The Agnostic’s Guide to Chapter 5 – Bill S.

Good morning. Can you believe it? We're all awake on a Sunday morning and not a hangover in the house. My name is Bill Sanders, and I am an alcoholic. By the grace of God, I'm sober this morning, and that's the single most important thing that I'll share with you in this time we have together this morning, that it is by the grace of a loving God and his gift of you to me that I have awakened without a hangover for the last 5,896 mornings. Now, I don't want y'all to sit here for the next hour trying to figure that out, so So that computes to July 26, 1982. And I thank God every day of my life for that because you see, I stand before you a miracle. And it's not so much a miracle that I haven't taken a drink in those many days. The miracle is that I have a drink. I havenít wanted one. And most days of my wife and sobriety, I have not wanted a drink now. Some of you know that Iíve spent most of my live in the broadcasting business and broadcasting business, they have commercials. And I've got a little commercial this morning for this little pill. Now, if y'all have heard about this little pill or not, this little bill, if you take this little pill, according to what I saw on 60 Minutes or Dateline or one of those, you're supposed to be able to drink normally. An alcoholic can take this little pillow and drink normally, and that's marvelous. And, and I got to thinking about the possibilities of this little pills. If I took this this little pill, I wouldn't have to go to all those meetings. And if I took this little pill, I wouldn�t have to call my sponsor all those times I called. And, if I took this little pill I wouldn �t have go to weekends like this and have a good time. If I took this his little pill, I wouldn't have to laugh near as much. And nah. Now sit down. Don't go crawling around on the floor. That's a breath mint. did that one place and about six people I tell you Patty hit it on the head Friday night I know how y'all get people sober in Jackson you sweat it out of them but see in sobriety I have learned to come prepared now don't y' all notice I got a jacket on Rusty I look pretty good this morning don't i kathleen okay here it goes gotta go gotta go I'm ready for you. You see, I was a nut when I was drinking. And to my delight, I found out I can stay a nut sober. I have made up my mind a long time ago I never had any intentions of growing up. That way I don't have to decide what I'm going to be when I grow up. I'm going to leave it to God. Sobriety is fun. Now, I came here with the belief that my fun days were over. No more fun. I came here to quit hurting. I come here to learn to somehow not drink and just exist. And I think most of us to one degree or another did that when we came to Alcoholics Anonymous. None of us could have possibly dreamed of the goodies that were in store for us. You know, this question of how free do you want to be would not have translated to my brain at all. I wouldn't have understood that at all, but I'm very fortunate that I had a sponsor who understood what I was the minute I walked into the doors of Alcoholics synonymous, like most of us. And one of his favorite lines was, I want all of the goodies, all of them. Of course, he also told me the thing that all of us have heard is how do you get to be an old timer in AA when you don't drink and you don' t die? And he hadn' t drank and he hadn't died for a long time. And he had a lot of goodies in his life. I never saw him when he wasn' t smiling and happy. And he was free. He was free from the bondage of alcoholism. Now I spoke a year or two ago to a rather large gathering of alcoholics who were in a prison in a state not too far from here. And I shared with those fellows that, you know, most of them within a few years were going to walk out of that prison free. But whether or not they were going to truly be free or not was going to be determined by their commitment to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You see, I lived in a prison for years, the bars of which were a lot tougher than those of any prison that man has ever built. I heard it said beautifully one time that the chains of alcoholism were too soft to be felt until they were too strong to be broken and that was certainly the case with me. Whose line is that Patty? Polly's isn't it, I think. I gotta give credit one more time if I repeat it again, it'll be mine. But I didn't come here looking for any of that. I just came here because as Bob and Kathleen and I were sharing the other night, I came here not with a fear of dying but with a fear continuing to live the way I was living. Dying, the thought of dying didn't bother me. It seemed like a very distinct possible out for where I was, but my drinking career began at the age of 15, but today I can tell you I know my disease started a long time before that. I happen to be one of those alcoholics that believes that I was born an alcoholic. At the age 15, I mixed booze in with the disease and became a full-blown raging drunk. Now I could begin my story at the age of 15 but I'm not. I'm going to begin my story at my very earliest memory because from my very early memory I felt like a square peg looking for a round hole and all, I never fit. I never belonged. I never felt like I fit in anywhere. Always struggling to be accepted. Now the kids I grew up with we said that's ridiculous. Billy Sanders was a member of everything that came down the pike, that's true. Joined every club, church, school, scouts you name it I joined it belonged to nothing. I could be in the middle of a crowd and felt like I was an outsider looking in. Lonely feeling and I was to carry that lonely feeling for years and years and years and years, be in the middle of a crowd of people and felt alone. The age of 15 though one Saturday night some people, some of my peers said you want to go across the river from Georgia into South Carolina we lived in a dry County kind of like Andy last night do you want to go get some beer? And so we crossed over the Savannah River from Georgia into South Caroline and there was a little beer joint over there that you could pull around behind it and honk the horn three times. A guy had come out and if you could see over the steering wheel, he'd sell it to you. And someone bought a case of beer and we went back and sat down on the banks of the old muddy Savannah River and someone popped open one of those beers and handed it to me and I took a great big slug of it and it was beyond a shadow of a doubt the most vile, putrid, god-awful tasting stuff I had ever put in my mouth. I didn't feel anything, Paddy. It just and but I wasn't gonna let them know because they obviously thought something was great about this stuff so I just kept going you know but between about the second and the third beer it happened all of a sudden fear evaporated All of a sudden, little Billy Sanders wasn't afraid anymore. And in that instant I became smarter, wittier, handsomer, sexier than I had ever been in my entire life or anybody I'd ever known in my life. And at that moment I knew that I had found a buddy in that can. Tasted terrible, but boy did it do good stuff. Now I have to say here that I thought for the next nearly 25 years that everybody who ever picked up a drink number one got the same effect I did and number two drank for the same reason that I did. I now know that they don't which which may explain something that I will go to my grave not understanding. I will never, as long as I live, if I live to be 150, understand the concept of a drink. The two words don't even go together. other. One drink. Why? Maybe a real big drink, you know. And I don't understand those people and never will that say, no, no more for me. I'm beginning to feel it. that ain't where you stop that's where you start i don't get it i mean and and i'm not ever going to get it but you see they're not ever gonna get me either they're not going to understand you know my my first sponsor used to talk about the guy who stood holding a bottle in his hand talking to it you know that's not unusual i talked about bottles for years you know but he stands talking to his bottle and he says you took my wife you took my car you took the children you took me house she took my job you took myself respect but I'm gonna give you one more chance that's insane and yet that's what we kept doing and kept doing and kept only this time it'll be different no it won't you know I thank God in my sobriety for those people who relapse I am I'm