I got a new jacket today. A black leather bomber jacket. I got it on sale for $100. I really like my new jacket.
The jacket that it is replacing is rather old, ragged and has seen me through the worst. Or rather, it has seen me at my worst.
When I got the old jacket I was still drinking. I got the jacket from my sister. She gave it to me because I had just come back from Costa Rica and had nothing. I went to Costa Rica newly sober and full of hope, going to a new job. I came back drunk, broke and hopeless with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes and a beater car. The car got stolen with all my stuff. I ended up staying at my sisters house because I had no where else to go. She gave me the jacket because it was cold outside and I couldn’t afford to buy anything. It’s a light blue jacket with holes in the pockets. I still didn’t get it at that time, I still couldn’t stop drinking. My parents had loaned my their car so I could go job hunting even though they should have known better. I got a job and on the first payday I went out after work with some people and got loaded. I pinballed my parents car between the barriers on the freeway. I was wearing the old hand-me-down jacket my sister gave me when I did that.
After that I went into a halfway house. The old jacket came with me. I wore it to my first AA meeting. I wore it through the first months of my sobriety, until it got warm. After a while I moved out of the halfway house into a condo. I started buying things. I got new clothes to replace the old junk I that I had bought cheap or had gotten for free. I got a new car. I got one year sober. I went to my year birthday meeting wearing the old jacket. The old jacket kept me warm through another winter and another year clean and sober after that.
The old jacket is the last thing I have from that time. I was going to give the jacket away to Goodwill or the halfway house. The halfway house can always use clothes, the people who end up there usually have nothing. Instead I decided that the halfway house could use a donation and I am going to keep the old jacket. From time to time I am going to take the old jacket out, put it on and remember the pain and utter hopelessness and the transformation that came.
Then I’ll put it back in the closet.
Slee