i love a recovery memoir. when i first got sober, i chugged ‘em, hungry to find my experience within the pages. which is why, when i was sent An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment by Cara Benson, i was stoked.
i mean, who else has written about recovery amidst finding refuge in nature? who hasn’t dated through the rooms?
THIS IS A BOOK YOU MUST PRE-ORDER.
An Armsfull of Birds” moves through addiction recovery, love, suicide loss,
and ecological grief to ask a profound question: How do we remain open-
hearted in a world that breaks our hearts again and again? At its core, the book
is a meditation on radical perseverance, the courage to stay engaged with life,
with one another, and with the natural world even when hope feels uncertain.
And now, an excerpt from the book:
This is an excerpt from An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment by Cara Benson, reprinted with permission from the author and publisher.
I Crash Into Sobriety
Not surprisingly, I dated my way into the rooms. That’s not the full picture. I also waitressed my way in. Rather, I waitressed, and the rooms came to me. Every night Friendly’s filled with sober alcoholics after their nighttime meetings ended, and they took over the smoking section for the “meeting after the meeting.” Lo and behold, I fit right in with them. Not the sober part, but the personalities. The quips back and forth. The caustic humor. I got to know them by name, and mine they readily knew from my ever so friendly name tag. They called it out and waved enthusiastically when I ran into them in town, which began happening regularly. Christ, they were everywhere. Were there always this many people in the world actively and specifically not drinking?
One day I came across a few of them sitting in the very park where I’d done much of my drinking, and they invited me to join them on their blanket. They were smiling and seemed so happy to include me, this drinker they might attract into the program. Their recovery speak floated in the air, enough that I started using phrases like “surrender to win” and “let go let god” without a clue what that meant or having a belief in anything with a capital G (though once, under the influence of an extraordinary amount of psychedelics, I thought I saw all the molecules of Washington Square Park vibrating). I was still drinking. Still bullshitting. But now here I was hanging out with people who went to meetings and were not drinking, even if it was strange to me that they were spending time with a fuckup like me.
The men who swarmed, I understood better. Even if I’d never heard of the infamous thirteenth step, I recognized the behavior. Typically it’s someone who’s been in the rooms longer than the other person, and it’s often predatory in nature. The newbie is coming in as if they’ve been in a car crash, and in swoops the elder statesperson to “help” the newcomer with their program.
In my case, the reverse was true. I was using these men to get closer to the rooms without actually dropping the drink or drugs. There were two in particular, but more were hanging around the edges. Maybe it was mutual, the using. Were they getting vicarious pleasure from spending time with someone who was actively partaking? Was I a good candidate for rescuing? The damsel in dysfunction? I got one of them to drive me around when I was drunk. Buy me things. Middle-of-the-night meals when I had a lush’s craving for eggs and hash browns at 2 am to soak up the booze. When I was short on rent I got repeated temporary loans. My mess was obvious. Part of my charm.
I was actively trying to hide my drinking from the other man. Frank was older, inappropriately so, but he was clean and sober and a thoroughbred trainer with strong hands and an intuitive sense with animals, which were very appealing. It was Saratoga Springs, summer home of historic horse racing, so the lure of being privy to backstretch connections, to being on the scene was also a draw. I was a taker, flat out. He was the father of one of the girls I used to clean hotel rooms with. She initially regretted introducing us, which was not uncommon for people to feel about me.
Our first date was memorable for the half bottle of beer I let sit with great restraint to prove a point. All I could hear all dinner long was that beer calling to me, but I did it. I abandoned it for the waitress to clear when we left the restaurant. Surely I asked him to drop me home so I could go out drinking afterward. I held out for a few weeks, but before long I showed up insultingly late and thoroughly intoxicated for an evening together and blew my cover as someone who did not, absolutely under no circumstances, have a problem with alcohol or drugs. It was hard to be convincing while slurring the words. Frank wasn’t having it. He couldn’t be around me if I was going to drink like that. I don’t know why that got my attention because plenty of people had cut me out of their lives due to my various and sundry forms of acting out over the years, but this time it rattled me.
And then there was my mom. She’d been watching my selfdestruction, driving me around town when I needed a ride while I kept up the act that everything was fine. One day, at a traffic light, she turned to me in the car and asked very plainly, “Do you think you drink too much?” She wasn’t accusing. There were no rancor nor recrimination in her voice. She simply wanted to know what I thought. I was stumped. Trapped, really. My shucking and jiving and tap dancing weren’t going to work anymore. I didn’t even have it in me to whip it up to try to convince myself. I offered something like, “Yes, but it’s okay?” my lack of conviction reflected in the rising tone.
Then those damn alcoholics again, back in Friendly’s night after night. Sobriety was closing in on me. A friend in program once described the closed mind of the alcoholic like a lock. All the tumblers have to be perfectly aligned for the message to get through. Something in me was shifting. I was opening up to the idea that not only did I have to stop drinking, that wasn’t new, but that I could. It still took another week, maybe more, of waiting on and kicking it with everyone after they piled into the smoking section, then swapping my polyester fudge-coated uniform for civilian duds and heading downtown to drink after my shift. Waitress. Drink. Repeat.
Until one night, instead of going out after my shift I sat down in a booth with a few of the people from the rooms. I didn’t tell them what I was trying to do, to not drink, but I’m sure they knew. We talked about everything but alcohol. Or did we talk only about alcohol? Either way, I went home without drinking that night. Same the following night and the one after that, until finally I walked down the musty stairs of one of seventeen churches in Saratoga and entered my first official meeting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cara Benson’s writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Terrain, and selected for Best American Poetry. Her first book, a collection of prose poems called (made), was well reviewed in The Huffington Post and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the bpNichol Award. Benson wrote a series on walking in the woods for the Best American Poetry website and taught poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility for eight years. She lives in a former church on the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians in upstate NY.
Her new book, An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment releases May 19, 2026 from Health Communications Inc.
Damn alcoholics at friendly’s!!! 😂😂😂
Thanks, Paulina!