so grateful to you people who come walking back into this room, in rooms like this, and say, Oh God, does it ever get worse? Or as my old buddy Jimmy Smith in Georgia says, Worse-er. And he said, Don't ever say it can't get worse-er, because it will. And I'm grateful to You people who've come back in, because you see, my intellect tells me that in nearly 16 years, I have gained infinite amount of knowledge about alcoholism. about this disease and about what it can do. I've learned so much about the physical and the spiritual and the mental and the emotional and all of those aspects of alcoholism. I ought to be able to go back out there and control it. And just as my mind cranks up thinking about that, some guy comes back in. And about a month earlier, I'd heard him talking about thinking he could go out there and control It. and I say thank you God see God gives me all kinds of little messages when I need them and I'm so grateful for those and I'M GRATEFUL TO HAVE EYES OPEN TODAY THAT I CAN SEE THOSE LITTLE MESSAGES THAT I GET I STILL HAVE AN EGO THAT GETS OUT OF HAND SOMETIMES A FEW YEARS AGO I GOT THE THE MOST WONDERFUL PHONE CALL I'VE EVER GOTTEN IN MY LIFE THEY CALLED AND ASKED ME TO COME SPEAK AT FOUNDERS DAY IN AKRON OHIO AND OF COURSE MY EGO WENT WHOOSH RIGHT OUT THROUGH the roof. I thought they had the wrong guy but you know they kept insisting that they didn't and so I went and as I laid out on the lawn outside that great big sports arena on the campus of Akron University and I watched the what they told me was like 18,000 people gathering in for that that great thing and you know I'm you know lying there on the grass and I'm I'm going home kind of all these people coming to hear me speak and geez wow look how far you have have come. And I'm smiling and waving at all these people. And about that time, a little bird flew overhead and pooped right there on my shoulder. And I said, thank you, God. I needed that. God sends me little messages all along. God sent me messages when I was drinking. All through my drinking career, he sent me messages. You you know, some of them I had to get sober for it to soak in. For example, let me get you to think about something that I thought about in sobriety. In all of the hundreds, maybe thousands of bars that I drank in, I never had a single bartender say, you keep coming back and it'll get better. That was a little message from God, but I didn't get it. I didn'T drink that much in high school as a kid because I grew up in a very, very, very small town in the hills of North Georgia. Now some of you who grew up in small towns will understand what I'm about to say. There ain't no anonymity in a small town. Zero! Everybody knows everybody else's business. But then a couple years later, I graduated from high school and went off to college. And And I suddenly, nobody cared how much little Billy Sanders drank. Nobody paid any attention. I started, I found, discovered hard liquor and a lot of it was quicker and some of it even tasted better. And I was off and running, a rip-roaring, raging drunk. Now, I hear so many people talk about their wonderful memories of their college career. I wish to God I could tell you all this wonderful stuff about my college career, but I was beginning by then to suffer from what I have heard referred to in my hometown as I grew up as spells. Y'all called them blackouts. 1962, that was a blackout. Oh remember remember that year i do know i got into a lot of trouble though in college god just constantly in trouble there was an old dean of men there at the university of georgia named bill tate god rest his soul and i i love the man dearly today i didn't back then because he threatened me with everything in the world he had and for some reason that old man was determined that i was going to walk off that campus with a diploma in my hand and so he got constantly had me in his office and I you know I crazy things I did but I want to get be a part of a grand tradition at the University of Georgia there's a great tradition at the University Georgia that after every victory of the football team the Georgia wins every time they you know come beat Ole Miss or every time they beat Auburn or LSU or they have a tradition of ringing the chapel bell at the university. And it's an old bell up in the tower of the chapel, and it's a great honor to be a bell ringer. They ring it at 15-minute intervals, and your name goes into a roster. That roster is ensconced forever in the library of the University of Georgia, and it's tremendous honor. It goes all the way back to the turn of the century. You can go back and look after such and such a game. Such and such person rang the chapel bell, and I rang that chapel bell. My name's not in that roster. Now as they, as they explained it to me it had something to do with the fact that I was ringing that Bell at 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday. In case some of you are not real big football fans, the season's pretty well over by then. That's the kind of crazy things I did. A lot of insanity was already there and a lot something else that was happening was the personality change that takes place and a friend of mine and I were visiting in another friend's apartment at about two or three o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night and my personality change had started and I I was going into my blithering idiot stage. And I started clowning around. I looked up on the wall in the apartment, and the guy whose apartment it was had an old antique gun collection worth probably $10,000 or $20,000. He was real proud of his gun collection. I reached up and grabbed down one of the old long-barrel Colt .22 pistols and started waving it around and acting like Matt Dillon or Wyatt Earp. Pointed at my roommate and said, stick him up. He threw up his hands and surrendered, and I pulled the trigger. and there was a sound like thunder, and in a moment my roommate was lying on the floor in front of me in a pool of blood. They were to tell us a few hours later at a local hospital that my roommate would live but that he would never walk again. The bullet had severed his spine. A very strange thing happened in the early hours of the next morning in a hospital room in Athens, Georgia. My roommate reached up from a hospital room bed and put his hand on my arm and said Bill for God's sake don't blame yourself it was an accident could just as easily have been the other way around. Don't blame yourselves. He forgave me immediately but I didn't forgive myself for more than 20 years because you see I didn t know how. It was not until you people gave me the wonder and the magic and the power of the fourth, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth step that I was able to find forgiveness and find peace and to find release. Unfortunately that was to be many years in coming and the only answer I had then was to crawl deeper into the bottle and live. Not long after that, I reached the point where there weren't enough drinks and not enough bottles so I set a plan into motion to pull the the plug, started going to the university infirmary and telling them I was having trouble sleeping, seeing alternating doctors on alternating days. And I got quite a supply of sleeping pills and took them back and put them in the nightstand drawer in my dormitory room and waited till one Friday afternoon when my new roommate was headed home to show his brand new car he'd bought to his family, first new car you'd ever owned. And i stood in the dormitORY window and i watched him pull out out of the parking lot and up the hill and head out of town. And I put the plan into motion. I emptied all the little bottles out onto the nightstand of what was later determined to be between 50 and 60 sleeping pills, and one by one, two by two, swallowed them down, turned out the lights, and pulled up the cover. And for more than 20 years, I believe that it was a huge coincidence. Love that word. A huge coincidence that my roommate's brand new car conked out at the city limits of Athens, Georgia and had to be towed back to the dealership. And he came back into that dormitory room and found me, saw the pills or the pill bottles, knew the frame of mind I'd been in and called an ambulance. I say coincidence because I don't believe in coincidences anymore. I love the definition I heard in this fellowship that a coincidence is a miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous. I believe today that was the first of many times that the God you people