I mention this because I am about to celebrate my 10-year sobriety birthday. This is nothing short of a miracle: I couldn't put together ten days clean and sober until July of l986. I tried to stop drinking the year before, because I was waking up looking and feeling like some horrible cross between Courtney Love and Mort Downey, Jr., and then spending the day waiting for it to be late enough to start drinking again. Certainly I could see that if you started drinking in the morning, it indicated you had a real problem on your hands, and maybe there were tiny little signs that I actually did have a real problem on my hands. But I was usually able to wait until the late afternoon to begin having the first of several dozen nightly social drinks, and to have the first hit of the non-habit-forming marijuana I had been smoking on a daily basis for 20 years.

But one day in l985, when I woke up so hung over that I felt pinned to the bed with centrifugal force, and was literally glued to my pillow by drool, I decided to quit drinking on my own. And I was doing quite well, remarkably well, in fact, until 5:00 of the first night. Then the panic set in. Thankfully, I had a moment of clarity in which I understood that the problem was not that I drank so much, but that I drank too quickly. The problem was with pacing. So I had a good idea. I would limit myself to two beers a night. Two beers! What a great idea.

I went to the market, which was one block away, and got two beers -- two beers in the loosest meaning of that phrase. What I got was two l6-ounce Rainier Ales. Now Rainier Ale is fortified -- it's beer with the merest little hint of raw alcohol added. It is to beer as Night Train is to wine. Winos and people from Bolinas love it. I learned to appreciate it in Bolinas. It gets you very drunk very quickly, and it's cheap. What's not to appreciate?

Okay, maybe the taste -- it's definitely an acquired taste, unless you just naturally happen to love the taste of rye bread soaked in goat urine.

Anyway, I took my two Rainier Ales, and I sipped one, and was a little drunk already, but it was only 5:30. And I realized I was going to have to make the second l6-ounce Rainier Ale last until bedtime. So I put on my thinking cap, and conceded that if I was going to pace myself successfully, I might need a little...supplement.

Luckily, I had a Nike box full of pills. (Oops -- did I forget to mention the pills?) I took one blue Valium, so little, so helpless, smaller than even a TicTac, and washed it down with part of the l6-ounce Rainier Ale. I definitely began to feel better, a little calmer. More whole. More like God.

Then I sipped the rest of the Rainier Ale, and discovered that now it was only 6:30. So I smoked a little of the non-habit-forming marijuana and took another Valium. I washed it down with some more Rainier Ale, listened to "Layla" five times, and then had a second moment of clarity: It was wonderful to want to pace yourself, but please -- two beers a night? I mean, let's not overreact here. So I went back to the bait shop, and got a third l6-ounce Rainier Ale and sipped it. I had to take one more tiny blue Valium, and then, halfway through the beer, a Halcion, which is a sleeping pill that they have banned in most civilized countries because of certain unpleasant side effects. Like it makes you feel like killing your mother. Whereas, getting nagging phone calls from her doesn't, right?

So I was able to fall asleep at a nice early hour, like 7:30, and I slept like a baby and woke up 12 hours later, completely refreshed. Wow! I thought. This is fantastic: no hangover, no being glued to the pillow. I felt like a million dollars. Whenever people called that morning and asked how I was, I said I felt great, which was true, and that I was on the wagon, which I believed I was, in a gentle, non-rigid sense.

So at 5:00 that night, I went back to the little market and bought three l6-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked the non-habit-forming pot, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Layla" ten times, drank the third ale, took the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy facts. One was that it was only 7:00. The second was that I was wide awake.

Ah-ha, I said to my tiny princess self -- here's the problem: Every so often perhaps, I may need an extra beer. But I am going to sip that nutty beer. So I walked to the market, or rather "walked," a little slowly perhaps, rather like a first-time tightrope walker on a wire suspended over burning coals. But I made it. I bought one more l6-ounce Rainier Ale, and tightrope-walked back to the houseboat, where I sipped the ale, took another Valium, listened to "Layla" a few more times, fell asleep, and woke up 12 hours later feeling totally great.

To make a long story short: On the fifth day I suddenly began to resent anyone's attempts to control me; even my own. And so, as an act of liberation, I bought and drank a fifth of Bushmill's Irish Whiskey.

It only took me a year to admit that I couldn't control my drinking any more, and that I couldn't quit on my own and that I probably wasn't going to be able to stay alive if I kept drinking. So finally I let a bunch of friends who were sober alcoholics help me get sober, and stay sober.

I didn't love it at first. I thought maybe there would be some loopholes in the basic premise of abstinence: Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, it would turn out that you got to smoke the non-habit-forming marijuana again, or that every anniversary, you got to have one glass of perfectly chilled California Chardonnay.

It turned out that there were no loopholes. I hate that, and I was angry for a long time. I didn't know why these people wanted to help me, or why they seemed to love me even though I was so angry and defeated, with a thousand resentments and an industrial strength self-absorption. I finally figured out the answer, although I could not have articulated it as well as my brilliant boy did, just the other day, ten years after my last drink.

Sam put it in a nutshell for me. He was watching "King Kong," the re-make with Jessica Lange, and he said, towards the end, "She loves him, because she can see that he is lonely." And that is why those sober alkies all loved me and wanted to help; because they could see that I was so lonely, like they had been once.

So here I am, 10 years old! Happy Birthday, Princess! I thought I had fallen as low as a person could go, ten years ago, having to give up drinking, and it took me a while to see that I was actually entering heaven -- a heaven that could sometimes be a little more irritating than I had imagined; a heaven where Republicans still exist, which I would not have thought possible. A heaven where I did not always get the nicest seat in a lounge chair near the shrimp, but where the bad guys really did become good guys, or at any rate, the sick started getting well. And the animals may still have the disease, but the truth is, almost without exception, that they secretly believe having it is the best thing that ever happened to them.