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Source: Tom G – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-g-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:08:00
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Now, with deep pleasure and honor, I'd like to introduce a person that came here. We just asked him, and he said this would be a privilege, and to me it's a privilege to introduce a fellow that comes highly recommended. He's a young practicing attorney from Winnipeg, Canada, and I'd like to give you Tom Gee, please. Chairman Ray, Reverend Sisters, and other members of the clergy who are here. I know there are some, I just can't spot them at the moment. I see one here. And all the other distinguished guests, including the tax commissioner.
You know, I got that bit that the president did about making this 25 years instead of only 15. And I've been told by some of my friends down here who are of a different persuasion than he is, that he's sometimes given to this sort of exaggeration. I don't know if that's true, but I was told that. And I want to assure you, Ray, and all of you, that it certainly is a tremendous privilege and pleasure, a joy, for me to be able to come here to Madison and talk to all you wonderful people.
This is one of the rewards of being in this fellowship, which absolutely no one could have possibly explained to me 30 seconds before I got here, because nobody could explain anything to me at that point. Firstly, not because they were not willing to do so, but mainly because I was completely incapable of seeing the obvious. And I was completely incapable of understanding that which I had to understand in order that I could be with you.
But now it has been given to me to see a little bit of it, and it has been given to me to understand a little bit of it, and I'm forever grateful. I'm grateful to the entire fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm grateful to you for this tremendous privilege, and I want to thank you for that very sincerely. I want you to know that this chairman you have, my friend Ray M., is a very wonderful fellow. We have to be awfully careful about that sensitive alcoholic, and he, realizing this, wanted me to feel at home right away.
So when I walked in tonight, he said, by God, Tom, that is a nice jacket. And he said the tent and awning company did a pretty good job with it. Too bad they didn't get it to fit. But he rushed me away so quickly from the motel, he had my friend Jim come and get me, and kind of took me by surprise that I, my wife gave me a pair of cufflinks a couple years ago, and they're in the motel with the shirts here, and I got the little paper clips from the laundry. They're still in there.
But it holds it together. And I like to be prepared when I go on a kind of a trip, you know. So before leaving, there's always somebody in our crowd who forgets a tie. So I went to a lot of trouble the night before we left, and my wife reminds me of these things, you know, Mike. And we picked out six ties, which we thought would be appropriate for the high degree of decor we have to maintain in this society of drunks.
And I very carefully put them up on the corner of my dresser, and after we got about 489 miles away from Winnipeg, I said, my God, my tie. So when I got here, I explained this dilemma to my good friend Ray, and he looked me over, and I wasn't quite sure until that moment exactly what he thought of me, but by God, I found out. He said, you come with me and we'll get you a tie that'll be suitable, and he took me to Grand Hall.
And I thought that was pretty nice. I've been told that if you want to get sober, quit drinking. And if you want to stay sober, don't take the first drink. And if you want to get cured, drop dead.
[00:05:04]
You know, before I got up here, I really wasn't nervous or anything like that, but all of a sudden I noticed that my dentures don't fit too good, and I got to go to the bathroom. You know, talking about these real sensitive alcoholics, you know, the alcoholics are not the only ones who are sensitive. We have sensitive people all through the world. There was a friend of mine who had a little cat of which he was very, are you having trouble with my Canadian accent?
I got here last night and somebody said to me, talk Canadian. Well, how the hell do you do that? I don't know. He said, say something in Canadian. Well, now you know my wife is French. She's French-Canadian, and I suppose they're really the Canadians because her family has been in Canada since something like 1643. And we have quite a thing going on in Canada which is called B&B. I don't want to confuse you drunks, that's not B&E, it's B&B.
It's called bilingualism. And if you're going to get anywhere in the civil service of the federal government of Canada nowadays, you better be able to speak French as well as English or you're just not going to get anywhere even if your name is M.. So I was highly tempted at that moment to embark on a little French and I thought, well, maybe I shouldn't. There's some difference, you know. At our house, maybe I should tell you this. It sort of might help to put things in perspective a little bit.
Ray told me to, you know, kind of fill you in a little bit. First of all, I'm an alcoholic. Secondly, I'm married. There's little connection. I was sober at the time. And we got nine kids. And seven of them were before AA and two of them are AA babies. And I'm so grateful for that because it was kind of nice to know how they get born. Because for the first seven, I was not there. I was detained elsewhere, attending to the really important matters, you know.
However, as I was saying, this guy was real sensitive and he had a little cat of which he was inordinately proud. And he went away from home for a few days and he began worrying about this little cat and he thought he'd phone home to his brother. He happened to live with his brother and his mother. And he called home and got his brother on the telephone and he said, how's my little cat? And the brother said, he's dead. He says, what? What are you talking about, he's dead? He says, yeah, he's dead. Died.
Well, he says, that's an awful way to tell anybody about their… You know, when I thought of that cat, that's a horrible way to break it to me. You could have done a little… Well, the brother said, what do you want me to tell you? Well, he said, you could have said that Fluffy went up on the roof and there was a strong wind blowing and she rolled off the roof and they took her to the vets and he gave her a needle and she didn't feel any pain at all.
