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Source: 1960 Long Beach International Convention – 1960 Long Beach Int, Alkathon Jules P Chair, speakers Sam V., Marion F.mp3 File: 1960-long-beach-international-convention-1960-long-beach-int-alkathon-jules-p-chair-speakers-sam-v-marion-f.mp3 Duration: 00:44:50
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We'll just sort of kick off this meeting. I was just supposed to introduce your chairman tonight, which is Julius. Hi, everybody. Hi, Jules. I'm Jules Pilcher, and I'm an alcoholic, and I don't know how people work this program throughout the country, but I do know that in California we have our own set ways of doing it, and it seems to work fine. So let me get rid of these announcements, and then we'll start the meeting.
It says here now, it says, Agreed Procedure for Opening All Meetings by Staff. May we open this meeting? Oh, she did that. God grant there may be. We have the following announcements. Now our chairman, to close, the chairman says, have the following announcements. The Transportation Committee suggests and requests that if you do not have yet, have not yet purchased tickets for the trips to the stadium meetings, you do so immediately.
Tickets must be purchased at the booth in front of the auditorium. Buses will load on the south side of Ocean Boulevard between Pine Avenue and Long Beach Boulevard between 5.30 and 7.30 in the evening. There will be a band concert at the stadium preceding the meeting, and the snack bar opens at 5 o'clock, and don't forget the show. I guess that takes care of all the announcements. I'll tell you people for sure that I'm a drunk, and I'm really glad to be here because I'm sober, and that's a real big important thing for someone like me.
Because I remember when I first came into AA, I had heard people say, hear this guy speak or hear this person speak or that one, and I didn't have any use for any of them. I just wanted people to leave me alone, and I never thought that I'd stay sober for more than possibly a month or two or a week or two, and by golly, I'm working on my 10th year of sobriety, and it's just a wonderful feeling because the world has opened up for people like you and I who are drunks.
And Alcoholics Anonymous and God, as you and I understand him, have made this possible. And Bea Harrigan has made it possible for me to lead this meeting today by not showing up today. And I must thank her from the bottom of my heart. I would like to introduce our first speaker today, Sam Vosburg from Kearney, Nebraska. Hi everybody, how are you? My name's Sam Vosburg, I'm an alcoholic and I'm mighty glad to be here.
She says I'm from Nebraska and I've got a California sunburn. I stopped at Reno and got some kind of a burn up there on the way down too. So they say that the greatest mistake that man ever makes is when he gets up in the morning. I don't know whether that's the greatest one, but it's the first one anyway. I've got a little thing up over my desk that a friend of mine mailed me. One of these little cards, I put it up there.
It seems to fit me, I don't think it fits everybody. It says, do it tomorrow, you've made enough mistakes today. And that just about takes care of part of my personality. Drunk's always been confused and mixed up and I don't think I've changed too much. Seems like I'm still confused and mixed up most of the time. And I'm no authority on anything and the only thing I know is what you have taught me and what I have read in the big book and the other literature of AA.
So I wonder sometimes in making a talk of this kind, of course somebody probably thinks, oh well, that fellow, he's going to try to tell us something. But I don't know anything new to tell you. But oftentimes some of the things that are said may be said just a little different by somebody else than by another one. So to sum it all up, I am like the bride on her wedding night. I don't know much about this business, but I'm glad I'm here.
I was very much of an ordinary drunk, nothing unusual about me. I drink up an automobile or two. I sold the furniture out of the house one time. I quit drinking. I used to quit for periods of maybe 30 or 60 days, something of that kind. So I told my wife, I said, the thing to do is sell the furniture. That's about the only thing she had that is left to sell
[00:05:01]
and we'll pay up our debts and we'll move over into an apartment. That way we'll get straightened up because I had quit drinking, you know. So we had an auction sale, moved the furniture out on the lawn, sold the furniture. A fellow there clerked the sale and I had to go down the next morning to get the money. Well, of course, it's more money than I'd had for a long time and it would seem like a fellow with that much money would be entitled to one drink, doesn't it?
So I thought I'd better stop in and take a drink and I came back about a week later and, of course, the debts were still there and the furniture money was gone. But I'm very thankful for AA. I'm one of the fellows that tried to quit drinking by myself. I tried for two years. I'd gone down and down with my drinking and I had come to the conclusion that the only thing wrong was coming out of the neck of a bottle.
