Hopelessness and the 24-Hour State of Hell – 1961 – Jack B.

and it's love at first sight, that's instant love. As the announcer was talking about this, I was thinking about alcoholism, Now, we think of poverty as being a lack of green stuff in your pocket, and that's true. After I thought about this, I stopped by the first library and looked at a dictionary, looked to see what poverty meant or what it says about it and it said it's a quality or state of being poor or indigent. It's a want or scarcity of means of subsistence. It's need. A want or scarcity of the needs of life. It's destitution. It's any deficiency in what is desired or desirable or in what constitutes adequacy. It's Any Deficiency in What Constitutes Adequacy. Want is extreme poverty, and destitution is absolute want. And I guess when I finally got to the point that I was NIA, that I was not only in want, but I was destitute in all of the ways that a person can be destitute, I think. And I'd like to tell you how this came about. As Jim Roundtree was talking this morning, I sat there and marveled at how the same end could be achieved by two completely adverse, opposite means or routes. As I listened to him talk, there was a certain, you probably felt it too, a certain rapport between what he felt as he experienced, as he brought us forth in his journey of alcoholism. I felt what he felt because I had experienced what he felt. But I did not experience it, I did not come about it in the same way. The route that I took from the very beginning was an interesting one. And as I felt coming over here tonight, I don't know too much about the program of alcoholism, but I know more, I know as much about alcoholism as just about anybody you've ever seen because all my life I have experienced its effects. All of my life. My parents were two young, charming, attractive people or at least they had been that. My father died when I was had just turned seven years of age. My mother died two months later. My father was found One January morning, under a bridge, it gets pretty cold up in Virginia at certain times of the year. And there was ice on the river, and they found my father between the railroad tracks and the river under the bridge. And there were packages of canned heat beside him. And my father was Catholic, was buried by the church. just a year or so ago I stopped by the church in Roanoke and was looking at the record that they had of my father's death and it was a funny thing it had the date the father's name his name was Jack Boland you know what they listed as the cause of his death bad hooch that was on the record that was all it said cause of death bad hootch not alcoholism bad hoouch but killed him My father was an alcoholic, and he died the year before Bill and Bob found each other. My mother died two months later, not as directly from alcoholism as my father. You couldn't put your finger on it quite that closely. But I now know that the circumstances that brought her death back were alcoholic. the first years of my life I remember I can remember many things quite vividly I've never been able to forget them I remember the insecurities that come living in a home when two people are so engrossed in their own in their alcoholism I can't recall anything in that period of my life that would there's nothing warm or friendly that I can remember. There is nothing that I can recall as having created any security in my life. Am I trying to imply that this made me an alcoholic? I am not. I'm merely telling you what happened to me. Why I am an alcoholic, I don't know. Someone else might have pulled through this with flying colors. But anyhow, this was these were the conditions that I lived under the first years of my life orphaned at seven and Nothing to look back on. Now, this sounds bad, doesn't it? Well, there was one relative that I had who stepped in to take me to Ray's. And guess what? Guess what the conditions that surrounded this person's personality and life were if they had been bad for or with my parents. Man, it was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire because this person was an alcoholic. And the next years from that period until I was 17, 16, well, just turned 17, I knew the poverty, the total poverty. I'm not talking about just the poverty of dollars and cents. I'm talking about the poverty of the total lack of security that comes from living in an alcoholic environment. And I'm not going to give you the details of how this life was in my case, because if I did, you couldn't believe it. I'm sure that most of you, that all of you I would say, would not have the concepts from experience to reconcile what I say with what you think. But believe me, it was rough. No single day of those years was my life acceptable to me. When I say my life, I'm talking about the environment in which I lived. I never capitulated to it. I never accepted it, not for one second. and I was always waiting for the day that I could make my exit from it. But each day, it was doing something to me, and I wasn't conscious of it. Not too long ago, I met, about two months ago as a matter of fact, I met a girl that she and I were sweethearts the first year that I was in high school. And it had been 20 years since I had seen her, and she had been able to follow the course of my life in those 20 years since I hadn't seen her since we had met. And she was