...you know, the one that's sorta like blue and yellow mixed together?..oh, yeah. GREEN!

It's been a wet spring in Arizona - okay, so it hasn't rained in a month. But up until then, it was pretty darn wet. And it's still ridiculously green - lush, verdant, all of those words that mean 'you can look at the desert and see colors besides brown'.

Not that brown is a bad color - I really like brown. The house that I want to buy in Circle Mountain is brown - in fact, we call it the Chocolate House. The desert is supposed to be brown; right now, it's not nearly as green as (say) Alabama is all the time, but it's the fact that it's greener than usual that makes it neat; it's the brown normality that makes the green special.

I'm supposed to help drunks* - that's what I'm supposed to do. I forget, from time to time, what my real purpose is; sometimes I think that my real purpose is to be smart or funny. Sometimes I think that my purpose is to build up material gains so that I can retire comfortably. Sometimes I think that my purpose is to run fast (for a short, fat, slow old man) or to get back into physical shape or to raise Silas correctly - but all of those are confusions. My purpose is to help drunks.

When my first wife left me (taking David and Andy with her) to marry my next door neighbor, it hit me sorta hard; I was suddenly not a husband, and not a father, anymore. I wasn't a very good husband or father, to be honest, but at least it gave me a reason for living.

But when  I sobered up in AA, I suddenly got a purpose. It's a purpose that I can never lose, so long as there are drunks in the world who haven't gotten the message yet. Ethel can leave tomorrow, and I'll still have my purpose. I'll probably be sad about it - I might even cry - but it won't leave me purposeless.

Contrariwise, whenever I forget my real purpose, I become empty and useless, even if everything is all right - and I'll start looking around for something to blame that "empty and useless" feeling on.

This morning, I got a phone call from a friend who relapse some time back; she's had some trouble getting back on the beam. She was calling because she was worried about me, because I've forgotten my purpose. While listening to her,  I heard some stuff that she was saying, and I'd heard that from others as well - and it involved a possible misunderstanding of application of some Steps in the program, so I tried to be of service to her.

That really straightened out my day, indeed. It realigned the windows through which I look at the world, and reminded me that I'm just fine, thank you, regardless of what I may think about it.

I remember one summer's evening in Texas, when I was just a few months sober. I was on my motorcycle, riding back from a meeting to the barracks. I remember suddenly being aware of a feeling of happiness, for no particular reason; then I realized that I was functioning properly, like a cog in a machine or an organism in an ecology - fulfilling my proper function. At that moment, it struck me - happiness is proper function.

I forget that from time to time.

Funny thing - after having that awareness today, I did what I could do to be of service, and went to a noon meeting; when I got home, there was a voice mail waiting that was saying, in effect, that I might possibly get something that I wanted, and with a minimum of effort on my part.

Gotta wonder about that.

*to help drunks and compulsive overeaters, as well - plus the occasional Al-Anon; the point here being that the 12 Steps give me my life, and the purpose for my life, all in a neat little bundle