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hours, and occasions have most often been associated with our tippling.
    When you want not to drink, it helps to shake up all those routines and change the pieces around, we have found. Housewives, for instance, say it helps to shift shopping times and places and rearrange the agenda of daily chores. Working people who used to sneak out for a snort on the coffee break now stay in and really have coffee or tea and a bun. (And that's a good time to call someone you know who's also off the sauce. During times when we used to drink, if s reassuring to talk to a person who has been through the same experiences.)
    Those of us who began our sobriety while confined to a hospital or a jail tried to change our daily paths so we would not encounter the institution's bootlegger so often.
    For some of us, lunchtime was usually an hour or two of liquid refreshment. When we first stop drinking, instead of going to the restaurant or steak pit where the waiters or the bartender always knew what we wanted without being told, it makes good sense to head in a different direction for lunch, and it's especially helpful to eat with other nondrinkers. Testing your willpower," in a matter involving health, seems pretty silly when it is not necessary. Instead, we try to make our new health habits as easy as possible.
    For many of us, this has also meant forgoing, at least for a while, the company of our hard-drinking buddies. If they are true friends, they naturally are glad to see us take care of our health, and they respect our right to do whatever we want to do, just as we respect their right to drink if they choose.
    But we have learned to be wary of anyone who persists in urging us to drink again. Those who really love us, it seems, encourage our efforts to stay well.
    At 5:00 p.m., or whenever the day's work is done, some of us learned to stop at a sandwich shop for a bite. Then we would take an unfamiliar route for walking home, one that did not lead past our old drinking haunts. If we were commuters, we did not ride in the bar car, and we got off the train at the other end—not near the friendly neighborhood tavern.
    When we got home, instead of bringing out the ice cubes and glasses, we changed clothes, then brewed a pot of tea or took some fruit or vegetable juice, took a nap, or relaxed awhile in the shower or with a book or the newspaper. We learned to vary our diet to include foods not closely associated with alcohol. If imbibing and watching TV was our usual after-dinner routine, we found it helped to shift to another room and other activities. If we used to wait for the family to get to bed before hauling out the bottle, we tried going to bed earlier for a change, or taking a walk or reading or writing or playing chess.
    Business trips, weekends and holidays, the golf course, baseball and football stadiums, card games, the old swimming pool, or the ski lodge often meant drinking for many of us. Boat people often spent summer days drinking on the bay or the lake. When we first stopped drinking, we found it paid to plan a different kind of trip or holiday for a while. Trying to avoid taking a drink on a vessel loaded with beer drinkers, Tom Collins sippers, flask nippers, sangria lovers, or hot-buttered-rum guzzlers is much harder than simply going to other places and, for novelty's sake, doing new things that do not particularly remind us of drinking.
    Suppose we were invited to the kind of cocktail party where the chief entertainment—or business—was drinking. What then? While drinking, we had been pretty skillful at dreaming up alibis, so we just applied that skill to devising a graceful way of saying, "No, thank you." (For parties we really have to attend, we've worked out safe new routines, which are explained on page 65.) In our early days of not drinking, did we get rid of all the booze around our homes? Yes and no.
    Most successful nondrinkers agree that it is a sound precaution at first to get rid of whatever hidden stashes