An Evolving Tradition

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It’s hard to see my sins repeated by the generation that comes next.

That sounds like some lofty, holier-than-thou proclamation about society. But it’s not. I just don’t care that much about society anymore. It causes me deep pain to see people I love, people I have watched grow up, steer into the same lane I chose in my 20s.

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I’ve lost the precise count, but I’ve attended the Indianapolis 500 over 20 times. It started as a family tradition from age five – waking up early on the Sunday before Memorial Day to make the pilgrimage to the track with my parents and 300,000 other race fans. In college I achieved drunken belligerence at the speedway with a variety of roommates and fraternity brothers. After college, along with a group of friends, I settled into an Indy 500 routine that spanned decades. We got married and started families, some people joined the group, and others drifted away. My family had the furthest to travel to get “Back Home Again in Indiana” at the end of May, but still, we made it most years.

We stayed with friends who owned a farm about an hour north of the track. We had kids. They had kids. Others in our race-day group had kids. We had a huge kickball game the night before the race. I’ll never forget the year the oldest two teenage girls regaled us with their success in their spring track season. They accepted my challenge to sprint to the end of one of the fields, and they beat me. Our kids were turning into young adults one annual snapshot at a time.

For many years I drank and got louder and more obnoxious throughout the weekend. All of the other adults drank, too, but I took it to an extreme keeping the party going way into Saturday night, and starting it back up as soon as we were safely parked at the track on Sunday morning. I was the example of how to maximize the experience. Maximum consumption. Maximum bad jokes at others’ expense. Maximum rules bent. Maximum obnoxiousness. Maximum fraying of my wife’s nerves. Maximum chances that I was going to need help getting back to the car when the race was over and I was maxed out. The irony of the example I set is not lost on me. Once every year I saw how much the kids had all grown. Once every year they saw how much I stayed the same.

Then I stopped drinking.

I have no idea what my friends, their parents, told the kids. I still played kickball, and I still had a-kid-on-Christmas-morning level enthusiasm on race day. It would be ridiculous to think the kids didn’t notice that I was no longer drinking. Had I shown up to Indiana missing a leg it would have been less obvious. They noticed my sobriety.

But my sobriety wasn’t as impactful as my drunkenness. If I left an imprint on the children of my Indy 500 friends, that imprint was fueled by alcohol.

Now those kids are young adults, doing what young adults do. They party on Saturday night, and do shots in the parking lot on race morning.

The cognitive connection for me between the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and alcohol existed on both a conscious and subconscious level. Sitting in our seats in turn three and watching 300,000 people drink was hard for a few years. It was hard because it was triggering. It was hard because it reminded me of post-race drunken arguments. It was hard because drunk people are obnoxious. But all of those hards were overcomable. My love for that race – not for racing in general, but for that annual event I have attended my whole life – was stronger than my disdain for the alcoholic buffoonery to which I was subjected, and to which I subjected my family, once I stopped drinking. Even with the expense, the travel, the four hours it takes to get 300,000 people out of the venue when the race is over – even with all of that, the race was still worth it.

Then the kids in our group grew up. I don’t know what I expected. I’m not naive enough to think my sobriety would serve as some sort of example. Honestly, I don’t think I gave any thought at all to how the excessive drinking of the next generation would impact me. Nor did I consider if my excessive drinking that they all witnessed in childhood would have any impact on them. I am far too selfish to entertain thoughts like that. I think obsessively about my impact on my own kids, but beyond my wife and our four children, well, everyone else can fend for themselves.

So I was unprepared to witness the next generation behaving like I did. Their parents still drink. None of them are alcoholics. I think they see the over indulgence as a natural period of immaturity surely to be replaced by something less dangerous. It is a phase. They survived. Their kids will survive. Just as I didn’t see this coming, I don’t think their parents, my peers, give a moment’s thought to the idea that any of their kids could end up like me. An alcoholic.

On the way to church this past Sunday morning, I asked my youngest if he misses the race, and if he’d like to go again. Affirmative. My oldest, my daughter, hosted a race-watching party with her friends in Minnesota. Her friends aren’t race fans. They were indulging her nostalgia. My middle two boys watched the race on TV and discussed strategy even though, just like their dad, it was the only race they will watch all year. The race is imprinted on my kids, too, just like it was for me.

Everything changed when I got sober, did the work of recovery, and grew into the person I am supposed to be. I once believed that my life would continue uninterrupted, except I would not have a beer in my hand anymore. I was so wrong. Everything changed.

I will go to “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” again. I will take my wife and kids. We are fortunate that the event that means so much to my family now holds 350,000 fans with seats spanning the 2 ½ mile oval. We can make the pilgrimage and attend again, and because the event is so massive, we can do so without interacting with kids I can’t bear to watch drink. Because watching the drinking of the next generation, not in the societal sense, but in our group of Indy 500 friends for decades, tips the scale and makes the event I love a no-go for me. I never saw that coming, and it is incredibly hard to acknowledge. They are innocent kids doing what I showed them how to do. Our decision to move on is not their fault. I don’t expect anyone to change.

But I’ve changed in a way that is incompatible with one of my most sacred traditions. And because I made it important to my four kids, I have to find a way to keep the tradition alive. And because the way we’ve done it their whole lives no longer works for me, I’ve got to make a change that’s painful to admit.

I thought I would stop drinking and nothing would change. As I approach a decade of sobriety, the awakening continues, and it seems likely that the changes will never end.

If you are ready to explore the changes of sobriety, expected and unexpected, we hope you will consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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