Intervention

Intervention. It’s when you’re in trouble, whether you know it or not, and someone shows up to help you, whether you want it or not.

I was in first grade, in the principal’s office for lying, when my dad intervened. “Let me handle the situation myself by taking the boy home for lunch,” he said. The boy ate standing.

I was eight, in the dime store. The yo-yo was a dollar, all I had was a quarter, so I pocketed the yo-yo. Before I got out of the store the manager collared me and asked for my parents’ name and number. “My mother is at the beauty shop next door,” I told him. He sent a girl for her while I sat in his office. My mother came in with wet hair. She apologized and made me apologize. “Let us handle this at home,” she said. On the way out she said the six words I dreaded most: “Wait ‘til your father comes home.”

I was in ninth grade, on my way home from school, when three senior boys started chasing me. Just as they caught me, Mr. Barton came out his front door and scared them off. Mr. Barton walked me home. “Watch your back,” he told me, “because there won’t always be someone to look out for you.”

In 1995, I was invited to sit down with the family in the den of my in-laws house. It was the Friday before Mother’s Day. My drinking was way out of control and I was the only one who didn’t know it. I thought, “If my work’s not suffering, I haven’t got a problem.” They told me that for the past few years I had been going through the family like a tornado. I flew to Minnesota the next morning and checked into a treatment center. As hard as rehab was, it wasn’t harder than the intervention in the den.

A father had a son who demanded his share of the estate. The father turned over the deeds to the property. The kid went through town selling off half of the family place. Prime land. He left town unpopular, but rich. He finally hit bottom. He decided to come home. His father saw him coming, but not before the townspeople, who had no intention of letting the spoiled crook come back to do more damage. So his father ran through town, through the angry crowd, to protect him from them. Then, he wrapped his own robe, the best robe, around his son, turned, the crowd parted and he walked him home.

Talk about an Intervention.