And all I had to do, it was as simple as this, is to leave the bottle alone. As a non-alcoholic will tell you, it's just that simple. All you've got to do is just don't drink the stuff. Well, of course, any nut knows if you don't drink the stuff, you won't get drunk and everything should be all right. So I tried for two years and I quit for a while. I stopped in and see the boys and maybe been off in the liquor for a month or so and, of course, I was cured.
If you stay off for a month or so, you're cured, you know. Now, you can stop in the bar and see what's going on and have one drink. Well, of course, you fellows know what happened then. Pretty soon a fellow says, Hey, you drunks have got to get out of here, you know. We're closing up. Closing the place back in Nebraska. Most of them close at midnight back there. So somebody would say, Well, where are we going from here?
Well, home's up that way, so we go down this way. Anyway, you know, to stay away from home. But in this two years that I tried so hard to quit drinking, I think they were the worst two years that I spent. I came through a town in central Nebraska one Saturday morning and I was unable to open a bottle, gone without eating it on and developed the shakes. So I took the bottle and put it in my pocket, one pocket, my hands in the other two and went down to see a friend of mine.
He was either getting off of a drunk or getting on one all the time. And he opened the bottle and we took a few pulls out of the bottle and sat down in the chair there. And for the first time in my life I said to him, I have tried to quit drinking and been unable to do so. I don't know what to do about it. Here it is Saturday morning, I can't go home. My daughter at that time was four years old. I don't know whether I've got a business, I don't know whether I've got a home, I don't know whether I've got anything.
He walked in the other room and come back out with a little A.A. card and he said, say, he said, did you ever hear of this thing? I said, yeah, I've heard of it. I said, what about it? Well, he said, the doctor said that I either had to quit drinking or die. So he said, he told me about these A.A. meetings, they were about 80 miles away and he said, I drove down there and attended two of them. Well, I said, what did you think of them?
Well, he said, I'd rather die drunk than I went to fool around with that bunch of monkeys. He said, I didn't think anything of them. He said, that wouldn't have anything to do with them. Well, I said, tell me this, what did they do? Oh, he said, they sat around there and tell how drunk they used to get. It was about the only thing I could figure out they were doing. Well, I said, I've got another question.
Do you think that those fellows down at that A.A. meeting, do you think that they knew about this drinking, the kind of drinking that I'm doing? Do you think they knew anything about it? Oh, he says, there's no doubt about it. He said, them fellows had been over the hill. He said, they knew all about it. Well, as we talked years later, that probably was the question that sold me. And that evening, I drove over to a town.
I didn't know this fellow, but I'd heard of him. And I'd been told that he was president of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I called him that night. And I said, you don't know me and I don't know you, but I understand that you're the head guy of Alcoholics Anonymous and I'd like to know if I could get a little help. Well, he says, where are you? Well, I set him up in a hotel, so-and-so in North Platte, Nebraska.
And he said, what room? I told him, he said, well, he said, you go to bed and I'll go back to bed. He said, I'll be up to see you in the morning. Afterwards, I thought it was funny he was going to bed because it was only 10 o'clock at night, but he told me it was 2 o'clock in the morning. But I thought he could probably tell time better than I could about it anyway. But he came up to see me, and he wanted me to attend a meeting there, stay there and attend the meeting Monday.
Well, I was too sick to do that, and he gave me the big book
[00:10:00]
and he gave me some literature and I went home. Well, I hadn't been home for several days, I suppose 10, 12 days. My wife is a lovely person. She's here today. But for some reason or other, when I would go to work and didn't come back for a week or so, she seemed to be a little angry at me. And there was times that she wouldn't even speak to me when I did come home. I don't know what makes wives that way.
But I had plenty of time to read the big book. And in this big book, I found two things. The first thing I found was 24 hours a day. I said to myself, that I can do. I'll do what this fella told me to, and I'll stay sober each day, and I'll go down and attend that meeting next week. The other thing that I found in the big book is that I was an alcoholic. And before that time, I didn't have any idea in the world what an alcoholic was.
I had never even thought of what an alcoholic was. But I found out from the big book that when I took one drink, that is the thing that set me off. And they tell in AA now that the first drink isn't really the other one, only the first drink. All the rest of them you take is nothing. It's just the first one. So when I came down to the meeting next Monday night, they tell me that I am a little unusual in AA.
