The Priest Who Heard My Fifth Step Was One of Us — Blood Pressure Dropped 60 Points in an Hour – Ron M.
About This Speaker Tape
Ron M. opens with gratitude — for the program, for the people who kept it alive, for the life he now has — and then walks through a childhood in Chicago that should have been fertile ground for faith. His father was a traveling salesman, his mother played organ at two Catholic churches, and they even lived in the same building as the parish priests. But his brilliant older brother had died of meningitis, his mother's grief never resolved, and Ron spent his youth trying to earn her approval and prove her wrong.
At Honeywell, sales terrified him until alcohol gave him courage. He drove with red wine in his coffee cup, kept vodka in his window-washer reservoir and sipped it through a straw at the side of the expressway, hid bottles in a water softener, in his workshop, and in the fire-extinguisher holder under his car seat. At home, his ten-year-old daughter ran the house when he blacked out, his son Paul broke a foot riding on the back of the bike because Paul was cutting into drinking time, and his son James grew up believing his father didn't love him. Honeywell kept promoting him — New Jersey, then corporate headquarters — while co-workers propped him up in restaurant lobby chairs. He called it the skid row of success. When alcohol quit working he turned to dry goods and financed the habit by tipping off a burglar to the alarm layouts he designed.
In Minneapolis, suicide seemed the only exit. A blowout tire pulled him off the road before he could hit a bridge embankment; a porch meant to collapse on him at a fire scene fell backward instead. A secretary down the hall turned out to be an AA and phoned his first sponsor, Harvey. After a relapse and a four-page letter from his wife Carol, inpatient treatment taught him he was not unique, introduced him to an 18-year-old roommate who reframed faith as a question of where you place it, and led him to a fifth step with a priest-chaplain who was himself one of us. His blood pressure dropped from 200/90 to 140/70 in one sitting.
Sobriety opened a second false idol — workaholism and money — that pulled him through business turnarounds in Arkansas, Oregon, and Tennessee until the program pulled him back. His daughter's boyfriend was killed by six drunk kids in a car; his son James, arrested for dealing, chose AA over jail and was kept sober by the young men Ron had been sponsoring for reasons he hadn't understood at the time. His wife Carol lost her entire tongue to cancer; Ron feeds her through a tube and learns her words from context after almost sixty years of marriage. He closes with the prayer of St. Francis.
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