introduced me to looked down and said big boy I'm not through with you yet. And I don't know for what purpose I'm still here. I do know that through the years of my drinking with all of the total cars and the insane behavior in the crazy places that I ended up, I should not be here but I am. Ido know that if I stay sober and I stick with you people maybe Maybe I'll be in the right place at the right time for whatever purpose God has in mind. Incidentally, my roommate's car, when they got it back to the dealership and unhooked it from the wrecker, cranked the first time and every time thereafter. Go figure. Well, they of course took me to the hospital, pumped out my stomach, and they decided I needed help. Now sometimes when I share in other parts of the country or in Canada or Patty in California, something like that, I have to do a little explaining of something that I know I don't have to explain to you people. I have explained the difference in the word help, H-E-L-P and HEP, H-E-P. Help means that you require some assistance. Help means you in deep doo-doo and I needed help so they started sending me to shrinks. Now through the years that were to come I don't know how many of those those people that my family paid for me to go visit and how many I saw, we lost track along the way. But one of them was a very famous one. And I really didn't know it at the time until I started going. But he and his partner had written a book. And it was a book about a woman who had three personalities. It was called The Three Faces of Eve. And at about the time I was seeing them, they came out with a movie about it. And hit one best picture of the year. Joanne Woodward got best actress for it and like i said it was about a woman who had three personalities and i didn't get the big deal if i could get my personalities down to three you see i have these conventions that go on up here in my head and they meet and they vote and they argue and they discuss they decide whether bill's supposed supposed to have a drink or not and if I'm supposed to do this or do that and I just sit and listen while they go there's a funny thing I've discovered though that the closer I stick to you people and the more meetings I go to and the most steps I work those voices get softer and they get quieter but and and and you know I can almost at times not even hear those voices And if I go four or five days, get too caught up in my own self-importance and don't have time to go to a meeting. I go for five days without a meeting, you hear the chairman say, call the order. See, they don't want me to go To meetings. They don't Want me to be around you people. and there's a funny little thing that they do that it scares the hell out of me, and that is they got this little deal going where every meeting that I miss makes missing the next one easier. And it don't take about a week for them to convince me I don't need their meetings. I'm doing great, and they're cheering, and they're applauding, and then they're jumping up and down happy, and I'm going friggin nuts. I can't listen to those voices. I got to listen to you, but back then those voices were just all the time. Well, I eventually did exit the University of Georgia. I did it with a diploma in my hand. I don't know if I earned it or not, or if they just got tired of me making trouble and ringing bells and just said, here, get him out of here. But I've gotten used to that diploma hanging around my house the last 30 years and I ain't going to give it back. So I'm, you know. I ended up in another town in North Georgia and went to work with a radio station there. And I met a beautiful girl, fell in love in very short order, knew that I probably need to cut down on my drinking if I wanted this woman to be a part of my life. Discovered after a few dates, I didn't need to do any such thing. That woman liked to drink just as much as I did. And we were off and running, and in a few months, we were married, and she became my first wife. And boy, were we a pair. We lived to drink in the bar. We'd get off work. She'd get off work at five o'clock every afternoon from her bookkeeping job. I'd get off the six o' clock news at 630 and run out of the studio, jump in the car, swing by the house, pick her up, and we'd head out to the private club we were a member of them start drinking and we drink till we close the place one two o'clock in the morning. We'd go home next morning get up and go to work now you know most people when they get up the next morning after they've tied one on person at the next desk or across the hall or something like that might be able to look at him see if you had a pretty wild night last night. Wasn't that way with me I had to sign a radio station on there at six o' clock in the morning and sound cheerful. If you don't know what hell is, hell's trying to sound cheerful at 6 o'clock in the morning when your mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage and your head feels like the Russian Army did maneuvers on it the night before. It was then that I first learned how to pray. I'd get that first record started, turn that volume down on that speaker just as low as I could get it, get that microphone off and put my arm over and say, oh dear God, thank you, this ain't television. I'd never have pulled it off on TV. My radio audiences never knew how many newscasts they heard me read lying flat on my back on the floor, microphone down on my face reading the news. Only way I could get the room to quit going boom, boom, had lots of crazy experiences. I'll share one of them with you. I was working at a radio station in Atlanta and the news director came came in one day and said, Bill, grab your tape recorder, get in a mobile unit, head to the Dinkler Plaza Hotel downtown Atlanta. You got to go down there and do an interview. Everybody else is out on assignment. Well, I was a young reporter. You know, I wasn't that experienced as an interviewer. But I said, okay, great. I grabbed the tape recorder. He handed me some credentials and stuff. I said who am I going to interview? He said you're going to be an interviewer with Lyndon Johnson. I get in the car and I start from the studio down to the hotel in in downtown Atlanta. I said, I can't, I got to have a drink if I'm going to do this. So I stopped at a local pub and I had a couple of drinks and I got back in the unit, went down there, got off, went into the hotel, rode up on the elevator to this floor they had sealed off and I was greeted by the Secret Service guys and they did their thing and checked my credentials and my tape recorder and everything else. And then I was ushered into this suite and walked into this room and this giant of a man came walking over and just kind of engulfed my hand in his and said, son come on in sit down. He's a big man. And I sat down and I'm sitting at this little, we're looking at each other across this little coffee table and sitting there in the middle of the table are two glasses and a bottle he said how about a little bourbon here before we get started? It's kind of good to me. He poured him a glass and me a glass. We started drinking and we started talking. Now I should explain it to you when you're going to interview the President in the United States, you don't just turn on tape recorder and start interviewing. You've got to do a pre-interview interview. You got to tell him what you're going to ask him so that he can tell you whether he's going to answer it or not. They don't do that as much anymore as Patty they used to, but Lyndon Johnson was big on that. No surprises. So we're having a pre interview interview and we're just sipping bourbon. Every time I take about three swallows, he fills that glass back up again. And we're going along there just talking and talking and talking, and suddenly it occurs to me my god this man is drunker than you are. Finally I started the tape recorder we started the interview and I did great. I did a great interview went along just as smooth as silk until I got to the point where I asked him a question about his wife ladybug. Thank God he thought it was funnier than y'all did. That's the kind of crazy things I used to do in my drinking career. My wife came home one day and said, guess what? We're going to have a baby. And over the next nine months we talked about the fact that when this child came we need to clean up our act and we need to become responsible parents and and we did when that child came my wife and I became absolute model parents we changed diapers and we made formula