Thank you, Jim. My name is Fleurette Pomeroy, and I am an alcoholic, and a grateful alcoholic. Those four words, “I am an alcoholic,” are the four most important words in my life because I couldn’t have admitted to myself or to anybody else that I had a problem with alcohol. I couldn’t have said those four words now a number of years ago. But with the help of this fellowship and the help of God, as I understand Him, I can say them now with no shame, with no embarrassment, and with no remorse because I have come to understand my alcoholism for what it is: a disease, a threefold illness, physical, mental, and spiritual. This month of June is sort of a, uh, a period of stocktaking for me because it is the month of my own anniversary in A.A. And last Tuesday night, we celebrated the fourth anniversary of our gratitude group in Sausalito. And, um, as Jim said, it didn’t start with a coffee pot and a resentment. It started with two other people and a coffee pot because I had..

I was about to have my seventh anniversary in A.A., and a number of friends that I had grown up in the program with somehow were having a little trouble. And as I looked around and saw a few people with a number of years of sobriety beginning to drink again, I took stock and wondered if in Sausalito, where we had not had a group for a number of years, although there had been one at one time, if perhaps I couldn’t, uh, buy myself a little insurance and start something that perhaps would help others. It, uh, is a group, uh, that.. And we took as the, uh, uh, motto around which we built the name, “Thou that hath given us so much, give us one thing more, a grateful heart,” because those of us who were sober felt that we had more than we had ever expected to have in our lives and that we could express our gratitude for that sobriety in that group.

And we thought we would have a little discussion group of perhaps eight or 10 people, and it’s a meeting that seldom has less than 30 or 40, sometimes 50 people at it, and it’s not a discussion group in the sense that we thought that it would be, but it still is, uh, the rallying point for us there. I came to the fellowship the hard way in terms of, uh, being introduced to A.A., uh, but not being ready to admit that I was helpless and hopeless, and spent precisely a year to the day of, uh, intermittent drinking and commuting to a farm up in Sonoma County. I made, uh, nine trips up there in one year, which, uh, uh, has caused me to be accused of trying to achieve a record. I wasn’t trying to achieve a record. I was trying to find a way to stay sober. That was a bad year. It was the second of two very bad years because I had come to the realization that I had a problem. My weekends were starting on Thursdays and ending on Tuesdays. My job was suffering acutely.