I've had some of my friends tell me they've had a great struggle with step number one. But I didn't have a bit of trouble with step number one because I knew I was an alcoholic before I attended that meeting from the big book. And believe me, that big book, if you don't have it, goodness sakes, get it. It's a wonderful thing for a fella that will sit down and read it. That has never been in AA. And if there's any one thing that I done at that first meeting, it was this.
I believed the things that they told me down there. I thought they were telling me the truth, those boys, and of course they were. And I thought to myself, now these fellas have reached some form of sobriety here. Apparently they're not drinking anymore. One fella had quit for five or six years, and the other one had quit for three years, another one, one. There was 20 or 25 fellas at this meeting.
So I thought, well surely if I believe the same things that they believe in, if I would do the same things that they do, then surely I will reach that same place in life that they have reached. So if there's any one thing that I did by myself, it was that when I first attended the first meeting. I believed everything that those fellas told me. Now, we find out too, of course, in AA, that it's not sobriety so much.
If it had nothing to offer except sobriety, I've been sober two or three months by myself. But this is a new way of life, and it's a wonderful thing. And all of us that's been in AA know how wonderful it is. But whether we can get it over to the other fella is something else all over again. I know that I went to one of my old drinking friends. I thought, well this guy's going to be tickled to death to know about AA.
The only reason he's still drinking is he's never heard of AA. He was setting up in a hotel in his underwear in the middle of the afternoon with a quart bottle. And he said he sure was tickled that I had joined AA and quit drinking because he was worried about me. So I went to see another fella that ran a grocery store, and he was having a great deal of trouble. And he listened to what I told him. I told him I quit drinking for a time.
I said, I've joined AA. Wonderful thing. I think it'll work. When I got through, he said, well, I tell you, Sam, I've read about that organization, but it won't help me. I said, why won't it help you? He said, as I understand, it's just for people that want to quit drinking. So I was telling a friend of mine about that. This guy says, you know, there must be something wrong with that organization. He said, the drunks won't even associate with you.
And I began to think the same thing myself. But I think all of us in AA should remember this, that there's two sides to everything. No matter how thin you slice it, it'll always come up with another side. And sometimes we get a little critical. I know we do in AA. Maybe not so much critical as we do disgusted with some of these fellas. I remember one fella I went to see was an old man in the going blind and tried to hang himself.
He told me, he said, I'll tell you something, Sam. He said, my wife died some years back. I have three children. One of them I know where it is. The other two I haven't heard from. He said, it's a different situation with you. You've got something that you can quit drinking for. That You Can Quit Drinking For, He Said, I've Got Nothing But the Bottle Left, Next Morning I Went Over to See Him and I Said, I'll Tell You, I Thought About That, I Can See Your Point, I Can See That Some Fellas Have Nothing in the World Except the Bottle Left, And I Didn't Know That Before, When I Was Talking to You Last Night, I Didn't Realize, That Probably You're Right, All You Do Have Is the Bottle Left, But He Came Into AA A Number of Years Back and Has Been Alright Ever Since,
[00:15:27]
But I Know That There's Two Sides to All of Those Things, It's the Same Way, Some Guy's an Oddball, Why Is He an Oddball? Because There's More of Us Than There Is of Him, They Tell a Story About a Fellow That Came Down from Mars and Went Back, And He Said, You Know, Those Earth People Are the Funniest Looking Creatures You Ever Saw, They've Got Two Eyes in Front, They Don't Have Any Behind, They Can See Where They're Going, But They Don't Even Know Where They've Been, So Always Remember That, The Reason a Guy's an Oddball or Something, Is Because There's More of Us Than There Is of Him, Otherwise He Wouldn't Be Odd, That's What Makes It, And All of This Thing Goes Back to the Way You Think, You Take Friends, You Hear Many People Say, At Last Man Has Found a Way to Destroy Himself, He Can Drop Bombs and He Can Shoot Rockets, He Can Take an Airplane and Destroy Great Cities Now with an Atom Bomb, But the Same Airplane Can Deliver Medicine and Food, Can't It? Or It Can Deliver Bombs, It's Just the Way That Man Thinks, And I Think That's True in AA, It's the Way We Think Now, And Always Remember That the Other Guy Has a Side Too, And I Know They Say in Alcoholism, It's a Bad Disease, One of the Things the Alcoholic Has is Pride, He Don't Want to Admit that He Can't Quit Drinking, He Don't Want to be Called an AA Member, He Don't Want to be Called a Drunk, I Remember a Bar I Used to Drink in, You Get Down to this Bar about 8.30 in the Morning, And this fellow that owned it used to say, Hey you Drunks, All the Drunks line up over here single file and come buy a drink on the house, Well, some of the guys didn't get up, but