reminding me of many things that I'd forgotten. She said, you know, I never could understand why you drank all that liquor, Jack. And I said, well, I never couldn't understand it either. And she said, Well, but you were so much against it when I knew you. We used to talk for the hour and you told me what your life was going to be like and it was a beautiful thing. You had great plans, ideals, and hopes. And the one thing that you were never going to do was drink liquor. You weren't going to doing it. And I got to thinking about it. I'd forgotten about it, I'd gotten about how strongly I felt this way. I wasn't going let what happened to in my background become my experience. But I didn't reckon with the hooch, that smearing off vodka and all the other things that I later got around to. Because one day when I was, just before I was 17, I was out with a bunch of fellas my age in a car and somebody passed a jug of wine and I said no and I meant no. and they all took a drink and it seemed to do something for them. I wasn't sure exactly what it was and they passed it back again and I took a drank, I mean I said no and maybe it was the second or the third time I don't recall but someone said oh come on Jack take a drink this is not whiskey this is wine and he said it won't hurt you it won' hurt you is the way he said and the way put it I thought yes that's right it won''t hurt me did you ever feel that way about anything it can do it to somebody else but it can't do it to you so I took a drink and it's remarkable to me now how I realize now the first drink that I ever took I escaped from alcoholism in the first drinking that I never took I didn't get drunk I didn'y fall down any steps I didn''t make a fool of myself as near as I can remember any more than I ordinarily would. But that drink did something to me, and in a few seconds, a few minutes, I said, pass that bottle back here, George. And he did it, and I took another drink, and it did more for me than the first one had. All of the worries and fears and inadequacies that I had experienced in my life. The poverty that I knew all my life, the poverty of things and the poverty of, well, I can't describe it to you. I probably don't have to. But suddenly, it was gone. And I felt a part of... I felt like that I was for the first time maybe a part of the world a part of the universe and I was I was lifted up I guess you might say I I seemed to suddenly speak with authority and with conviction and I liked what I had to say and it was suddenly instead of a group we had a party it was as simple as that things looked up where they hadn't looked up before and I felt bigger than I was. It changed things. It's as simple as that. And already I was looking forward to the next opportunity. You see, the first period of my life I had been unable to accept it. I desperately wanted to escape from it but I did not know how. I did no longer have the wherewithal to do so and I had not learned that nor did I learn for a number of years later that we don't escape. No. I thought I believed, and I think maybe we're even taught, we're trained to believe that happiness is found in a certain arrangement of conditions and of circumstances. And by knowing and being associated with the right people and selecting the right wife, if we can get all of these things in order, then we can be happy. That's certainly what I felt and those were my intentions and my plans. But I didn't know what the law was. Here's a book that we were talking about tonight, Ben and some of us were talking before we came over here. And it says, and this is As a Man Thinketh by Allen, it says mind is the master power that molds and makes and man is mind and evermore he takes the tool of thought and shaping what he wills brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand hills. He thinks in secret and it comes to pass environment is but his looking glass. I wanted to change things. I didn't know about doing anything about me. I was married at a very tender age. I don't live way up in those hills of Virginia. I live just down there on the fringe, you know. But something happened. It was a part of the changing things and just had turned 17 and was married. It was going to change something and it did. It really did. That was not anybody else's fault but how can somebody who has never been able to cope with the simple situations of life expect to cope with a major undertaking such as marriage. Any 17-year-old is inadequate for most of the things that he has to face, and I was more inadequate than any 17- year-old when I got married. And so I don't have to tell you. You can just form your own conclusions from there. But for the next few years, if I had tried to escape for the first 16, you can imagine the manipulations that began to take place in the next 8 or 9 or 10. And I'll tell you that I went through many. You name them and I experienced it because I was trying to find something, to find myself, to make things right. In a little while, I don't remember how long it was, I remembered something that I had learned that night in the back of the car when I was with the fellow, and that was that it dawned on me how that hooch had done for me. And I never forgot that. It never completely left my memory. So, if things were a little rough, I looked forward to drinking a few beers with the boys, and I did. And if things weren't