and we did 2 a.m. feedings and we fed and burped and all the wonderful stuff of parenthood and it was absolutely wonderful and we did that for God I don't know two maybe three weeks and then we discovered the great American institution of the babysitter and we were right back out there in the bars. I know today that that was the beginning of the end of that marriage, that was... I hear people talk about that their marriages didn't survive because of problems of communication and I can tell you tonight or this morning, where am I? Oh, that communication was not our problem. You could ask our neighbors three doors down the street and they tell you the Sanders communicate, they could tell you what we we were communicating about. And our communication sessions were pretty simple. I could hang in there with the best of them until it became apparent that I was on the losing end, and then I'd always go to plan B. Now you fellas know what plan B is. Plan B, you grab the bottle, storm out the back door, slam the door, get in the car, peel up the driveway, out of here. I don't have to stay here listen to this crap. Over and over and over again that happened with my wife and me. One Sunday afternoon we got into a discussion, no way I could lose this one, and I would just get win this one hands down. Ten minutes in, I'm losing plan B, grab the bottle storm out the back door up the driveway out of here just like a hundred other Sunday afternoons only difference this Sunday the afternoon I still had my pajamas on. Well, my wife did what any sweet, loving, caring, thoughtful wife would do. She sent a friend to come get me and bring me home. The only thing wrong with that picture is the friend happened to be a police captain. And he found me sitting in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn minding my own business, talking to my bottle. And he suggested I get out of my car and get into the squad car with him that he'd take me home and I told him that he could. I said, no thank you. Then he started talking about his relative size to mine, about his Marine Corps wrestling medals he'd won, and the more he talked, the more it made sense. I might want to think about going with him. I was drunk, I was not stupid. I also wasn't so drunk I knew in about two turns we weren't heading toward my house. In about two more turns I knew where we were headed because he pulled into the emergency room parking lot of a local hospital. And before I could say a word of protest, he had me out of that squad car into that hospital upstairs in a room, checked in, laid out, zip, blap, just like that. You will not believe how fast you can get checked in the hospital when you already got your pajamas on. They said it was something about public relations. You know, a drunk sitting in the lobby with a vodka bottle under his arm and his pajama. It just don't look good, you know. Checked out of the hospital three weeks later. Learned anything? No. Drunk before the sun went down. Not long after that my wife and I did The Great American Alcoholic Cure. We moved. We move back to Atlanta and over the next few years that were to come, we moved all around. People ask me today what part of Atlanta have you lived in? I said all of them. You know because I would always hear if you live over there in Dunwoody, the cost of living is better, the housing is better. The people are nicer and so we'd move Dunwoodey and just as we get there it had changed. Now it's over here. So we'd spend a few months and then pack up and move over there. I wish I had known what an old timer told me right after I got to AA because it saved me a ton of moving money. And what he told me was that no matter where I go, there I am. And the very thing I was trying to get away from, I was keeping up with. Now, I had the ideal American family. Beautiful wife, beautiful little blue-eyed blonde haired girl, a great job. But you see my disease called alcoholism had outfitted me with something that I didn't know about and that I couldn't see. It was a set of blinders and those blinders didn't allow me to see what was going on around me. Those blinders did not allow me to see that when I didn't come back from one of those long liquid lunches that I'd go on, that it suited the people who worked for me just fine. Because you see while the guy who came in in the morning was capable of being a pretty nice guy, the one who came back after one of Those long liquid lunches was a different person. He was forgetful, he was argumentative, he was judgmental and at times downright mean. Those blinders didn't allow me to see that. Those blinders did not allow me to see that by now my beautiful little blue-eyed blonde-haired girl who's by now five or six years old doesn't invite friends over to spend the night because she never knows when dad's going to come home in the middle of the night in a drunken rage smashing furniture, planting his foot through television screens, screaming, yelling, dragging her out of the bed at three o'clock in the morning demanding that she clean up a drop of milk on the kitchen cabinet or some other insane. Of course, I would never remember any of those things. I'd wake up the next morning with this ominous feeling something had happened but my wife would fill in all the details and missing pieces for me. And I'm saying I did not, could not, would not. Of course, what I'm that is she is withdrawing my shoe from the television picture tube. Then I'd go downstairs and sitting in the dining room hovering down low over a bowl of cereal would be that little blue-eyed blonde haired girl hoping not to be noticed and I'd go over to her and say Karen you and dad need to take a walk and I take her by the hand and go walking out down the sidewalk from our house and say sweetheart mom told me what I did last night dragging you out of bed at three o'clock in the morning and making you clean up a drop of milk on the kitchen cabinet all the time telling you how stupid and dumb and clumsy you are and I'm sorry and I want you to know that it's never ever ever ever gonna happen again and those blinders did not allow me to see that there was not a flicker of belief in that little girl's eyes because we had taken too many walks and she had heard too many lies and too many empty promises and she wasn't buying it anymore I was a traveling drunk had to travel a lot in my work I do things like oh yeah I'd have a convention to go to in New York and I'd go out the Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta and I go in and of course I had to have a couple of drinks before I got on that plane I'd going to bar and sit down order a couple of drinks. Only problem is sometimes I forget to get on the plane. Y'all have heard those commercials that say Delta is ready when you are? Nah, they'll leave you. So I do what ain't a good drunk dude. Just get on another plane, go somewhere else. Call home that night. Family say, how's things in New York? I don't know. I'm not in New Yorke. Where are you? I'm in New Orleans. You know how I knew I was in New Orleans? Because I opened the nightstand drawer of that rinky-dink little motel I was in, and on the phone book cover it said New Orleans. That's how I knew where I was. I woke up in a lot of strange places. Don't know high in the world I got there. I walk up in lots of strange beds with a lot of strange people. I didn't know who they were or why they had brought me me there. It's all right, Patty, I'll wait. You act like you know what I'm talking about, honey. And of course, there's all the rituals of us drunks, getting up in the morning and And going with a lot of fear and looking out the window to see if your car is there. And if it's not, trying to piece together in your mind where you've been the night before so you can go back and get it. The only thing worse is looking out in the morning and part of your car isn't there. And you don't know where the rest of it is. And the loneliness. The loneliness was getting worse and worse and worst. and i used to drink in i have to remind myself of this today i used my early business career i used a drink in fancy places you know the deep pile carpet and the bar that had the big leather rail around it big thick leather and and the place had a mater d at the door in a tuxedo who spoke with a phony foreign accent good day mr sandals come in right guy he knew me by name i'd walk into the bar and by the time i reached the barand sat down the bartender had set the drink in front of me of my choice. Didn't have to ask, he knew, he just put it right there. That was classy and I knew that made a statement. I take people in there just to see how they treat me. Bartender, you know, the maitre d' knew me by name, the bartender knew me my name, knew what I drank, set it right there on the bar. Boy, that makes a statement! Yeah, it made a statement all right, it's just not the one I thought it was making. I was a snob too. too. I thought, you know, vodka had to be served at exactly 31.