By William C. Shelton 

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

The quality that I love best about human beings is our capacity to transform ourselves. No other creature on earth can do it.

Yet we seldom embrace this potential. Doing so requires courage, persistence and a willingness to ask for help. Instead, we daily and thoughtlessly act out our ancient patterns. They may hurt us and others, but they are familiar.

I want to tell you about a Somerville guy who exemplifies this capacity for self-change. Clyde was born and raised across the street from the East Somerville Community School. His father died when his mother was two months pregnant. She was 18.

He graduated from the Northeastern middle school in 1985 with an appetite for drugs. When his mother moved to New Hampshire to be with her new husband, Clyde stayed here, living with a neighbor where “there was no curfew.”

During and following high school, drug use became a way of life. Addicted to cocaine, he was fired from a series of jobs, including stints with Mass DOT and the MDC.

His daughter was born in 1991, and he lived with her and her mother until 1993. Each day he would put her in a baby carriage and go shopping at local stores.  “Shopping” involved stealing tools and appliances, concealing them in the carriage and then selling them for the daily $150 that he needed to buy an eight ball of cocaine.

When his daughter and her mother left in 1993, he continued his routine, replacing his daughter with a doll. When he was chased, he would wing the carriage, run like hell, and come back for it later.

While he was not apprehended for these incidents, he was arrested in 1995 for two armed robberies that he did not commit. His mother put her house up to secure his bail.

Ultimately, the Commonwealth dismissed the case based on new and unambiguous evidence that he was not involved. He resumed his coke use the day that he got out.

His daughter returned to Somerville at the age of five, and Clyde tried his best to be a good father. He coached her soccer team, but during the games he was continually thinking about getting high afterwards.

In 2003 he got arrested running out of Filene’s and plead out to 18 months in Drug Court. About this period, he says, “I was drug free, but not in recovery. I was unfaithful, dishonest, stealing…I wasn’t working on myself.”

A month after his Drug Court commitment ended, he felt the old urge and told himself that he would just do a $40 bag. He spent the next two and a half years on crack.

His daughter called that first week asking for a ride to school, and he could not respond. He broke down, wept, and subsequently tried to kill himself.

He lost all motivation, along with his driver’s license. He did little more than sit in a room by himself, waiting for a call to get high, and stealing cans of Beefaroni to put something in his stomach.

In late 2008 one of those phone calls came from a woman who asked if he would sell her some crack. His desire to keep half of what he scored dominated his strong suspicions about her. She got him to do it twice more before arresting him. She had positioned the buys just within the thousand-foot legal designation of a school zone.

Meanwhile he borrowed $500 from his best friend, telling him that his daughter needed an abortion. When they discovered the truth, his friend and his daughter both told Clyde that they never wanted to see him again.

He entered jail with 6 cents and profound depression. He couldn’t buy anything from the canteen, so the County gave him a comb, toothbrush, and paste. When his public defender asked if he had applied for bail reduction, Clyde said there was no point, since he could not pay any amount and there was nowhere for him to go.

He applied after being goaded, and the Court reduced his bail to $600. Then an unanticipated IRS refund for the same amount arrived.

He could not pay for a bus ride on the day he got out. It was February 2009 and freezing. He begged his best friend to take him in. The friend relented for one night.

The following night he got a cot at CASPAR Inc.’s emergency services shelter. CASPAR staff admitted him to their ACCESS program, and after five weeks of evaluations, urine tests, and meetings with counselors, they gave him a room in their halfway house on Prospect Hill.

As he accumulated months of sobriety, Clyde yearned to change himself. He tells me, “I wanted not just to stay sober, but to be a different person. I wanted to learn how to be honest instead of conniving and manipulating. To give to people without expecting something in return. And to never forget where I came from.”

He participated in something called “A Way Of Life,” or AWOL. Ten guys met every week to support each other in working through the well-known Twelve Steps. The process required profound self-revelation, and it built powerful bonds of trust.

He graduated from AWOL and began attending a daily Twelve-Step meeting. His essential decency and relentless determination to change himself won affection, praise and support from other regular participants. One of them put up $6,000 to hire a decent lawyer.

The District Attorney had offered a plea deal whereby Clyde would receive a two-year sentence and serve one. His lawyer kept getting continuances, while Clyde kept changing his life.

He had determined not to become romantically involved with anyone until his new patterns of behavior were solid. Two years after getting sober, he met a lovely woman named Emma while riding a bus. Their first date was a walk around Castle Island.

After 811 days, he was wary of leaving the halfway house. But he and Emma moved into a Teele Square apartment this past October. The guys from his meeting helped furnish it, and Emma’s daughter joined them in December.

This month Clyde’s continuances ran out. The unequivocal evidence of his transformation won over the Assistant District Attorney handling the case, but he did not have authority to change the plea deal. The ADA, his boss, and Clyde’s attorney spent an hour and a half on a conference call hashing out a new deal. The resulting recommendation to the Court was that Clyde would receive a 60-day sentence, with credit for 40 days already served.

He submitted 84 character letters to the Court, among them, one from his daughter declaring her unconditional love. On February 15th, he and ten of his 12-step comrades showed up to learn his fate. The judge approved the deal, the DA shook his hand, and the gang went out to celebrate—no alcohol or drugs involved.

Clyde is a model for how we can change ourselves. And essential to this model is that we can’t do it by ourselves. He is unremitting in his praise and gratitude for his 12-Step allies, Emma, his daughter, his running coach, and his sponsor, Anthony, whose loyalty, honesty, generosity, and spiritual way of life he hopes to emulate.

Clyde went in to serve his time yesterday. A lot of people will be waiting to embrace him when he comes out. I will be one of them.