Well, the brother says, okay, if the brother had it that way, it's all right with me. So then the brother said, by the way, how's mother? He said, well, I don't quite know how to tell you about this, but mother went up on the roof. Now, my name is Tom G. and I'm an alcoholic and I'm waiting to hear that. Hi, Tom. That's better. That lets me know that I'm where I belong. I'm at home with my people.
And, you know, down in… We have something going in Canada too, it's been going for years. They talk about Western hospitality and we just make it into Western Canada by reason of the Great Lakes and the Ontario-Manitoba border.
[00:10:08]
So we're kind of proud of our Western hospitality in Manitoba. And when we go down east, we, you know, sort of kid them a little bit about this. And I had the occasion of being down in Toronto last March at one of their conferences there and when I said my name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic, I, you know, nothing. Nobody said anything and we always, you know, boom, like that. So I said, well, all right, I'll give you another chance.
My name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic. And boy, did they give it back to me. They just about took the roof right off that Royal York. It was real good. So the Eastern hospitality is all right too. We get along with them pretty good. Alcoholics are alcoholics and AAs are AAs, wherever you meet them. And I'm, for that reason, if for none other, I'm sure glad to be here with you. I say that I'm an alcoholic because I believe that I am one who suffers from the disease, if you can call this suffering, of alcoholism.
I have been sober since the 27th day of May, 1960. The story that I would have to tell you if I were to embark on a blow-by-blow description has already been told. Dan told it when he was up here. He explained exactly what happened to me. And I think this is the sort of thing that has to happen to me. I belong to a group in a little city called St. Boniface, which is just across the river from Winnipeg.
I practice in Winnipeg, but I live in St. Boniface. And it's called the Tiger Group. Now, I don't know where it got that name. I haven't got any idea at all. But that's what they call us. And we're billed as the fastest, most dynamic group in Western Canada. That is, the fastest growing, most dynamic group in Western Canada. And, of course, our club motto is humility. It just so happens that I didn't come down here alone because they don't trust me to do that.
They send along a kind of a truce squad who check what I say, you know, and make sure that I stay on the program as long as I'm up here anyway. And these three fellows are with me here tonight. And I'd like to ask Bill to stand up, if he would, because he's chairman of the Tiger Group. And we're very proud of Bill. And this next fellow, his name is Ross, and he's my sponsor. Ross, stand up. Stand up.
Ross is a past delegate, past just about everything. In fact, he's damn near past, but he's here. And the next fellow is Paul. Paul, stand up, please. Paul, stand up, please. So we had a continuous AA meeting for the 13 or 14 hours that it took us to drive down here through the storm. And that way, of course, we hardly realized there was a storm going on, except when Ross was driving. And then we heard all about it, because things started getting fogged up.
I would like to tell you just a couple of little things about my drinking history. I think that the first time I really had a drink which produced a startling effect was in California. It happened that I had graduated from high school in Winnipeg at a very early age, and I had been playing hockey there. This was in the dirty 30s. And a friend of mine had obtained a hockey scholarship at a university in Southern California, and he made it possible for me to do the same sort of thing.
So I went out there to play hockey. And I don't know, maybe you people know, maybe you don't, but for a sort of little backwoods boy like myself going from a small town in Manitoba way up in Canada to a large city like Los Angeles, it was quite a change for me. And to have people come out in large numbers, like maybe 8 or 10,000, like maybe 8 or 10,000 to watch a hockey match in which we were engaged.
[00:15:03]
This was pretty heady wine. And of course, my sponsor at the university was engaged in the moving picture industry. And he had a large home and rather a, by my standards, fast set of friends. And of course, liquor was no stranger to that establishment. So that upon my first visit to his home, which had nothing to do with the university, he offered me some drinks and I took them. And I think maybe behind that, behind my taking these drinks, was this sort of defiant thing that every alcoholic has to have.
You know, we're not about to be left out of anything. And we're not about to come in second in any contest. And whether the odds are equal at the beginning or not is of very little consequence to the alcoholic. So the fact that these were sophisticated men of the world and I was a country bumpkin meant absolutely nothing to me. And if they were going to knock back three fast doubles of rye, I was going to do exactly the same thing, although I had absolutely no conception of what I was dealing with.
With the result that after about half of the third one had disappeared, the rest of the evening was somewhat hazy. And it was a little difficult for me to understand the strange relations with my sponsor, you know, at the university for the next couple of weeks. It took me about that long to get out of the doghouse. The effect that it had upon me was immediate and was different, was very different from the other people who were there.
This is one reason why I have come to believe that alcohol has about as much to do with alcoholism as gasoline has to do with automobile accidents. I refer to repetitive automobile accidents. We know and we're told, you can study this in statistics and the driving record people and the insurance, automobile insurance people and so forth. We know that there is a certain class of driver who is continually involved in repetitive motor vehicle accidents.
