Twenty five years ago today, I dragged my butt into a AA holiday marathon at a local AA club, scared and badly shaken by a mercifully brief relapse that happened after spending several months on the fringes of AA and trying to stay sober on my own - mostly by just showing up in meetings and hanging out with sober people, trying to get recovery just by osmosis. It worked for about ten months. Then I got a new job, got some money in the bank, got a social life, didn't have any time to got to meetings.... and you can guess what happened after a couple of weeks of that, on December 22nd 1988.
The night before I came back to AA, when I managed to extricate myself from a potentially dangerous situation in the rough part of town and got myself home, I was scared. So I formed a plan. I would call the AA hotline and tell my sorry tale of woe about my relapse to someone anonymously, and then go back to meetings the next day and not tell anyone that I had relapsed. I was thinking that I was getting close to a one year chip and dammit I didn't want to start over..... When I called the hotline, they took my number and told me someone would call me right back. The phone rang and I started blubbering about my relapse. A voice on the other end of the phone said "wait a minute.... Dave? Is that you?..." Aw crap. It was my friend Gene from my home group, who I had not seen in a couple of weeks because I hadn't been to any meetings. My first instinct was to hang up, but of course he had called me, so he knew it was me. So in high alcoholic drama, I replied "Oh Gene! Thank God it's you!". He didn't buy it. He asked if I was home, and safe, and then he told me to go to bed and meet him the next day at the meeting. Aw crap.
So the gig was up. I went back to meetings and told everyone what had happened... sort of. I would go on and on about my big mysterious relapse, as if it had something to do with some tragic repressed secret from my childhood or something. Very dramatic. Finally Gene pulled me aside after a couple of meetings and rolled his eyes at me and said "Oh for Pete's sake Dave, you drank because you are an alcoholic and you weren't doing anything to stay sober. What the heck did you THINK was going to happen?" I got the message. I asked him to be my sponsor and began working the steps and getting into action.
So here I am now, twenty five year later, still going to meetings, still working the steps, and still working with others to show them what worked for me. My life has changed so much, and in so many ways, that there is no way I would have ever dreamed that this life would have been possible for someone who came from where I started. Happy Holidays to all, and 'see you in the meetings'.
I love those "gotcha shares" Dave...Gene still around? Share celebration with him and with your Higher Power both of whom were and are here to celebrate with us. Congradulations...duplicate tomorrow.
Hi Jerry. Gene was much older than me and he passed away several months after he became my sponsor after a rich, full life with many, many years of sobriety. His memorial service was an amazing celebration of life, filled with an absolutely enormous crowd of sober people who all spoke about what Gene had done for them and how his message had been passed to them, and through them onward to others. It was one of the turning points in my life that gave me the evidence I needed to fully allow Step 2 to move from my head to my heart. All of the love in his actions was still here in the material world, still moving onward and outward, still helping people recover, and it would continue to do so long after all of us will be forgotten. A powerful force that he had tapped into and had made real by helping others. Even if I only do a fraction of that, I'll be a very grateful guy.
But many of the other folks that I knew from those early days are still around. I'm heading down to southern California in a few hours to spend the week with my whole family, and while I'm there I'll visit my old meetings and celebrate my 25th AA birthday with my old friends. Happy Holidays to all!
