Alcohol or Life

By Dave Lentz

This book is about how alcohol and drugs can cost you your life and can hurt you financially and make you lose your ambition and lose your focus on your dreams. Rehabs can help you get back on track with your lives, but you will need to want the sobriety. This book will help you understand that this is a disease. Family plays a big part of helping you return to reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781635251098

Book preview

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Alcohol

or Life

Dave Lentz

ISBN 978-1-63525-108-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63525-109-8 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by Dave Lentz

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Chapter 1

Born into a medium-income family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a modest suburb thirty miles west of Philadelphia, I’m the youngest of three. The year was 1967. My name is David. I was born with blond hair and blue eyes. I thought I was a cute kid. From being an infant to the age of about nine, my family life was very normal. I went to elementary school of Westtown-Thornbury where I had a lot of friends. I used to hang out in my neighbors’ sandbox with my buddy Carl. I was such a happy-go-lucky kid.

My family was just as normal as everyone else’s. My mom was a housewife for many years, you know, the ’sixties thing. Mom then ended up getting a job in the ’seventies for a company called Foote Mineral, which she would eventually retire from in the early ’nineties. Dad was employed by Boeing Vertol his whole adult life, which he would retire after thirty-five years of a one-hour commute each way to work on Route I-95. God bless him.

My sister, eight years ahead of me, was pretty much a stranger to me in my younger years. She did her thing; I did mine, you know, playing in the sandbox with Carl that was living large in those days. I mean, we didn’t even have big wheels back then. Tonka trucks and sand wow baby. But now Cheryl has made a world of difference. Finally, Brother Bill, six years my elder. Oh, yeah, Brother Bill.

Bill and I were close when we were kids. We shared a bedroom bunk beds, which we used to turn into a fort; it was cool. Eventually, the bunk beds would split into single beds in which we could share a room for the first nine years of my life. My big brother was my idol in those years. He would protect me from bullies and stuff. That’s what big brothers are good for, but as I got a little older, he was my mentor. He bought a mini bike for five dollars in the mid–’seventies, and he taught me how to ride it, which was a lot of fun at seven years old because you didn’t have to pedal. A year later, Bill graduated from the mini bike to a motorcycle a Kawasaki 100 cc dirt bike, yeah, a real motorcycle with a clutch and five gears. This was a lot heavier to an eight-year-old kid. At this time in my life, I sort of felt like I was a little man. After all, my mentor was fifteen years old. That’s the year I started to use tools, real tools, man tools. That was a big deal to me at nine years old. After all, this would really be the last year of my normal childhood.

Chapter 2

Year 1976, the year my life was starting to change forever. My mother and father asked us kids to come sit down in the family room; they had to talk to us. What they said to us next would make my brother and sister cry their eyes out.

Kids, Mommy and Daddy can no longer live with each other.

Our response was, What’s that mean, and why?

Mom and Dad then replied, We are getting divorced.

My brother and sister were blown away, but to me, I just didn’t understand. From that day on, normal family life wasn’t so normal anymore.

Mom and Dad still lived under the same roof, but it was clear they basically just avoided each other and just did their own thing. It was like the pressure was