a little rougher, it became so that I looked forward to drinkin' a few beer with the boy anyhow, and i did. Time went on. Passed. I did fairly well. Not Texas-style well for myself. They don't have oil wells in Virginia. I wish they did, but they don't. But I did all right. I did far better than I had ever hoped to do, better actually than I've done since on the financial and material level. Things got well, and it's a funny thing. If things got better, I seemed to find myself drinking more, and if things got worse, I seem to find myself drinking more. I just found myself drinking More, and there didn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with that. But as time went on, you know what happened. And one day, in 1953, I found myself hitchhiking down a road. Now, maybe that doesn't sound like it's a very startling thing to you. but I wasn't hitchhiking down the road because I liked it. It wasn't a fad that I had taken up, I'll guarantee. This was not something that I was doing by choice. I wasn'T going somewhere to camp out that night and enjoy nature. I was going down that road because there wasn'T anything else for me to do that I knew about. And I was on my way to New Orleans. This was in April of 1953, and this is where I had arrived. It was when I got down in Mississippi, it was pretty hot. And I had left home, left home with the intentions of not drinking. I was going to New Orleans to get a job. I knew where I could get a Job. I knew there was a fellow that I could talk into. I was a, oh, what a beautiful liar I had become. You know, something else I was thinking about the other day is about what beautiful liars that alcoholics are. And I wondered why. Why is it that an alcoholic is such a beautiful liar when he's so believable when he lies? And you wives know what I'm talking about. The most beautiful lie that you ever heard, and yet most normal people that lie, it just doesn't go over. I mean, you look at him and, you know, you just want to leave the room when he does it. But not an alcoholic. And you know why it is? I discovered. It's because it's based on the truth. He takes the truth and does something to it. I still haven't figured out exactly what he does, but what he tells you, you know that that's the way it started out. But somehow or other, when he gets to the part where he's out of sight of the how, something takes place. I don't know what it is, but I was a beautiful liar and I knew down in New Orleans where I could get a job and I was on my way and I met a fellow in the Cadillac and I told him, I explained to him why I was hitchhiking and it even sounded good to me. And he offered me a job but I didn't want to go to work that week. I was waiting until I got to New Orleans and I don't remember getting there. I woke up the next morning in some flea bag of a hotel and believe you me, it was wild and I was shaky and nervous. And I waited another day and took a few more drinks to get up my courage to go see Leo, who was the district manager of a company that I had worked for and done quite well with. And I saw him the next day and he said, Sure, we've got the thing for you. He took me to lunch and I hadn't had a drink since I got up. I will never forget having lunch with Leo because he was sitting across the table from me where he was watching me. And for people to watch me did something to me. Something took place when someone was watching me if I didn't have some booze in me. I recall that I tried to... I had coffee, something else I didn' t like about that lunch. If a fellow just offers you a job, you don' t order beer for lunch, do you? Particularly if you' re broke and I didn''t want him to know that I was broke or that I needed the beer that bad but I tried my coffee to my lips and I'd get it about so far and something would happen to my arm, wouldn't it? It just wouldn't work. This seems like a simple thing now. It's funny now, but it was terrible then. It wouldn't look good. It wouldn' t work. I couldn' t get it to work and this was something that happened to me frequently. There was always something wrong with some part of me, some part or me or some part o' my life. It was everywhere I looked things were flying apart and I felt like that I was flying apart and I was flyin' apart. Well, he sent me over to see the local district manager who gave me a job as a salesman with a bookkeeping and business machine firm. And this was Friday by this time, and he said, fine, if Leo says that you're a good man, you are, you be here Monday morning ready to go to work. And there was something about the way he said ready to do it. Ready to go work. I wasn't there Monday morning. I knew I might be able to get there, but I wasn't going to be ready to go to work. It just wasn't in me. So I left town Friday afternoon, came to New Orleans to get a job and got it. Had not worked for a long time. Had been living off of $22 a week unemployment compensation. $5 that I could lie my way into from an old friend here or two bucks there or whatever would come. I left New Orleans but I don't remember leaving now do I remember anything until I got back to Greensboro, North Carolina I came to it's a long way from New Orleans to Greensborough and I cannot tell you how I got there how long it took what happened or any of those things but this was not unusual to me This had become the order of things in