At any rate, this time I’d like to have you help me welcome Sam E. from Eddyville, Oregon. What a good-looking group of people. Hi, my name’s Sam Eddy, and I am an alcoholic. I am. I, I’m a very fortunate recovered alcoholic. Uh, to dispel anybody’s thoughts, my name is Eddy, and the town that I come from, it’s not a city, it’s a town, uh, is Eddyville, and it was named after my great-great-grandfather. And, uh, as a result of it, uh, I live on a r– a piece of the original property. And when I get up in the morning and I look out the back window down to the river, we have our own family cemetery, and I see the headstones and gravestones of my great-great-grandfather, my great-grandfather, and they’re down there and they’re there to keep me honest and sober. Uh, this is a tremendous privilege. I never dreamed..

Oh, let’s take a, let’s take a rough shot of forty years ago, that I would be standing here, uh, in Portland, in my home state and my hometown at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and talking or sharing some thoughts and ideas, some experiences, uh, what strength I’ve gained in this program and from you, uh, about sobriety. I’m not gonna talk about alcohol. Uh, I’m not gonna talk about the disease of alcoholism. I’m going to, uh, hopefully, uh, share a few thoughts. A-and I don’t know how I can take, as you all know now, that I haven’t had a drink or, uh, uh, for twenty-eight, almost twenty-eight years, uh, due to the results of, uh, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Uh, I don’t know how. I haven’t been able to find a way to take that length of time and squeeze it down and package it a-and share with you the things that have occurred from the point of my last drink. And that’s the most important part of my life, is the point from my last drink to this, to this day.

Uh, I haven’t been able to, to do that. Uh, my home group, uh, in AA is a, is an internationally famous group, uh, where we– over at, uh, Newport, Oregon, called the New Punters Group. It’s a Sunday morning breakfast meeting. We meet each morning, each Sunday morning down there at nine thirty, and from nine thirty to ten thirty, uh, we eat, and from ten thirty on until such time as the meeting ends, uh, we meet. Uh, we have a lot of fun. We have a little, uh, uh, a little slogan of the group that we put together, and it’s sort of like a card, and it came right out of AA. Uh, the one thing tonight is that I’ve got to keep in mind is to keep our rule sixty-two in the forefront of my mind. How many of you are familiar with rule sixty-two? Well, we have that on the inside. If you’ve, if you’ve read the twelve by twelve and gotten into the fourth tradition, you, you’ll find rule sixty-two. Uh, I have it on my license plate.