A young woman walked into a bar. Fortunately for her, and for the people who care about her, it was her bar, rather our bar — or more precisely — the island bar, and there she found community, her community, a community of drinkers.

Sixty years ago, the island had one particular drunk whose life then and for the next 60 years was miraculous. He was one of many — many whose resolve was less than the astonishing determination he brought to bear years later.

Though impolitic today, these few guys — and one woman I recall — were called the drunks and they were — as their successors are— as much a part of the fabric of town as any of the rest of us. His addiction, in particular, was so profound that he was sometimes encountered prone in the middle of Main Street and had to be dragged to the sidewalk so he wouldn’t be run over and killed.

It seemed clear to us then that, at 40 or so, his days then were certainly numbered. Nearly 50 years later, having achieved sobriety in the most unlikely of circumstances, he finally did pass on — of natural causes — at nearly 90.

He’d once been a beloved institution of one sort and had become an even more beloved and remarkable institution of an entirely other sort by the time he passed on.

Part of what was remarkable was the way in which, and the environment in which, he chose to free himself from this crippling addiction. He achieved, and the young woman has achieved, recovery in that same bar into which he walked and she walks daily, in the company of their fellow drinkers.

Of course, I can easily call those accomplishments remarkable — his and hers — because I am not a regular patron of the bar. I don’t know what goes on there and it would be transparently clear to anyone who knows me if I pretended otherwise. Still, I call their achievements miraculous because it just doesn’t make sense to me, to an outsider, that to quit drinking one would choose to go to a bar.

Clearly there’s more to this than meets my pedestrian eye.

Sitting in the adjacent restaurant I offer my heartfelt encouragement and congratulations — everyone knows everything in a little town like this — as she passes by my table on the way to the bar for the support she clearly receives. She thanks me and acknowledges her accomplishments, reciting the number of days she has been clean. There is community in the bar, their community — his not long ago and now hers — and it works, works in a way that, while foreign to me, was nonetheless for him and is now for her a remarkable and supremely effective support structure.