You see, in order to have that sort of driving record, it takes a particular kind of a driver. And in order to have an alcoholic, in order to give birth to the problem of alcoholism, it takes a particular kind of a driver. It takes a particular kind of a body. That is to say, my body is different from that, for instance, of my brother who is not an alcoholic. He can take his one drink regularly once a year and does not become an alcoholic.
And he has no wish to have any more and nothing strange ever happens to him. It is of no consequence to him whatsoever. But this was completely and utterly different from my own experience. With the first belt, fire, pockets full of gold, godlike, wonderful, floating, right over the rest of the people and made me equal to anybody and anything. You see the reaction? Quite different, quite different.
The physical thing that we're told is the X factor, that thing which makes the difference with us. Now we don't know what this is. The doctors can't tell us because they don't know. But we do know that there are certain differences. We know that the alcoholic body differs in more than one way from the non-alcoholic. We know, for instance, that the alcoholic suffers from periods of lower blood pressure.
Now that does not mean to say that every person who has low blood pressure is going to be an alcoholic. Nor does it mean to say that every alcoholic has low blood pressure because this is not true. But as a generalization, alcoholics suffer at times from lower blood pressure. And this may explain why many of us get up in the morning feeling absolutely lousy for no particularly known reason. So if this should happen to you, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're off the program, if you know what I mean.
You may get up in the morning, you know, feeling as if you'd like to jump off a bridge. But in actual fact, you haven't got the energy to get to the bathroom. This happens to me, and it has happened to me. So when I found out that this is not an actual indication of the fact that I'm off the program, I felt a little bit better about that immediately. We know also that alcoholics are people who tend to have a difference in their blood sugar level.
[00:20:03]
Maybe a little higher content or a little more variable content of blood sugar. Now, this produces low energy in the alcoholic. A lot of people tell us we're lazy when we first get into the program. I don't know if you went through that, but I did. The first year I was in the program, of course I was so scared I had to go to a meeting every night because I had a tremendous fear that I wasn't quite going to make it.
I was not going to be able to stay sober. Because for me to try to visualize to myself staying sober for anything like two weeks, that was some sort of a mad dream which I would never be able to attain. So as I say, I went to a meeting every night. I'm very glad this happened to me. I'm very glad of the opportunity of having been able to go to all those meetings. But I was also very grateful to find out that there are some physical reasons behind the other things that happened.
Because once I settled down into the program, somehow or another, I didn't feel so energetic about carrying on my practice. And this went on for maybe eight or nine or ten or eleven months. And then I began to find out about some of these things. Fortunately, I was able to do something about it. I was able to get to a physical program at our local Y, and this did a lot for me. I came down from something like 228 pounds.
You know, I was one of those fat slobs who drank. So the problem with sobriety around our house was sort of a little weight redistribution kind of thing. Because by the time I got to AA, my wife weighed about 93 pounds. You know, this was not her, this was me. So now, she's the one who's putting on the weight. She's getting fat. She weighs 116. And I warned her. I said, if you don't cut this out, you know, this here is one teenage marriage that just is not going to last.
Well, if it lasts till next February the 14th, it'll be 25 years, so I guess maybe the worst is behind us. I think maybe it is. The physical differences maybe have more effect upon us than we might want to think. Another one that's always been of interest to me, and we're told by the medical people who can measure these things, is that the alcoholic is given to periods of low brain oxygen content. And this gives rise to irritability.
Boy, I like that. I went home and told my wife all about that, and I said, now all this complaining about me being irritable had better stop, because it has nothing to do with that at all. All that's involved is low brain oxygen. So don't complain about a physical fact. You know, it's interesting to know these things, but don't try to get away with it with the little woman, particularly if she happens to be an Al-Anon wife, because I understand in Al-Anon they don't give too much credence.
They expect a little better performance from us. But perhaps those of you who are sponsoring new members, and I'm sure many, many here are, maybe you could bear some of these things in mind when you're dealing with the new man, and sort of keep it foremost in your consciousness that some of the strange pattern of behavior, maybe if he doesn't catch on just as quickly as you think he might, maybe just as quickly as you or I did, you know, maybe there's some kind of a reason behind that.
We're people who have inherent muscle tension, and doctors can measure this on graphs, and we're not going to change just because we get sober. This is something we can't do anything about. We just learn to live with it, and that's about it. We're also people who have a tremendously high fluid content, and we have a tremendously high fluid requirement. And I'm sure any of you who were here at the conference this afternoon and who saw these good waiters and waitresses, the girls and boys who were serving the food here, passing the coffee jugs around, and the coffee that was poured out of that little kitchen before this meeting started, I'm sure you'll know what I mean when I say we have high fluid requirement.
Because I'm sure one of the difficulties we always have, and I suppose maybe the same thing applies to you, we always have a very difficult time talking to the hotel people, or whatever it is, trying to describe to them how much coffee a thousand drunks can drink. They won't believe it.
[00:25:01]
We say to them, well, we're going to have an afternoon meeting and there's going to be a thousand drunks there, so you better have 5,000 cups of coffee. They say, 5,000 cups of coffee? But the amazing thing is that they're gone. They're all, they get drank, you know, they get drunk. What, drank, drank? And anyway, they slurp them down. The physical differences. We're tense, intense people. We act and react differently to life and to the situations of life.