most of us didn't mind being called a drunk when they'd given us a drink, and if you got back there before he closed up, it was the same thing, he always said, Hey all you Drunks line up single file down at the end of the bar and come by here and we'll give you a drink, well I was always in the line, I didn't mind being called a drunk by him because he was giving us on the way, but they say pride keeps you falling out, I liked that place so much I finally moved down to that hotel, of course I always wound up my drunks in a high class hotel, kind of like my little friend the judge from Dubuque highway, his palace hotel, a pretty high class place he says, you could rent the bridal suite for two dollars there, and you pay a dollar more they throw the bride in with it, so I always wound up in those places, but I think in AA we should be careful and not be critical of our fellow men, this happened to me over 11 years ago and I've never had a slip, which doesn't mean anything, the only thing it means is that this program will work, it will work for a fellow like me that thinks the way I think, but it may not work for somebody else, so I always think let society judge if they care to do so and the courts will of course, but in our groups and in AA as a whole we only can forgive, no matter what our members do we must forgive them for it, forgive them wholeheartedly, that is the only answer and I'm only expressing my own opinion, I don't expect you to go along if you disagree with them that's fine, but I believe like Steinbeck does, that when we reach the end of this road, shake off the dirt, there's only one question in our mind, did we do good or did we do ill, was it a good life or was it evil, there's no other question, and in the final analysis of it all, the only thing that a man can leave behind him that's worthwhile, it's not money and things like that, but it's deeds well done, thank you.
Thank you very much Sam, knowing Sam was talking about any idiot would know that if he didn't take a drink he wouldn't get drunk, he must have been talking up my alley because I was one of those people, it just never entered my mind, I was always drinking and I was always drunk,
[00:20:11]
and it wasn't until my sponsor had told me that it was the first drink that got me drunk and not the last one or the last fifth, I didn't know any better, it wasn't until I had met you people that I learned something about sobriety for a drunk, and I've heard many people say that it isn't normal for a drunk to be sober, and I agree with them wholeheartedly because it isn't normal for me to be up here speaking to you today sober, it would be normal for me to be drunk, and I'm not, because of you people and God as I understand him.
For our next speaker, I take great pleasure in introducing a lady that I met when I first came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I've seen her grow a little, and possibly she can say the same for me, but it's just been a wonderful experience, and always is when you see growth in Alcoholics Anonymous. I introduce Marion Forbes. Hi! My name is Marion Forbes and I am an alcoholic and I am so grateful I can hardly stand it.
When we started this meeting there were only a few of you, my heart wasn't pounding quite so hard then, now it's going like crazy, and one by one you all came in, and one by one I saw friends, and I thought how dear of them. There are people in this audience who could tell my story far better than I could, and they're not close to crying, and I am, out of sheer gratitude that you're here, and that I'm here.
My husband, who is also a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and who is recovering from a serious illness, is often wont to say that Mama can't talk, can't even give part of her talk in 25 minutes, in fact she can't even lose her daughter and regain her custody. So all you kids who know me real well, start praying. I don't want to leave any tag ends around, I have to tell people about after. By the grace of God and the Alcoholics Anonymous program, I have not had to drink alcohol in any form for 10 years, 2 months, 27 days, and a few hours.
I'm kind of surprised that it comes out this way, because 10 years of sobriety, for me, almost seems magical. I am not one of the people who came the first time and stayed. I came in 1946, I stayed around 6 weeks, and I went off to drink again. I have come to know that my first advent in Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought I was too good for you all. I knew I wouldn't have gotten drunk with those characters, and I sure wasn't going to get sober with them.
When I crawled back on my hands and knees after a suicide attempt in 1950, the reason I hadn't come before the suicide attempt was because I was sure you were too good for me, and there wouldn't be a place here. And in 4 years, this is what had happened. But most specifically, what had happened was in the last 6 months of my drinking. Unlike many alcoholics, I fought booze when suddenly it became a problem.
It never occurred to me until I'd been on this program for a little while that really, there had never been anything wrong with me. I thought I was one of the people that the book describes as being affable and strong. The only thing wrong with me was that I drank too much. And so for years, I fought booze. I kept thinking that I would recapture that effervescence that I had always been sure that I had had.