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the optimum temperature for a glass of crystal vodka. Discovered that wasn't so. I discovered the optimal temperature for drinking vodka is 108 degrees because that's the temperature under the front seat of my car where I kept the bottle. No more crystal stemware. Used to stay in fancy hotels, big, you know, the big high-rise deals. But in my later drinking career, I would wake up in the morning lying on the ground, Rusty, in Piedmont Park in downtown Atlanta. Not a good place to be. And I'd wake up and look down and there's dew all over my clothes. And I blink my eyes and realize I'm looking out from underneath a bush up the nostrils of a policeman's horse and he's saying, what are you doing here? And I'm answering, where is here? Not very classy. It's also not classy when you're dragged from a car that you've planted into a steel post on the side of the road all the time telling the officer this can't be happening, I only had two beers I don't know why it is none of us ever had but two beers you watch all these cop shows and highway patrols and LAPD's and they arrested stop these drunks I had two bears I don'T remember it but there must have been a school somewhere that taught you say two beers well he cuffed me and put me in the back in that cage had that we got that fence in Atlanta too too, Patty. Put me in that cage and off the police station, out and into there. Put me on that breathalyzer, blowing that thing, and it registered .28. And I said, that is absolutely impossible. There's no way in the world I could be registering .28 on two beers. The cop agreed with me. It was the only thing we agreed on that night, but I was not a smart drunk. It is not smart to go to Superior Court for a DUI drunk. Judges don't like that. Judges are not lenient with you when you do that. That's nuts! But those blinders, you know they didn't... By now my wife is off drinking in her places and i'm drinking in my places we never see each other except when we meet once a week to have a good knock down drag out discussion the loser is a little girl get one hair girl who by now is 11 or 12 years old and she's home alone in an apartment in a big city on the phone dialing bars is my mom there is my dad there the phone would ring and the bartender say it's your kid and i would take the phone she'd say daddy please come home in a trembling voice and i'd say karen where's your mom i don't know daddy please come home i'm scared and the answer was always the same sweetheart i will i'll be home just as soon as i have one more drink and you people know the rest of that story many hours and many drinks later i'd stumble into that apartment there cowering in the corner of that bed tears streaming down her face trembling is that little beautiful blue-eyed blonde haired girl but the blinders were firmly in place I never asked where my wife was going she never asked why I was going we didn't care anymore so one night when she disappeared and I'm sitting in my recliner chair in front of the television staring at it with my bottle in my hand and she's gone for two or three hours and when she comes home I'm still sitting in the recliner chair with my bottle in hand staring at the television screen probably trying to decide whether to turn it on or not and and she looks down at me and says guess where I've been I said who get who who cares and she didn't say anything she did something really weird she flipped a white poker chip into my lap and I looked down at it and i looked back at her and i look back at it hurry and look back at it again and i said i don't know where you've been but if that's all you won you had a lousy night well y'all know where she'd been she had been to an a a meeting and she told me where she's been and i went into an absolute flying blue perfect rage because there was no way on the face of this earth that that woman was an alcoholic because i knew good and well if that woman was an alcoholic then it she just couldn't be an alcoholic there wasn't no way but that didn't stop her she started going to meetings going to meetings and going to meeting some fool nonsense about 90 90 and 90 something and i kept waiting for the other shoe to fall i kept waitin' for her to say you need this worse I do you're a bigger drunk than I am you ought to be didn't do it did not do it She just kept going to meetings going to meeting going to meetings Oh, you know there were little clues left around the house like I'd go and lift the toilet seat And there's how it works taped to the lid Or one of those rare nights And I come home and sleep in my own bed and i'd flop down on the bed ram my arm under the pillow and there's a piece of paper in there and i'd i'd pull it out and reach and put my glasses back on you know and and shut one eye look at the paper by the way i got to share something with you that occurred to me not long ago i had to go have my eyes checked i went to the ophthalmologist and had my eyes check and about a year and a half ago he said i don't really understand the phenomena that's going on with you your left eye is in real good shape almost 2020 but your right eye is shot you you've got your sight is going fast in that eye and i don't understand why that's taking place i thought about a few days and i figured it out i didn't use this eye for years you know i drove like that if I had something to read you know like this and and I figured it out God's been saving this eye for me when when I got old and needed it you know so anyway I look at that paper and what it is it's it's that pamphlet with all them questions in it I'd get to about the third question say I'd say, this is as big as my mouth. Well, the other shoe finally fell like I knew it would. It finally fell. My wife came home one day and said, I'm going to pick up a 90-day chip tonight and I'd like for you to be there. No way, Jose. Well, there were a few tears, a few promises, a few deals, and I said, okay, I'll go on one condition. I'm gonna go in my car. But see, sometimes she'd go to these meetings, she'd be gone three hours, and I say, how long is the meeting? An hour. Why are you gone three? So we can go to Coco's and have coffee after the meeting. Yeah, right. i know where they're going i just knew i wasn't going so i said where are we going she's going to the place called 81 11 club follow me i said well where's that she says it's at 81 11 roswell road but you just follow me well i did i got in a car only about a mile or two from where we lived she pulled into the driveway of this pretty little house sitting up on a hill in a grove of trees it was a home that had been converted into an aa clubhouse and as i drove up the driveway i said this is the weirdest thing i have passed this place a hundred times on the way home from the bar and I had looked up there and said you know you really ought to get to know the guy that lives in that house because he obviously has a party every night well that night old bell went to the party and I slid into the back of the room in that little clubhouse and slid down behind a post nobody gonna see me there and for the next hour I witnessed the biggest bunch of weirdos I have have ever seen in my life. They read all that stuff at the beginning of the meeting, and just as they're finishing that up, this guy's doing this. And I thought, God, he's got to go bad. Why don't he just go on? Well, somebody pointed to him, and he stood up and right out loud told him his name and that he was an alcoholic. And i'm sitting there thinking, I don't think I'd have I told that if I'd have been him. And if that wasn't enough, he told them that whole room full of people that he had gotten three DUIs. DUI, what do y'all call me? DUI or DWI? Drunk Driving Awards. You know what I'm talking about, you know. And you know what those people did? They busted out laughing. And what's going through my mind is, my God, what are these people laughing for? Don't they know what they are? they're alcoholics they ain't got nothing to laugh about i don't ever want to forget