You know, there's a story that Earl M., Dr. Earl from San Francisco, tells that I always like because it's so indicative to me. It explains something to me. About the two fellows who live across the street from each other. One is a very nice, normal fellow, and the other one's an alcoholic. And the nice, normal guy is lying out in his backyard, it's a beautiful spring day, and his wife comes out to him and says, it's about time you cut the lawn.
So he lies there for a little while, and she comes back and she says, darling, it's about time you cut the lawn and you better get going. He says, all right. So he very deliberately gets up and goes out to the garage and takes down the lawnmower and proceeds to oil it and clean it. And by this time, one of his neighbors drifts over and they hold a little conversation about lawnmowers and things. And she comes out of the house again and says very patiently, darling, don't you think that it would be nice if you cut the lawn?
And he says, yes, dear, I think it really would. And he takes a couple of turns up and down and stops to admire some flowers and he's watching a bird. And this goes on for three and a half hours and eventually he gets a lawn cut and he does a pretty good job of it. Right across the street lives the alky. And he's lying out in the back on a hammock and his wife comes out of the house and she says to him, don't you think it's about time you cut the lawn?
And he grunts and replies to her and she goes back in the house. And she comes out again in about another ten minutes and she says, the lawn needs cutting, buddy, you better get with it. And he grunts and says, yeah, he'll do that. And he's lying there absolutely motionless in that hammock and then all of a sudden, oh! By God, we got that lawnmower and zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, like that.
And the lawn is cut and the lawnmower is back in the garage or maybe sitting out in the middle of the lawn and he's back in the hammock. I see you recognize the picture. You see, I really wasn't talking about any kind of a lawn mowing incident down in San Francisco. I was talking about one that takes place in San Boniface. About every two weeks all summer. Or every two weeks when I can't con my boys into doing it.
But I'm working on that too. Then there are some other things that take place. There is the social thing that happens. As it happened to me. And maybe as it happened to you. I had some friends come into my house and they were good friends of ours. And I wanted to be nice to them and so did my wife. She wanted to be really nice to them or she would never have made the suggestion she did. She said, Tom, wouldn't it be nice if we poured them a drink?
And I said, yes sir, it sure would. So I went out of the kitchen to get ready to do that and I got out the four glasses and the little tray and I got out the four hunks of ice and put them in and poured the four little shots, you know, modest, decorous, genteel, and all that sort of rot. Then I got down my own little glass and poured me a little hooker and knocked it back and grabbed the four glasses.
I went out in the living room and passed them around. We had all sorts of polite talk for about 15 or 20 minutes while they choked down these drinks. Mine was gone in the first 30 seconds, as you might know. The rest of the time was an agonizing wait for me, hoping to hear the man or the wife say, by God, that was a good drink and I sure would like another. They didn't, of course. And I, after having gone through all this agony, I said, couldn't I pour you another drink?
And they'd look at each other and say, well, yeah, okay, fine. They were very busy talking about something. How in God's name people can get busy talking and concentrating on any sort of a subject when there's some drinking to be done? I don't know about that. This never happened to me, so I'm not any kind of an authority on that. In any event, I immediately gathered up all the glasses and back to the kitchen and again through the little ritual, having first knocked back a little one for me and then, you know, the ice and the this and the that and the booze.
[00:30:03]
oh, God, this is a good feeling. Three ounces, that's all it'll hold. And I'm standing there with it like this, you know. This is dedication. And just about to knock it back, when my friend from the doorway says, Tom, what are you doing? And I couldn't answer, because I didn't know. But I realized in the twinkling of an instant that this was something which did not have and was not about to get social approval, and that I was performing some sort of an act which was not quite kosher.
If I may use that expression. With the rest of the human race, which was not quite honest with me and the way I understood life. It was an act of dishonesty within myself, and I felt uncomfortable. It, you see, set a sort of a tone. It set a sort of a balance for the future drinking that I was about to do. With that kind of a background, I then embarked on further and further drinking. You see, if you're going to drink alcohol, there's one other factor that we must consider, and that is the factor of tolerance. As anybody knows who has ever been associated with this business, this business of drinking, what originally a couple of beers or a half pint, Mickey as we call it, was able to do within a certain specified period of time.
Those two beers or that half pint or that little Mickey will no longer do it. We have to increase the dose because our body becomes accustomed to tolerating that dosage, and therefore we have to increase it if we're about to obtain the desired effect or the same effect. And this continues and continues and continues, and the tolerance keeps building up and demanding more and more and more and more. So sometimes I am tempted to think that we forget about these physical things maybe a little too much, and we're tempted at times to sort of delve into the background, you know.
And maybe some of this is all right. I'm no expert. I don't know anything about these things really. But at times people have asked me, and professional people I mean, what do you think caused your drinking? Well, how in God's name do I know? And I'm not about to find out. I have no really great interest in that whatsoever. I'm an alcoholic. I cannot drink safely. Once I have ingested one ounce of alcohol into my system, I am no longer able to predict my behavior.
Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. You know the whole story as well as I do. So I am not concerned whether it was because my Aunt Emma put me backwards on the pole when I was eight months of age, or whether my mother was scared by a brewery truck or whatever it was. This is absolutely of no interest to me. I'm concerned only with the fact today. And the fact today is that I'm an alcoholic, and I cannot drink safely. You know, the World Health Organization has a sort of a definition, and everybody, you know, you don't rate today if you don't have a definition of alcoholism. There's no subject in the world upon which so much has been written by people who know so little about it.
And this is the truth. The World Health Organization has a tremendous little thing which I like because it describes alcoholism to me. They say this. They say no matter why the drinker drinks, it is drink and the results of more drinks that makes the drinker drink more. Now isn't that fantastic? You just sit and think about that. It sounds a little bit like a Chinese puzzle, but it ain't. It ain't. It makes good sense if you take it apart. What they're saying is that booze, you know, is what made me an alcoholic. Booze plus me equals alcoholism. Booze plus my brother did not equal alcoholism, but it did so in my case.
Now, having gotten to that point where we have this mythical person with a high food requirement and an ever-increasing tolerance and a greater demand, a greater daily demand for the stuff in my case, and this sort of aura of social disapproval and all the…
[00:35:13]
things that were attendant upon that, it's not difficult for me to see why I became a gulper and a sneaker, you know, because we don't drink like other people do. I recall going to so many social functions with my wife, and if, you know, if you understood a little bit about my background, we live in a predominantly French community. And while these people are French-Canadian, they have imported many of the social mores and social customs from France.
And they're great people with the wine, and they're great people with the courtesy, and they're great people with the sort of the frills and the folder all, you know, they do everything just so nicely. So they would pass around the cocktails in very nice little crystal glasses on beautiful little silver trays, and I tell you, it just takes an eternity to get around to me, you see. And my wife, she's not even noticing, she's yacking away, and she picks up the first one with the frosty little glass, and she takes that one little zip, you know, I don't know how you drink like that, and then she'd put it down.
Oh, in God's name, anybody can put down a Manhattan and walk away from it, I don't know, but that's what she'd do. And they'd hand me mine, which I would promptly knock back, step back, and let her go by to talk to this girl, and by that time I had the second Manhattan, so it worked out not too bad. But you see the tremendous urge, the tremendous need, the tremendous sort of compulsions. For a long time I thought I was not a compulsive drinker, and I said, no, by God, never. I am not a compulsive drinker.
You know, all that is is a sort of half-baked snobbery, and we kind of laugh at these people, but it's the truth, so help me. We got them. You know, there's the class of snobs that we have in Alcoholics Anonymous, who look down their noses and they say, well, by God, I'm sure grateful that I had the intelligence and the foresight to get here before I got nearly as bad as him. You see? Well, they don't really say it in that word, but you know what they do. They say, well, no, no, I was an alcoholic for about six months before I got here. Hell, I seen him crock four days a week, three years before that on Main Street, but that's all right. If he wants to think that, that's all right.
And then there's the other guy. He's a snob too, and he's just as bad, only he don't recognize it either, and this is the guy who looks up at the other guys and he says, what are they doing in here? Hell, I soaked up more with my elbows than he drank in his whole life. Why don't he go out and get some serious drinking in, and then by God, maybe in 10 or 15 years from now he'll be ready to get here. You don't kind of appreciate this program like I do.
I just about killed myself, but I finally got here and I haven't got too much left to appreciate it with, but if he works hard, he'll be just like me. The truth of the matter is that it does not concern us really how much or how little you may have drank. If I think I have a problem, then I got one, and if I think I need an answer in my life to the problem of alcoholism, then I'm sure as hell in the right place when I come here with you. I come to see that the real problem in my life is not the booze, it's me. I come to see that the problem existed before I ever got to the booze. Otherwise, how could alcohol have become an answer in my life as it did?
Because to me it was an answer. It was an answer for a long time in my life before it got around to being a problem. It made people in situations and circumstances behave more or less in the way I wanted them to behave. It calmed the fear, the inner conflict, that feeling of uneasiness which I carried with me from a boy, the feeling of not understanding others, the feeling of not being in on life, sort of standing back on the fringe and watching what was going on and never being in the center and really taking a part in life. That feeling, a fringe person.
But after a few libations, I was able to join in to all the fun and the merriment and become a part of life. This was not always treated by those whom I was joining with the greatest of joy. However, that's how I felt. That's how I felt. It was only when the answer turned into a problem that I decided I would have to do something about it. That was not simple. That did not come about quickly.
[00:40:13]
I can recall in 1950, we had a great flood in Winnipeg at that time. And it was a wonderful excuse for me. I sent my wife and my family away. Dear, you must get out of town. We're about to be inundated, you know. Called my friend Noah and… So out she went to the country and she was gone for about six weeks. And by God, when she came back, I was in real good shape, I tell you. So was the house. I hadn't been there for the whole six weeks. I was with an undertaker friend of mine. He was a client of mine as well. He ran an undertaking business.
