Weekday mornings, exactly seven-thirty a.m., a handful of people walk past our house. I hear them through the kitchen window. They are rarely more than a minute late. The persons in the group, all ages, all colors, are new each time, but their punctuality is unchanging. It’s uncanny. Is it a religious thing? A Krotona thing? A Theosophist morning ritual? One morning, I followed them. They went all the way down the hill, around a corner, to a large brown house behind by a fence. The map on my phone said it was a recovery house, a residential treatment facility. The website said they’d served addicts in the LGBT community since the early 1970s; a bunkhouse of sorts was at the top of our street. I admire people in recovery. In odd ways, it’s been one of the main stories of my life. Most mornings since then, seven-thirty, when voices float through the screen, I think about how for years, each week, each morning, a different set of humans does exactly what some other set of humans did the previous day, the previous week, the previous year. Same steps down the hill. Same speed, same time. Addiction. Recovery. Walking. Everything, and also very little, the same.
Untitled III (1982) by Willem de Kooning, from the MoMA show “Willem de Kooning: The
Late Paintings, The 1980s.” Susan Cheever wrote a review of the show focusing on the effects of de Kooning’s alcoholism—and late sobriety—on his work.