I kept knowing that I would get the fun back. But it always depended on what I was doing. I kept thinking that I would recapture that effervescence that I had always been sure that I had had. I kept knowing that I would get the fun back. But it always depended on circumstances.
[00:25:03]
I would marry again, and I would have some more children, and then I would be the pillar of society, and then I'd be all right, and I wouldn't drink the way I had come to be drinking. Or I would get a new job, and then I'd be all right. And when I had a job and I was single, I wished I was married. And when I was married, I wished I had a job and I was single. I was never content with anything, and I was always sure that if only I wasn't living in the circumstances that I was now in, everything would be all right, and I would drink again the way I had drunk in the past.
But I fought alcohol the last years of my life. I fought it intensely. The last six months of my drinking were the difficult parts because all the things happened to me that I had known never would happen. For instance, I'd always been sure that I would never have a problem with losing days. I had heard about other people losing days. In fact, two of my husbands were the kind of people who lost days.
They lost days away from home. They would lose them for maybe a week or ten days at a time. And they would come home and say, I don't know where I've been. And I would say, how absurd. This is an excuse. And I would privately say, what's wrong with me? When my first husband did it, it was dreadful because my ego was crushed. When my second husband did it, I thought there must be something terribly wrong with me.
And of course, as a woman, I couldn't stand the pain. The rejection was hideous. I began in those last six months of my drinking to lose days. I never went out of my house. I quit driving my car. I didn't get into the kind of trouble because I was terrified. But I would not know what day it was. I would pass out on a day that I thought was a Tuesday. And when I came to, it might not be Tuesday, but then I couldn't remember whether it was Tuesday that I passed out on.
This was terrifying to me because I had said it could never happen. And I could never believe anybody else. I had never blamed myself for the things that had gone wrong in my life. I blamed my parents. I blamed my husband. I blamed my employers. Deep down inside of me, I always knew that if something different had happened, then I would have been all right. And the last six months of my drinking, I blamed myself.
When I came here and they told me to take an inventory, I realized what I had been doing for six months was taking an inventory. But all I'd been doing was chalking up the black marks against me. My case against me was so dreadful that finally one day I could not stand the pain any longer and I took the pills. I've been here in AA a very short time. In fact, such a short time that I am amazed that I seem to grasp as much as I did about other people.
They told me that if I wanted what they had and was willing to go to any lengths to get it, then I was ready to take certain steps. Well, I wanted what they had, but I didn't know how to do the steps, and so I went around asking people, what should I do? And everybody had a different idea, and so I did what everybody said. But one day I woke up and I realized what was the sickest about me was that I had inside me churning a ball of guilt that seemed to be so mixed up with me that I was afraid I might not stay sober.
And by now I wanted this program more than I wanted my next breath. And so I went to my doctor that day, and he said, And by now I wanted this program more than I wanted my next breath. And so I went to my doctor that day, and I told him all the things that were wrong with me. I told him all the things that I had done through my lifetime. I explained why I had been walking around with this awful feeling of guilt.
And after I was all through, he said to me, Now that you've gotten rid of the surface guilt, think about you and think about your life. He was not a psychiatrist, but he was a man who loved alcoholics and honest. And that was how finally I came to be able to understand a little bit about why I was like I was. And I think the case for women is something different than the case for men. I had been reared from the time I was a tiny child to care about other people's opinion.
I had heard from the time I was a tiny child that a lady does not do this and a lady does not do this. A lady behaves thusly. You must never do this and you must never do that. What would people think? this and you must never do that. What would people think? And somewhere along the line, what people thought became so much more important to me than anything that I ever thought. Plus
[00:30:05]
the fact that when I was a child, I was the apple of my parents' eye and everybody adored me and suddenly my parents lost me up and had another child and that child was an invalid and all the love and attention that I had was focused on somebody else. And there I was suddenly indicted by the people who had loved me the most. And instead of my childish mind being able to accept what it really was, I was sure that I was to blame. And I can see in all my pattern of drinking through the years that I worked all my life to win the approval of other people. By the time I was in high school, I was two personalities.
