One July evening, William Alexander, an author and highly regarded lecturer on spirituality and recovery, had an all-too-real fantasy about getting drunk again. He had been sober for 23 years, so why was he suddenly craving the feeling of freedom that only a quart of Jack Daniel's used to bring? Alexander's psyche was facing something it hadn't faced before: he was growing old. Thus, he was returning to old ways of coping with something uncomfortable that he didn't want to deal with. 

Out of the author's personal reflections and hard-won insights emerges an unconventional approach to the challenges of recovery that come with aging. Beginning with the admission that we are as powerless over growing old as we are over our addictions, Alexander takes readers on a journey of discovery and, in doing so, overturns the clichés of age, revealing how to:

• let go of old ideas
• experience meditation in a new light
• re-vision personal mythologies
• discover the virtues of idleness
• challenge the assumption that older is necessarily wiser

With one foot firmly planted in the principles of AA, and the other in the rich life experience of a child of the sixties, Hi, I'm Bill and I'm Old helps people in recovery reinvent how they can take on the unique challenges that come with age. 

...

Bill Alexander had no idea that his simple dream of having a vegetable garden and small orchard in his backyard would lead him into life-and-death battles with groundhogs, webworms, weeds, and weather; midnight expeditions in the dead of winter to dig up fresh thyme; and skirmishes with neighbors who feed the vermin (i.e., deer). Not to mention the vacations that had to be planned around the harvest, the near electrocution of the tree man, the limitations of his own middle-aged body, and the pity of his wife and kids. When Alexander runs (just for fun!) a costbenefit analysis, adding up everything from the live animal trap to the Velcro tomato wraps and then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it comes as quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each one of his beloved Brandywine tomatoes. But as any gardener will tell you, you can't put a price on the unparalleled pleasures of providing fresh food for your family....