that folks because i'm gonna tell you something i thank god every single day of my life for the laughter that we share in these rooms because there's magic and there's power and there's healing in that laughter and if you don't have a home group that laughs a lot go find one that does i also tell you this do not laugh all the time or they They will come get you. Seen that happen a couple of times. But I didn't get it that night. Next guy said he'd gotten five DUIs and been arrested for indecent exposure. They came unglued. I'm sitting there thinking, good God, if they knew some of the stuff that happened to me, I could sound like Richard Pryor. Well, meetings seemed like it lasted forever. Finally, everybody stood up, and they grabbed each other by the hand and said the only thing I recognized that whole hour, and that was the Lord's Prayer. Then we were out the door getting out of here, and I can't get out of this place fast enough. I'm heading across the parking lot. I got about two-thirds of the way across the park lot, and something grabbed me by the shoulder that felt like a steel vice, spun me around, and I found myself looking up into the face of a man that was 7'11". i know this morning he's only six six but he looked a whole lot taller that night i also remembered him from the meeting he was a little different from the rest of most of the rest of these folks had said my name is tom i'm an alcoholic my name's mary i'm an alcoholic mine suit he was little different when they called on him he stood up and said my names floyd and i'm a grateful hillbilly drunk give me a break break. Well, this guy standing there in the parking lot starts talking to me about his fifth grade education and about him driving a school bus for a living and about getting a DUI driving the school bus. And I'm thinking, what in the world is he telling me this for that God don't even know who I am? I found out later he knew exactly who I was because she'd been talking about me in those meetings. People coming out and getting in their car and leaving. Remember now, I went in my car by God so I can get out of here. My wife comes out and says bye, gets in her car and leaves. And it's me and Floyd. And he talks to me about getting drunk out in the woods in the wintertime and falling down on the ground and his face freezing to the ground. And they had to pour coffee on him to get him up. And And I'm not hearing most of this because I'm busy making a deal with God. Well, Floyd talked on there for about, I don't know, three or four days. I finally got away from him, got in the car, went home, walked in the house. My wife started to say something. I said, Don't open your mouth. Don't you ever, ever, never try to get me back in that place again. And she didn't. and my roller coaster ride continued down more arrests more pain more suffering more anguish more loneliness couldn't get enough of what i really didn't want finally the afternoon of july 26 1982 i came out of a week long blackout drunk whole week missing and when i came to i'm sitting in my living room that recliner chair and i look down and in my left hand there's an empty bottle and in my right hand there was a fully loaded and cocked 22 pistol and i had not remembered picking up either one of them and i thought it was going through my head was is this all there is is this really all there ist because if it is you can have it and through the fog of that evening at monday afternoon at about twilight there came a voice voice of God well not exactly voice of an angel not quite it was the voice of a beautiful wonderful lovable strapping hillbilly drunk named Floyd and the words that cut through the pain of that hangover that Monday afternoon were simply this when I come to Alcoholics Anonymous I expected God to open up the gates of heaven and let me in he didn't but he opened the gates hell and let out and if where I was on the afternoon of July 26 1982 can be any closer to hell on this earth I pray I never know it and I got up out of my chair and I walked into the bathroom and I cleaned up as best I could gargle about a half a bottle of Listerine drank the rest and I went back to that little 81 11 clubhouse on the hill and I sat down behind the same post at the back of the room now folks I don't know about the God you believe in but the God I believe in has got one heck of a sense of humor because i stared around at the front of the room and there sat my wife chair in the meeting she didn't see me till the end of the meeting when a man got up and he explained those chips and he talked about that white chip of surrender sick and tired of being sick and tired and i got up took the longest walk i've ever taken in my life to the front of that room and a man pressed the white poker chip with two a's on it into my trembling sweating palm in my hand closed around it and I walked back and sat down I choose with all my heart and soul this day to believe that an old Bill Sanders walked to the front of that room that night and died and that a new one walked away because by the grace of a loving God in his gift of you to me and this program and those steps in this book I haven't had a drink since that night I had quit quit a thousand times before. But that night, something changed. I hear people say we get a new start, a new beginning. I think we get a new life, a clean slate, new pair of glasses, new eyes. This one's still shot. He told me very early I need to get a sponsor. I thought that's weird. I'm in broadcasting. Can't do a radio or TV show without a sponsor? I got the kind of sponsor you were talking about. You explained what you meant, and I said, okay, I'll do that scientifically. So I looked around for the sweetest, kindest, roly-poliest, white-haired old granddaddy I could find. One that I knew would pat me on the head on a daily basis and say, you're doing the best job of this program anybody I've ever seen. Don't change a thing. I found just such the man I was looking for. Snow-white hair, perpetual smile on his face, roly polyer belly than mine. And I asked a man by the name of Doc Crandall to be my sponsor. Biggest mistake I ever made in my life. I don't remember that man ever telling me one damned thing I wanted to hear. I knew I was in trouble the very first day he said yes I'll be your sponsor now let's discuss the rules. Rules? He said yes the rules first thing you're going to do every morning when you wake up is you're going to roll out of that bed onto your your knees and you're going to ask god as you understand him to keep you sober today and the last thing you're gonna do at night is to get back down there and youre going to say thank you before you get into that bed i said doc listen let me tell you something i'm also a recovering southern baptist i grew up when the church doors opened i was in it didn't have any choice now i've got a long way away from the church but i do understand prayer is important god you people pray a drop of a hat and i know prayer is importante but i gotta be honest with you doc Doc, I am not comfortable with this knee business. He looked me square in the eye and said, I didn't say a damn thing about you being comfortable. And then I got real cocky and said Doc, I thought this was supposed to be a program of suggestion. He says, It is. I suggest you do it or get you another sponsor. That's how we began our journey together. Then the next thing he did Ed was, give me this book. He said, I want you to take that book home and I want you to study, not read, study the first 164 pages of that book. And after you spend a few weeks studying, I wants you to come back and we're going to sit down and talk about how you can make that work in your life, especially chapter 5 and those 12 steps. And I said, all right, I can get into that. You know, I'm a smart college boy. So I went home and on the way home I stopped at the office supply store and I got me a couple of legal pads and some highlighters and and some sharp pencils. And I went home and cleaned off my desk, and I spread that thing out, and I opened that book up, and I started to work. And I highlighted, and I underlined, and I wrote in the margins, and I struck through the steps that didn't have anything to do with me. And I made notes of a couple I'd thought of that y'all hadn't. And I wrote it in that legal pad, and about two or three weeks later, I was through. I had about 15 pages of notes, a bunch of highlights underlined and marked and all that, and I called Doc. I said, I'm ready to talk. He said, hot dog, come