A Look Back, And Up

Joseph doesn't say anything.

"Yeah, you'll do your four minutes," Rowland says. "It's not so scary. You'll get up and in four minutes, you'll own everybody. You've handled tougher things."

Joseph shrugs. "I guess. I've been in worse places."

Rowland chuckles. "Amen."

He makes notes as Joseph delivers the story of his adult life in four minutes. "I came to this program three times and I fell on my face three times. . . . I give urine every Wednesday," he says, then concludes with a warning for his classmates: "If you work around alcohol, you will be back."

Rowland applauds along with everyone else. "Joseph, you were locked and loaded," he says, and proceeds to identify the moral lesson for the class. "You're not a failure if you fall down; you're a failure if you don't get back up. Thank you, Joseph."

Robyn Inglese looks on. "It has to be somebody like him who does this," says Inglese, a former crack addict and now a counselor here. "How is someone with a squeaky-clean life going to be able to understand people who've had problems? He knows he made a mistake. He took liberties in a gray area and he paid for it. He talked about it to us. For a moment, he got choked up."

Rowland says he feels happiest about his quiet achievements nowadays, like recently helping a parolee and former addict find his first job ever -- driving a forklift for $10 an hour. He guesses that he has found jobs for five parolees. "What I'm doing now is more meaningful to me than anything I ever did as governor," he says.

Johnny R, Trying to B Goode

After the class, he is driving around with his dog and musing about the possibility of a nice walk later for the two of them. He cruises past the governor's residence again. Its occupant nowadays is M. Jodi Rell, who served under Rowland for 10 years as lieutenant governor.

"She threw me under the bus when it got rough -- Jodi acted like we weren't even friends," he says. Then, hearing himself, he adds: "But that's politics. . . . It's about survival. . . . It's the place for the ego-driven, and that was me. . . . I still have to watch it. You know, I get some applause and I start to get those old feelings. I have to watch out for that arrogance. You're always in recovery."

Now and then he leans over his shoulder toward the back seat and glances at Colby, his 7-year-old black Labrador. Colby impassively looks back, a well-trained political dog who learned during the glory days to stay perfectly silent in the presence of strangers hanging with his master. If you have a pen in your hand, Colby just keeps looking you over, in the manner of a wary attendant.

"How you doing back there, Colby?" Rowland asks at a stop.

Colby looks up at him, then back at you.

"Colby's loyal -- Colby rides with me every day," Rowland says. "Or almost every day. If I haven't taken him somewhere, Colby is wild when I get home. He can be doing something and then I walk in and he just completely forgets whatever it was that he was doing. What's that called?"

Attention deficit?

He snorts. "No, that's me -- attention deficit. No, Colby has whaddyacallit -- oh, separation anxiety."

He shrugs at the dog. "He's my people now. That's it. Just Colby."