I had a wall out here against the hostility that I was already sure there was in the world and inside me, I was a person who was frightened and alone. Well, of course, I had not even found alcohol and by the time I found booze, this thing got worse. The wall of self-protection through the years against hostility, against opinion, against what people thought, against the kind of people who were, you know, saying, My dear, but why do you drink? You're so lovely when you don't. People like this, I eliminated. The wall got thicker and I got more scared inside because things were happening without any seeming control on my part. I had no control of what was happening to me. I would always have a choice of which road I would take and inevitably it seemed like I picked the wrong road. And it seemed like I did it without control. This is what happened in my first marriage. I lost the custody of my child in divorce action when we'd been married five years. At 25 years old, my life was completely finished and before I was 30, I'd tried suicide and before I was 30, I'd been in my first hospital for alcoholism. It didn't stop me. I blamed other people. I could not see that this had anything to do with me. The thing I was looking for in the bottle all those years I found in Alcoholics Anonymous. I came on this program expecting nothing except a way to learn how to live in contented sobriety. This they promised me. Contentment to me was a word that was ugly. I was too young. I spent all my life to be contented. That's for later.
Let's have some excitement now. Let's have the fun. And when they said contented after I'd gotten here, the idea seemed peaceful. It seemed quiet. It seemed restful. It seemed everything that really down deep inside of me I wanted. And so I began to live in contented sobriety. I would like to tell you that I have had a peaceful time for these over ten years. I have not. Everything I've learned, I've learned the hard way. I've been a kid who's had to bat my head against the wall to learn every lesson that ever was. I have went back east three times to try to make amends to my daughter, and three times the door slammed firmly in my face. But each time I learned something. And the last time I came back I said, OK, God, if this is the way it's going to be and I'm never going to have anything to do with her life, then let me have a lot of young babies so that I can do something with this enormous feeling of maternal complex that I have. I've got to put this love someplace.
Can I put it with some youngsters? And within a week I had a baby, 19 years old, who had slashed her wrists. And just to make things add up, my daughter at that point was 19, and both of their names were Jerry. And this was coming pretty close for comfort. On my daughter's, around my daughter's 20th birthday, when I was not quite five years sober, one night her father called me and asked me to come and get her. I said, is she dinking?
And I don't know where this came from. And he said, well, what's that got to do with it? She's in trouble. Come and get her. And so I went to New York. I went to New York in fear because I was scared of rebuff, but I went to New York in confidence because one of my sponsors had said, you've gone each time before on your own. This time you didn't plan this. It's come from God. And he said, follow the script. And I put my hand firmly in God's, and we went to New York. And three weeks later, my kid came home with me. Every time before, I'd expected her to say, mother. And she'd said, how do you do? This time I expected her to say, how do you do? And she said, mother. And it was marvelous. It wasn't always easy. She was a practicing alcoholic at the age of 20. But on February the following year, February 25th, five years ago, my daughter joined Alcoholics Anonymous. And because God is like this in the God of AA, he let me carry the message to my daughter. I was the one who spoke the night that she identified herself with this program. You who are mothers know what this meant to me. We tried very hard to find a mother-daughter relationship,
[00:35:05]
Jerry and I, and it was too hard to start with her 20 and the years between. But what we did find was a wonderful AA relationship, and it's grown into a mother-daughter relationship. I've been married for almost eight years to a man named Anthony Forbes, who has had an exciting time. He was retired when we married. He was on AA. And he decided he would go back to school and get a degree. He's just finished his degree, and it's not been easy, but he has done that one thing that I think all alcoholics can be grateful for. He started something he finished. I must tell you that I live only in, I only bask in this from here because I have watched him do it. He seemed to me hard, but he did it. Then my daughter married a man in AA, a guy that I like real well who has a wonderful program, and then we have two grandchildren. The oldest, the older I should say, is very much like Jerry and very much like me. We think she's an alcoholic. She's not quite two. But you know how surprising it is after you've been sober for a while, you get so you can watch those things grow.
The characteristics are terrific, and I'm just sure we're going to have her. In fact, I'm so sure we're going to have her that my husband said last Christmas he thought it was about time for us to start High Chair Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. This all has been exhilarating and exciting. It's happened without anything I've done seemingly, and I'm sure that you know that this is the way this program works. When we want something real bad, it seems like it's not something that's right for us. But when we give up wanting something, it seems like it happens. My Al-Anon friends call this release and let go. I've had a hard time learning it. It seems like I learned it pretty good for all of you, but I don't learn it so well with the people close to me. And yet, over this last year, I have learned what it means to release and let go. All of this has been terribly important, but the most important thing always to me is what's been going on inside of me. Because all of this is so important, but it's a result. The important thing is what goes on here every day. What's happening to me every day in the thing that they promised me in AA, which is spiritual progress? Some days I don't see much. Other days it seems like I've taken a giant step. Sometimes I seem to be standing terribly still and I'm afraid I'll go backwards.