And we spent our whole time when we weren't out patrolling the dikes. You know, they had great big dikes and we used to go and patrol. I don't know what we were looking for, but… And we'd sit up in his undertaking parlor and drink and play cards or tell jokes or what, you know, on the caskets. Well, you see, they couldn't bury anybody during this period of time because everything was underwater, so they just had them stacked up around there.
And this is real sane behavior for a barrister at law. Will you please note the pronunciation? I said barrister. Somebody's gonna, you know… I may be, but I'm still a barrister at the same time. So we had a little conference. Well, if two people can make a conference with only one talking, that's what we had. It was more of a commiseration, I think. And she said to me… Don't rush me. I'm trying to remember what she actually did say. It went something like, what have you been doing? Boy, these wives, they can think of the sneakiest questions. How would I know what I've been doing? She'd only been gone for six weeks, you know.
And then she said, well, after a few other things, she said, well, I think maybe you ought to do something about this. And I said to her, yes, I think maybe you're right, because I realize I have a drinking problem. Boy, are they not encouraging words for a wife? If your husband were to come up to you and say, I realize I have a drinking problem, you know, and you were not the wife of an alcoholic inmate, would you not feel encouraged?
I could have said to her, I am the son of the Sphinx, and it would have had just as much meaning. They were only words that somehow crept into my mind and something told me this is kind of the right thing to say, because I knew damn well in my heart that I did not have any kind of a drinking problem. Firstly, I was too damn intelligent for that. Oh, yeah, well, I was supposed to tell you when I get there that my wife tells me. She said, be sure to tell them that you got two degrees from the university because you look stupid enough to just have one.
You see, I didn't mean it. There was no sincerity, no earnestness, and no recognition on my part. Vaguely, vaguely it sort of occurred to me that, you know, having a drinking problem, this is not a bad kind of a thing to have, and what you do about it is you simply say, well, I got a drinking problem, and so I'm going to control it. I'll just watch what I do, and I'll kind of exert a little bit of willpower, and being a man of tremendous resolution should be simple. Nothing to it, you see.
Well, you know, there's some basis for this sort of thing, because I had just completed about five and a half years of university in less than two and a half years, in less than 30 months. So when I say that I was able to concentrate and to resolve on a problem, I was able to do so, and it seemed very reasonable to me that this problem would also yield to that sort of thing. That this problem would also yield to that sort of resolution.
Oh man, what I was about to find out.
[00:45:00]
It did not yield an inch. Of course, I never got around to saying I was an alcoholic. That was ridiculous. I remember a couple, three years after that, my little wife took me to the front window one day on this street we lived on. There was a guy who lived a few doors down. And she said to me, you know Jim, whatever his name was. And I said, yes, what's he do? Top flight sailor. She said, well, you know what happened to him the other day?
And I said, no, I don't. Well, she said he drove his car off the road very inexplicably. And he ran into a pole. And he cut off the pole. And he drove the steering column of his automobile through his internal workings. With the result that he had such difficulty in breathing, he quit. And she said, buddy, if you don't pull up those socks, you're going to have something like that happen to you. Well, by this time, I had my socks right up to my eyeball.
But I was still getting corn. About three times a day. And she said, well, you know Jim, But I was still getting corn. About three times a week. And about two days after that, I had to go to the country to take a part in a council. Like our, we don't have counties like you people do. We have municipalities. Very much the same sort of a thing. And they have counselors, councilmen, who represent various wards in these municipalities.
And we get together once a month for the council meeting. And it's sort of a mark of prestige among rural municipalities if you have a solicitor on your payroll, that is to say an attorney, who is more or less at your beck and call. And what determines whether it's more or less is how much you pay this attorney. And I was more than less because they paid me a little bit more. And I used to have to run out and attend these council meetings and pass judgment on all many serious things.
You know, things of a very serious nature. Like whether the reed, the head of this council, should sign his full name or if his initials would be sufficient. That kind of thing. I'm being a little, you know, really not quite that bad. In any event, on the way home from this thing, I learned that the highway which led from this rural municipality to my home had about seven hotels on it between the little town of Elm Creek and my home, which is in St. Boniface.
And it just so happened that six of those seven hotel owners were clients of mine. Now, you know, it's not really regarded as courtesy in the field of legal ethics to sort of pass up a client on the highway. You have to go in and say hello. And I did that. At each one of the six places, and by the time I got to the junction of the highway, I was, I guess, in pretty fair condition with the result that my car sort of spun around.
And by God, wouldn't you know, there happened to be in that area a perambulating telephone pole. And it walked out into the middle of the highway and naturally my car struck it. And I washed out the automobile. And two farmer's sons picked me up and took me home. And it had been after a light snowfall, and I kind of had a little damage. There was some blood. And I was brushing the glass off myself and off my clothing with the result that I did a real barn-red job of all my face and my hat and my shirt and everything.