on over. I went over to his house, and he reared back in his big old recliner chair. I spread all that stuff out on the coffee table, and He said, lay it on me. I flipped that book open to chapter 5, and I pointed down there at that first step, and I said, all right, Doc, look in here at this first step. As I interpret, and that's as far as I got. He said boy, that step don't need your interpreting. It needs your doing. I said, yeah, but Doc, what I think it means is, he said, Bill, look closely, son. They wrote it in English. It says exactly what it means. They even put little numbers by those steps so smart college boys like you can follow along. God, he was tough. And he was a fanatic about this book. He was a nutcase about this books. I remember I had a personnel problem at work one day and I went, I thought, you know, Doc's been in the business world a lot longer than I have. I'll just go discuss it with him. Got to a meeting early, said, Doc, can I talk to you a minute? Sure. Got me off the side. I said, Doctor, I've got a personnel problem at work I want to talk to you about. Let me lay out the situation. He said, hang on, wait a minute. Before you do that, what step are you using on this? And I looked at him and I said、Doctor, this ain't got nothing to do with steps. I'm talking about real life stuff here. He said、You go look again. So I went home and I got the book out and I opened up the steps and I went down through there and there wasn't nothing in there about personnel problems. problems. Went back the next night, walked into the meeting, said, Doc, got to talk to you. Went back and I looked in there, ain't nothing about personnel problems. Let me lay out the situation. He said, go look again. I'm riding home after the meeting thinking, oh God, why am I stuck with this crazy old bastard? And I get it out and I turn to chapter five and I start looking down. there it was there was the answer and over and over and over again he kept sending me back to this book and to those steps until one day the little bell went off in this thick skull of mine that said bill there is nothing nothing nothing that is going to happen in the life of this alcoholic that the answer is in those steps and in this book and I believe that to this day. I can tell you right now, what edition of the big book do y'all study here? Third? Well, I have the 26th edition of the Big Book at home. I do. Because that's how many times I have read that book from cover to cover and every time I read it they have rewritten that sucker. And the way I know that is I read through there and I highlight things things. And I look down here and this ain't highlighted. I know if that had been in it before, this is powerful stuff. I would highlight. Now there's some over here that's highlighted. I don't know why that's highlighting. I didn't do it. It's a magic book. It keeps rewriting itself. Now I believe that it's a God revealing himself as I'm capable of understanding through you people and through this book and through the magic and power of those steps my sponsor doc didn't believe in lollygagging around on the steps you keep moving i went to a meeting one time where they the the subject of the meeting was the fourth step and the consensus that came out of this meeting a lot of newcomers there was you'll know when you're ready to write a fourth step you'll just you'll just know when your ready and that sounded good to me so i went back to doc i said He said, Doc, I was in this meeting, and the consensus in this meeting was that I just know when I was ready to write a fourth step. He said you're damn right you'll know because I'll tell you. And he did. And we're going on to four, and then we do five, and then we're on to six, and they were on to seven, and we're on to eight. And it suddenly occurred to me one day we're just zipping right along. We're going to be through with these steps before long. And I fell into Doc's favorite trap. I said, doc, what do we do when we get through working in the steps. Without batting an eye, he said, son, you lay real still because you're dead. Either way, folks, think about it. There are a lot of quotes that Doc's famous for. One of them was if you get into an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to take a drink, you will lose. lose if you get into an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to take a drink you will lose you can't win that argument so don't let the subject come up it comes up knock it out and i heard that up here but i didn't hear it in here and i had been sober for about three months and i Had to take my first business trip out of town from atlanta up to washington dc fortified myself with a meeting had lunch with my sponsor got on the plane out at atlantic international International Airport. That plane had not cleared the ground until the convention convened in my head. 700 miles from home. Ain't nobody up there knows he's an Alcoholics Anonymous. He could tie one on tonight and have it all out of his system by Friday night. Notice I didn't say anything about a drink. You know, yeah, but he know. Yeah, but you ain't gonna tell nobody. I mean, they're discussing. I'm just sitting there. I looked around the plane to see if anybody else was hearing those voices. They weren't. Plane touched down at National Airport, out of the plane, into a cab, headed for the Hyatt Hotel over on Capitol Hill, out-of-the-cab, into that big old atrium lobby, and of course my radar spots the bar way on the other side over there. I can hear the laughter, the tinkling of the glasses, the music. Took me less than 10 minutes to check in, came back down, stood in the doorway of that bar, and I stood there for three or four minutes as that convention played out in my head, and nowhere in sight was Doc's admonition of you getting an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to take a drink you're going to lose, and I lost. And I walked over and I sat down at the bar, and the bartender came and stood in front of me, smiled, and then said something really weird. He said, hey buddy, buddy, how about a Coke? A what? And then he pointed to the lapel of my jacket and said, by that pin you're wearing, I figured that's probably what you'd want. I had forgotten to take off that damned AA pin. He set that Coke down, went down to the bar, served two or three other people, came back, and I'm still sitting there staring at that Coke. He stood there a minute and said, you ain't got any business in here, do you? No. He said, where you belong is three blocks down the street upstairs over the furniture store. There's a meeting in 20 minutes. Get the hell out of here. I went to that meeting that night, and I did two other things. I walked back into the bar, and I thanked an angel in the shape of a bartender for saving my life. he laughed and said you know you weren't as much trouble as you thought you were when i saw you standing in the door for so long i thought you was looking for somebody but when you sat down and i saw that pen i saw the look on your face i knew what you were doing and there was no way in hell you were going to get a drink out of me and the other thing i did is i got down on my knees beside a hotel room bed and i said god if you've gone to this much trouble to keep me sober tonight i will never test you again and i haven't i don't go in bars because i I don't belong in bars. I belong in rooms like this with people like you who know who and what I am and how I think and how my crazy alcoholic mind works. And if I don' t have a reason to be where there's alcohol being served, I don''t go around it. You know, when I was in early sobriety, I'd go sit at the bars with my buddies and drink my Coke until my sponsor found out what I was doing. And I said, I'm just having a Coke. he said bill going in a bar to have a coke is like going to a whorehouse to get a kiss stay out of there i remember there was a kid at a meeting i'm sorry i just there wasa kid at the meeting that i was in that let it slip that he and some buddies after the meeting we're going to go to a night club down the street and I punched the guy next to me I said watch Doc he reared up saying whoa whoa whoa where'd you say y'all going oh we're going to the such and such club but we're not going to drink we're gonna hear the band Doc said buy their record kids said they hadn't got one Doc said then they're not any good he wouldn't let us con ourselves on November 25th 1985 my sponsor Doc Doc went on a 12-step call and never came