:  The correct answer is there are no “correct” answers. ( You knew that was coming, right?) I have done “all of the above,” and a lot of them more than once. We respond to our children's addictions in a thousand different ways and employ a thousand different coping strategies. Some make us feel better for a few minutes, some make us feel worse. I have found that if I give myself permission to feel everything on this conflicting, heartbreaking continuum, I can tolerate the ambiguity of my situation. As long as there's cake.  - Jill Piper

If Only Longing Would Fix It

        While visiting New Orleans recently, I took in the World War II Museum. The experience begins with a simulation: you board a train, you feel it move across the rails, and through the use of film, you see a black and white America pass by the windows. Most of the young soldiers have never been more than fifty miles from home, and their future is uncertain.

       And their mothers' job was to let them go....into separation, danger and not knowing.

Those mothers had little expectation of getting word from their sons, perhaps a letter or card from time to time. Others would get that dreadful telegram from the state department.

       Theirs was some serious waiting.

       When I lost touch with my faraway son a few weeks ago – no phone, no texts, no Facebook – it took me to a new level of panic. As moderns, we expect to reach anyone, any time. Nightmarish scenarios multiplied themselves in my mind: he's friendless, he's jailed, he's overdosed.

How frequently the metaphor of war is invoked to talk about addiction: the “war on drugs,” “battling an addiction,” “in the trenches” and so on. And it's a comparison not without merit. Sometimes drugs feel that way to me, that my son is off fighting a dangerous enemy that is beyond my comprehension.

     Then I remembered the example of those World War II moms. I can wait fretfully, until I am paralyzed with worry, or I can contribute to the war effort . My most important job – and maybe the only job within my power - is to pray.

Loss of Focus

When my young adult son moved to the West Coast three months ago, among the wreckage he left behind was a 2002 Ford Focus. It's easy enough to shred his unpaid bills, but I have a view of his junker out my kitchen window every day. There are worse things to look at than a GM rustbucket, I guess, but this car thing has gotten personal.

For months I ignored it. But increasingly it's become a dirty, daily reminder of the circumstances that brought it to my doorstep: I moved it here during his hospitalization last July. The come-apart was cinematic in scope, featuring glass breakage, a three-day disappearance, and mystery abrasions to his extremities.

I'm not certain what triggered this episode, but I suspect pills, weed and a steady contempt for his legitimate meds had something to do with it. While he was at large, I began to worry that he'd kill somebody in his car. So I used my spare key and just took it. What would I rather deal with: someone's accident-shattered life or another of his irrational tirades? 

Last summer I had high hopes for his dual diagnosis treatment. Ditto for the three sober living situations since. But sobriety's just not in the cards for him right now. As long as he's out there, I know I can count on the disease to cheerfully refund his misery. So I plan to outwait it. 

Meanwhile, there's this eyesore in my driveway. 

How, in less than a year, does someone turn a gently driven sedan into a crackmobile? Not only was the transmission locked up, the console was ripped out, the grill fell off the front, the body has been beaten with a baseball bat, and cigarette burns have made Swiss cheese out of the cloth seats. On humid days, does the feral smell come from the rat droppings or "product" still clinging to the interior? 

Still, I continued to store his car thinking, "Pretty soon he's going to get his act together and he'll need a car to go to work," or "Once he has a job, he'll save up enough to fix it himself."

Please. As Spanky used to say on The Little Rascals, “Wish cotton was a monkey.”

It dawned on me that I myself have been as stuck as that car while he yo-yo's between treatment and relapse. I've felt unable to move forward, useless to anybody, badly beaten up and sorely in need of an interior detail. 

Last week I couldn't look at it one more day. I called and donated the car to charity. I was never so glad to see the back of anything in my life.

Removing the car opened up space in my driveway, but not nearly as much space as it made in my head. I have heard it put this way: like his Ford, I can let go, or be dragged.

Enneagrammatic

For 20 years I’ve been running a numbers game. In my attempts at enlightenment I have consulted the twelvesteps (Bill Wilson), the fouragreements (Don Miguel Ruiz), the seven critical choices (Dr. Phil), and the five people you meet in heaven (Mitch Albom). For a historical perspective, I also reviewed the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile)—the Classical Era’s answer as to why people are the way they are.