I was plastered with blood, to put it very bluntly. So I walked in the back door in this light skiff of snow. My wife had just washed the rear landing and waxed it, and it was shiny and, oh man. And my feet went up and down. I went to hell to smash again. She opened the landing door and said, What on earth? You know, seeing this apparition. My color was chalk white, beautiful red, you know. She said, My God, what on earth happened to you?
And I said, I slipped and fell on your damn wax floor. Laughter And so I became indoctrinated into the three R's of the alcoholic. The rationalization, the resentment, and the remorse.
[00:50:02]
And I learned about the morning drink, and I learned about drinking alone and the shakes and the sweats and all the things that go with it. I never really got to the point where I saw anything that I remembered. But I was told by a friend of mine that I was hallucinating real good one evening. But I certainly was at the point where I knew they were there. They were just behind the wallpaper, but for some reason did not quite emerge.
And I knew exactly what they were. Horrible things, you know. And I got down to the point of the unreasonable fears, and things began to converge. Life became very small. You know, I have a mental picture of this thing like one of those old western cattle drives where they built the fences converging to a corral, and they drove all the cattle in, and that was my life. And the fences were coming in, and I was being crowded into this confining space.
And friends were going, and people were going, and clients were going, and my wife and my family were going. And my health was going. And the money was going, and everything was going away from me. As I sometimes say, I was down to three places to drink, two of which were in my own basement. And this is the truth. I had a den, and I had a penchant for drinking Manhattans. It was a thing with me at that time.
I had some sort of an idea that they were more nourishing, you know. But all I could maintain in there was a glass and the bottles that were necessary to contain the contents of this, you know. So nothing to measure with. And to measure, any person who is a connoisseur of wines or liquor, as I was, will tell you that if a Manhattan is not mixed to the hairline ingredient, then it is absolutely worthless.
They do it on TV all the time. They just throw them away like that, you know. So it became necessary for me to obtain the proper mixture without having anything to measure with. Now, the only way you can do that is by trial and error. So you start by pouring the little glass almost full of rye, bourbon rye, we drink rye. Drink. And then you add the wine until you get the proper formula. Well, you know, by God, sometimes this can take an hour and a half just to get one Manhattan that's any good at all.
And by that time all the ingredients are gone. And so was I. And so was I. But then, you know, Dan put this so beautifully. The day came when this was not working anymore. When the answer that had been in the bottle was gone. And I had to find me a new answer. And I spent the whole day in the pub and nothing happened. That night I went to a sort of private club and was knocking back doubles there. And for some reason which will ever be unknown to me, as I was raising my glass with a double shot of scotch, I was filled from head to toe with the certain knowledge that this was my last drink.
Now, it was as though someone had put a sign on the wall and said, Tom, this is your last drink. But that didn't happen. And it was as though someone had spoken over my shoulder and said, Tom, you're all through. But that didn't happen. But it seemed to me as though the room contracted and became more solid and not nearly as frightening. And I had this certain feeling which I cannot describe. And I heard Dan trying to describe it tonight and he didn't do any better than I'm doing.
But I know somehow, something in here tells me that he knows what I'm talking about. He knows what I'm talking about. And I walked out of that room a free man. Thank God. The next day, I called Ross, who was my sponsor, because I knew him when he was drinking and he was about 12 years sober then. And I said, Ross, I got a problem and I'd like to talk to you about it. He said, well, it's Saturday afternoon and I'm real busy.
[00:55:00]
I've got some new records to play. What a hell of a way to spend a Saturday afternoon playing records, eh? For an alcoholic. He said, I think I can spare you maybe 20 minutes. So I said, all right. Come on down. So he did. And about eight and a half hours later, he went home. You see, he told me all about me. But he said that he was talking about Ross. For the first time in my life, I had met somebody to whom I didn't have to have an answer.
I didn't have to have an excuse. I didn't have to have a reason. I was not being criticized. I was not being pigeonholed. I was not a bug on a pen. Nobody was doing anything to me. All I had to do was listen. And as much as I wanted to shake my head and say, no, no, that is not me. I did not drink like that. I found myself nodding my head and saying, yeah, that's me. I drink like that. You're talking about me, buddy.
And he got through. And thank God he did. I can't tell you now one word of what he said that day. I wouldn't know. But whatever it was, it was life to me. It was life to me. And I've come to see that the answer which we get in Alcoholics Anonymous is the answer that I was looking for all of my life and long before I ever had my first drink. Because I have come to believe that the answer to the riddle of life and the answer to the business of alcoholism is the same answer, and it's a good answer.
And I think no one in this world knows that better or finds it out faster than that man or woman who is in Al-Anon. And it seems to me this is what Art was talking about so beautifully before I got started here. It is the same answer because what we are all talking about is the business of living, the business of meeting today's problems today. What we come eventually to learn and to understand is the existence in what we might call the eternal now.
Now. Thank God somebody said, try it one day at a time. Thank God somebody said, this is a 24-hour program. Forget about yesterday. Cut yourself off from it. You cannot go back and relive the past. I can't go back to this morning and change one single thing. And I can accomplish nothing tomorrow until it be tomorrow. I have to live now. So if I'm going to stop drinking or if I'm going to get sober or if I'm going to come to believe or if I'm going to turn over my will in my life, the only time in my entire lifetime I can do it is now.