home. As he and another man struggled to take a shotgun away from a suicidal young alcoholic that Doc had been trying to help, the shotgun discharged and Doc caught the blast full in the stomach and died on the way to the hospital. That evening at twilight I sat in his den and I felt a loneliness come over me I had not felt in a long, long time. And all I could think of was how can I go on? how can i stay sober without the man by my side who has planted me in this program who has guided me through these steps who has how can I go on and in the stillness of that evening the answer came you'll do it by doing the things he taught you to do and that his sponsor taught him and his sponsor before that taught him and his sponsored taught him all the way back to that fateful night in the spring of 1935 when the broken down stockbroker and the has-been doctor doctor sat in that little gatehouse in Akron and said do you think we might be able to stay sober if we help one another I believe with everything in me that God and his infinite and compassionate and powerful wisdom looked down in the spring of 1935 and said the lowly alcoholic has suffered long enough he's been the outcast of the world for long enough I've got to give him a way out he could have decreed we be locked away in prisons as many of us were and should have stayed he could have said we ought to be put off in colonies like lepers so we can't corrupt society as most of us had he could've said we'd be put in mental institutions as many of us weren't should have but he didn't instead he gave us each other and more love and more joy and more happiness and more serenity and more peace than most of us could have ever dreamed of in a thousand lifetimes and then you'll never convince this alcoholic that he didn't top it off with one more thing i believe he topped it off with a one-on-one face-to-face relationship with him that few people on this earth will ever know i believe that we are the luckiest people to walk the face of god's earth I thank God that I am an alcoholic and for you people early in my sobriety doc had a lot of problems with me with acceptance and his favorite way of dealing with it is he'd make me go back and read page 448 and 449 in the big book your sponsor ever sent you there my sponsor would make me read it out loud every day for a month i think three separate times he made me do that and i decided if i ever meet the bozo that wrote that i am gonna punch his lights out now i told you i got a god with a sense of humor that man is my sponsor today and he still talks to me about acceptance but I got to do something that none of you ever gotten to do and very few drunks have and I'm going to share it with you now he lives in California and I live in Atlanta we talk on the phone two or three times a week we see each other speaking places four or five times a year but we email every day and one day my phone rang and it was on a day when he doesn't usually call and I said hey Paul what's going on he said you ain't gonna believe it my computer is down we got people putting in carpet in the living room max is screaming and hollering at them the dog has peed in about four different places because she's upset by what's and I was going to email you but the computer the computers down so I just had to use a blasted telephone and then In my mind, there's a little voice saying, say it. Say it. Say it, and he rants and raves a little bit longer, and finally I said, Paul, maybe you need to read page 448 and 449. I wouldn't take anything for that. Time to close, but I'm going to share two quick things with you. I refer to the woman I married in 1966 as my first wife because you see she's not married to the same man anymore and thank God I'm not married to same woman anymore they're the same bodies but we're not the same people you changed that in December of 1982 on the day when divorce papers were to have been signed instead the two of us stood before the same minister who had married a sixteen years earlier and in the presence of family of this fellowship we renewed our vows and we started all over again and the last 16 years have been fantastic oh we still have discussion every once in a while making up is a lot more fun than it used to be but she is my friend she's my soul mate she's partner my lover we work together we laugh together we cry together we share life together and I wouldn't take anything in the world for her she often goes with me when I go to share she She could not be here this weekend, but I'll guarantee you one thing right now. She is in Atlanta, Georgia, thinking about me, sharing with you, and my thoughts are with her. And the final thing I would share with you is that a few years ago on a February Saturday afternoon, I took one more walk with my little girl, but this time it was down the aisle of a church. And dear God, did she look like a princess in that long flowing white gown. and I looked just like a damn penguin in that monkey suit. And I cried all the way down the aisle and I took my little girl's hand and I placed it into the hand of another man and he and she turned to face the same minister who had married her mother and me 25 years earlier and who had renewed our vows 10 years before that and they began their life together. Now we're at a great deal the first time I met my son-in-law to be he and my daughter and my wife and I all went out to dinner and we sat down in the restaurant and the first thing he did was to order a beer then he sat there and nursed that thing for two and a half hours and when we left left half of it and I said son you ain't never gonna make it my little group drinking like that and he won't but he loves going to aa meetings as does my daughter my daughter incidentally at the about of the age of 17 said i got two alcoholic parents i got too alcoholic grandparents my chances are somewhere between zero and none so she didn't drink i didn't know there was that much brains in my family but the greatest tears didn't come at the wedding the greatest tears came at the reception that followed because you see my daughter said dad i want to have the first dance with paul but i want want to have the second dance with you and I said okay sweetie but I tell you what you better tell me what we're going to dance to so I can practice a little bit with your mom because you see I don't dance nearly as well today as I never did and she said no I'm not going to tell you and so I stood with several hundred other people by the dance floor and I watched as the young princess and prince had their first dance together and then my little girl came and stood in front of me and she reached out her hands and I looked into her eyes instead of fear and hate and disgust I saw love and I saw trust and we moved out onto the dance floor and the music began and the words of the song were did you ever know that you're my hero and everything thing i want to be i can fly higher than an eagle you're the wind beneath my wings dear god what a miracle had been worked in the lives of this family that had been ripped and shredded and torn apart by the insidious unforgiving unrelenting disease of alcoholism and yet meeting by meeting step-by-step sponsor by sponsor and prayer by prayer you God and a a had put this family back together again not long ago I was sharing at an AA conference in Northern California it was one of those rare chances when my daughter had an opportunity to go with me because she's a veterinary assistant works in a veterinarian's office and it's hard for her to get away but she was able to go with me that weekend and we were in a room like this there's about 3 000 people in the room but at a given point everybody in that room disappeared and all i could see was that beautiful little blue-eyed blonde-haired girl sitting there on the second row with a smile on her face and a look in her eyes instead that's my daddy up there you gave me that I got a call early this morning in my room daddy happy Father's Day we've got dinner with it ready for you when your plane gets in tonight I am a father today thanks to you so it can't possibly come as any surprise that I would close this morning by saying to you did you ever know you are my heroes you are everything I searched for all of my life and wanted to belong to and wanted to be and I'm convinced with everything in my being that together together we can all soar like eagles because he's the wind beneath our wings God bless you Thank you. Thanks to the committee, and thanks to all of you. Bye-bye.