Despite these and other sincere efforts, my 19th nervous breakdown arrived right on schedule at mid-life. Always a pushover for a self-understanding scheme with a numerical rubric, I signed up for an Enneagram workshop (from the Greek prefix ennea meaning nine).
Turns out, the nine-point personality system was my One True Thing.
According to Helen Palmer,  author of The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life,  the Enneagram is an ancient map to the nine basic personality filters. While it has its roots in the monastic traditions of the Middle East and Asia, the Enneagram corresponds to the nine psychological types recognized in today’s counseling professions: the Perfectionist, the Giver, the Performer, the Individualist, the Observer, the Investigator, the Enthusiast, the Protector and the Peacemaker.
“The Enneagram gives us a very clear map of the nine different ways we fall asleep to our lives and respond to life on automatic,” explains Sandra C. Smith, M. Div. and Certified Enneagram Consultant in Asheville, North Carolina.  “When we respond to life from an automatic posture (to paraphrase Jesus) we do not have eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Smith says spirituality is as individual as personality. “Our journey to wholeness will involve a deeper understanding of both of these. Self-observation is key for personal growth and spiritual development. The foundational theological question is ‘Who am I?’”
Each of the nine personality types has a certain filter that guides one’s attention down a particular path.  Do you know someone who has to have everything “just so”?   How about the person who’s always at the center of some drama?  What about someone who requires a lot of time to themselves?   According to the wisdom of the Enneagram, each of these basic temperaments has its virtues and its vices, and no one type is “better” than any other.
Rather than offer another behavioral inventory, the study of the Enneagram goes deep toward discovering  a person’s motivation and habits of attention. If we can understand what motivates us and how our attention is hijacked by our habitual responses, we can discover the direction in which our spiritual work needs to go.
Sandra C. Smith“We really do have two selves, an automatic self and a present self,” Smith continues.  “The automatic self, when we are in it, is in lockstep with our patterns and knee-jerk reactions, and we’ve fallen asleep to life.  The automatic self sees reality through a specific filter that is shaped by our core fears and avoidances. This automatic self is really a contracted posture, both of the body and the heart, and it resists the present moment.”
Presence is the state in which spiritual growth is possible.   “If I am awake and fully alive, I am resting in the lap of the holy, and when I move into a place of essence, I can offer love and compassion,”  Smith explains. “When we are all there in our present self, type structure fades.  When I am present, it is in that place of presence that I become receptive.”
At the two Enneagram workshops I attended, I discovered I am a Four, also known in various “Ennea-books”as the Individualist, the Tragic-Romantic, or Artistic temperament.  (Because there are many teachers who have different names for each type, it’s more uniform and neutral to refer to someone as a Two or a Seven than with the descriptive nomenclature “Giver” or “Enthusiast,” which can be mistaken for a label.)
Fours value themselves for their individuality, their specialness, their originality.  At the obnoxious end, the expression of our “terminal uniqueness” can be so aggressive that its turns people off.   We are attracted to the extremes in life, and we are comfortable with despair and beauty, both our own and others’.  A phrase like “the unbearable lightness of being” makes actual sense to a Four.  What we’re not so great at, it seems, is doing ordinary stuff, like going to a job five days a week or tolerating an uneventful stretch in a relationship or task. In fact, the thought that another one out of every nine personalities is ALSO a Four is a massive affront to my Individualism with a Capital I.
At the end of the last workshop, Sandra Smith asked me, “Jill, what would your life be without drama?”  My first thought was, “Dunh,  I would cease to exist,” but I’m finding that’s not true.
When I take a step back from being a prisoner of shifting emotional states, what I find is that stillness feels pretty nice.  When the people around me report that they are finding me too intense, I try to believe them.  Drama, I’m finding at 50,  is better indulged as a  spectator sport than as a participant,  so I’m getting my intensity from Battlestar Galactica on DVD andWicked on tour.  When I’m tempted to create some chaos, I try one of the breathing techniques  I learned in the workshop and become present to whatever I’m feeling, and let that sadness or nostalgia or anger just have its voice.  The description of  a Four’s inner state “nailed” me closer than anything I’ve ever read, and I have hopes that I can move away from my investment in being seen as an “original” to a genuine connection with holy origin.  Being present is not the same thing as being seen.