Right now. If any of these things are any kind of a problem to you, I would suggest to you that you will never find a better time in your life to make the decision that you have to make than right now, right here, with all these people and with this tremendous power invading this room and pervading this room, as it does right at this very moment. You'll find an easing of all the trouble. You'll start to find out about a joy that you did not know existed before and a fulfillment and a peace of mind so that you'll be able to see yourself, as thank God I was able to see myself, with nothing at all in between me and me.
Just me. And if we don't like it, we can change it. We don't have to be this way. We can change by the following of the 12 steps and the 12 traditions of our program. What a wonderful way to live. What a full existence. You know, we're people who always knew that life was big and beautiful and promising and was meant to be lived to the hilt. And we tried to live it to the hilt, and we couldn't because we had the wrong handle.
We had the wrong handle. You know, I… These people, some of them, and I… People, some of them, and please don't misunderstand me, I'm not being critical, who say that alcoholics are immature, you know, they're sort of poor, immature people, poor bloody
[01:00:01]
alcoholics, they're not immature, it's because we have such a keen, intense awareness of life and we know what life is made of, we understand something of the stuff that goes into it, and how dear and blessed and precious it really is, you know, if you think that alcoholics are immature, when was the last time you heard your psychiatrist talk to his wife on the telephone, that's a very enlightening experience, let me tell you, that is a very enlightening experience.
If it is of some difficulty to believe, don't worry about it, so long as you're being honest with you, it'll come. There's a little story that I've heard my friend Chuck C. from California tell, and I stole it, but I'm giving him credit for it, B. thinks it belongs to him, but it don't, it belongs to Chuck. But the three little fish, big fish and two little fishes, and they're swimming around in the ocean this day, and the big fish comes by where the two little ones are, and he says good morning boys, ain't the water fine, and the two little fish say yes sir, it sure is fine, and he goes on by, and after he's gone by, one little fish looks at the other and says what's water, and they swam all over the ocean looking for water, in which they lived and moved and had their being.
And this is me in AA, and I come to believe, and I thank God for that. And we learn even from our kids, I remember sitting at home babysitting one Saturday evening after I got in this fellowship, and I have a little daughter Judy, I was about nine years old at this time, and we had a program, she and I, because she was of all my children the one who showed greatest the effects of my alcoholism. She had lots of problems, and I had had a little inspiration, and I'd put on a kind of a campaign of love with this kid, and she responded just fabulously, and thank God we have a wonderful association today.
So this was in the beginning of it, and she was sitting with me at the dining room table on this Saturday evening, and I was trying to read the paper, or watch the hockey game or something. Anyway, she was, you know, asking questions and sort of interfering, and I thought wouldn't it be nice if I found something for her to do. And I had noticed a map of the world, a round map of the world on the front page of the evening paper, so I got out a pair of scissors and very quickly whistled through this thing and made a jigsaw puzzle out of it.
And I said to her, now here's a good exercise for you, how would you like to learn something about the geographical construction of the world, so try to put this together, and she says, okay father, and proceeded to do so. And after she had been busy for about a minute and a half, she came and she said, I'm all through. I said, come on, you know, you are not Copernicus, how could you do this? She said, it's very simple, dad.
She said, I turned all those pieces over because she said I found there was a face of a man on the back of it. And then she said something that shook me and made me think. She said, you know, dad, I found that when I put the man together, the world came out just fine. And I thought, oh boy. So we try from day to day with the association of those near to us to improve the quality of our sobriety, asking for knowledge of his will for us and the strength to carry it out.
And it's just amazing what can happen.
[01:05:03]
We see through the unity of our fellowship, which is the most cherished quality we have, absolutely astounding things take place. And we are so tremendously privileged to be a part of that. What a wonderful thing. For the first time in our lives, we begin to understand the meaning and the depth and the worth and the weight of the word love and to learn that it is not a word with all the TV connotations and the pictorial magazines and so forth.
We learn that it is a word which involves service and fire and depth and has a real vital meaning in the lives of each and every one of us. We learn that it is a matter of my abiding in you and you abiding in me. A part of all of us sharing the unity of the whole, which makes up our fellowship and our most cherished possession. We are able to look, finally, even into the face of alcoholism, no matter who may be wearing the face on that particular day, and look through the vonit and the sweat and the filth and the grime and the tears and the blood and breathe in a little bit of love.
God bless you. Thank you. Thanks kindly, Tom. We want to thank Bethel Lutheran Church for the hospitality we had here today. And I want to pay particular thanks to Mayor Feske and his wife. Because you people, particularly here in Madison, know that this is Parents' Night at the University. I know they're parents. And with a gratitude of debt, I know that the mayor and his charming wife come over here to spend an evening with us.
And again, thank you, Mayor Carney, for being here. Thank you. Now, we will have the closing prayer by my senior officer, please.