Sometimes it seems that I'm galloping. There have been times during the last ten years, not recently, but during the last ten years, where I've been frightened and wondered, where has my program gone? Have I lost it? Was I kidding myself? What's happened? And I may have had this panic for two or three days, but because of the wisdom of the people in AA and because of the cherished tradition of sharing our experience, strength, and hope, I have never gone very long without help. It's amazing to me that I, who could never talk my business to anybody and who could never ask help from anybody, have not only learned to talk my whole business to everybody, but to take help from anybody. I used to think I could only get it from the people who were beyond me, my teachers, people who'd been here when I came. And I found this year that I was getting help from the young ones on the program who are very wise too. I've stopped thinking that we have to act as though when we get to this age on the program, we don't have any problems for the new ones. I find that it's a very good idea to tell the newer members that we don't get all that spiritual and that there are days when we have problems and that there are days when we face things in areas of our lives where we're not as grown up as in other areas. I'm grateful that I can share this with newcomers because I used to put people way up there on a pedestal and when they did one small thing, crash, they came down and I lived to resent them. I don't want anybody to feel this way about me. It's a marvelous thing to know that we're all in the process of growing up, that we're all in the process of trying to be better members of AA, that actually our own personal progress is a matter of recovery and that we are put on this earth to help each other in our growth. I believe that God puts us in a position to be helpful and to be helped. I think of it as a giant jigsaw puzzle. I used to be an
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ugly old nasty big piece forcing my way in places and I was always getting hurt and people were always being hurt and we were always at swords points. And now I like to think of me as a tiny little weeny piece where when I drop in maybe I bless a few people around me but I'm the one who gets blessed. I used to think if I did something for you, you would do something for me back. And so I would chart what I would do for you. I would plan something perfectly lovely and you would do something perfectly lovely for me in return. At least you'd be under obligation to me and then that would make me happy. I have learned on this program that I not only cannot expect anything from anybody, including consideration, but what I put forth in love always comes back to me but not always from where I thought it would come. In other words, that wonderful thing that all of history has known. Do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And if we're so busy doing unto others all the time, pretty soon we forget the having them do unto us bit and everything showers down upon us. I'm one of the beamers. I'm a kid that they call a beamer. In fact, I think it was my lovely Jules Pilcher who when he was brand new and couldn't stand any of us named three of us the beamers. I'm one of the beamers and I know that every once in a while people come on this program and they say, that woman irritates me to death.
She can't be real. Well, I am. But don't forget that for 39 years I walked this way in self-condemnation and self-loathing. I hated myself. In fact, every day of my life I told me how I hated me looking in the mirror. AA took away the pain, took away the self-loathing, gave me a little confidence, gave me a program to grow on. And you know now I can look in the mirror and say, I'm not always with you, kid. I don't always understand you, but you're getting to be the kind of person I'd like for a friend. God bless you all.
Thank you very much, Marion. You know, when Marion talks about these beamers, I can't help but think about it because it brings me right back to those days. And I also think of the important part of Alcoholics Anonymous. We share our experience, strength, and hope with each other. And I know you people were doing all the sharing with me when I first came into AA because I was one of those people who was just extremely obnoxious. When I'd see beamers, I'd swear under my breath. I couldn't stomach the thought of people laughing and smiling and be happy when I was so sick and when I was hurting so bad. It just didn't make sense to me. I wanted no part of you people, but you people had something that I needed. One thing. You had sobriety. And irrespective of what I thought or felt inside, when I walked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw sobriety in that room. And I had to take it because there was no place else to go. And I'll tell you just a little something. I had been physically dry for three weeks at this time. And this lady made the mistake of asking me to speak and tell these people at a fairly large meeting just what it was like to be sober for three weeks. And I got up there and I said, I hate every darn one of you people out there. I hate Alcoholics Anonymous and I hate people, period. But if you'll just get off my back, just leave me alone. I'll keep coming back to meetings.
I'll keep drinking water because there's no place else to go. Now I don't feel that way now. But I've had to do a lot of beating into this thick skull of mine to make me change my mind. But once that had happened, I've had no trouble with this program. Once I became an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous, everything became wonderful.