my life at that time because I don't know why it had become that way. I did not know what was wrong. I still didn't know that drinking was the cause of it. I didn't Know that I was an alcoholic or that I knew that there was such a thing as alcoholism, but I just had not made any association. But I'd come back to Roanoke from California to die, and New Orleans was my last attempt at living. And I had failed there. I knew I had felled. There was no other way and so I was just waiting for something to happen. Got back to Roanoke and for the next period of time I just lived to drink. And I drank to live. And there was no way out except to eliminate myself. I was waiting until the day when it got so terrible, so bad, when the fear was so great and the wall was so high that I couldn't escape another time and couldn't lie another time that that would be the end for me. I lived in a state of hell, fear of apprehension and there was no beautiful thing, no good thing, no thing of hope but I knew if it was there, I did not know it. Now, this was not only true at this period in my life, but as I stood there at that time and looked back, you see, this was only the end of what I had always known. As I looked at my life from my earliest recollections, this is where I had arrived, but the destination of the journey in my case had started to take place the day I was born not just the day I took my first drink I didn't make the association of deterioration of poverty of the livingness of life starting at a particular point around alcohol it was all I had ever known and alcohol the first time I drank it became we became buddies later on we became associates and after a while we became inseparable friends and it was the only friend I had the only thing that seemed to give me any relief in the beginning was the answer and in the end it was a thing that was killing me although I did not know it but before it killed me it had robbed me of all of the things that go to make up the goodness or the livingness of life And my life was nothing but a 24-hour state of hell. I was afraid to go to sleep. I've awakened night after night, sitting up in the bed screaming so that you could hear me a block away. Afraid of something I knew not what. And yet in the morning I was afraid to open my eyes because it was another day like all these other days that I had known. I did not know this was alcoholism. One day, stumbling down the street, I frayed to cross the street at the corner. The simple little things of life were too much for me. I bumped into a fellow who had walked out of a door and inside that door was a group and that became ultimately in a few weeks my introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous. until this period and I was almost 29 years old I had not known it had never occurred to me that my problem was myself I had always been trying and I had used every trick every gimmick I'd used the force of my will of my voice, of everything that I could to shape the world around me. And there was a time when it was almost in place. It just almost suited me if I could just get her straightened out and one or two other people in order, I would have had it made. But it fell apart. I had not learned that my environment was but the looking glass of myself. I set the bottle down in NAA, not the first week. It took a few weeks. One day I set it down and I was afraid that I was one of the hopeless ones. I did not know that it would work for me. I thought that I might have gone too far or something. I was worried that I couldn't make it. But I was willing, honestly I think, to go to any lengths to get it. But setting the bottle down and not taking another drink was not the answer for me. It was only the opportunity to find the answer because I set it down and went to meetings and went back to some more meetings and continued to go to meetings, and it was a great comfort to me to be at the meetings and to be with the fellows, the people that were there. Their strength became my strength and their hope became my hope while I was there. But there was still that world out there that I had to live in, that I hade to wake up in and go to sleep in. And when I stopped drinking, there was no lessening of the fear. The tendency to lose my temper was just as great. When I say the tendency, I mean the practice of losing my temper was just a great. I could lose my temperature more times before 9 o'clock in the morning than anybody you ever saw, except maybe some other alcoholic. I had a violence. Things affected me. There were so many things in life. Women drivers, clerks in stores, almost everybody that I had ever known in some way, the people that I knew then, the people who were in AA when I first walked into it. Not everybody, but those other guys you know. The ones over there, I reacted to them this way. I set the bottle down, and instead of things being better for me, they were worse because I no longer had my crutch. A little while could become what I felt whatever that was. I didn't know what they felt or what they thought. But it was mine. But this was not enough for me. Now, there was another kind of poverty that I had that many people have not had And today I'm grateful for this. You might not be able to understand it, but I am. But I had a poverty of... I have heard it said, I heard an intelligent man say the other day before a rock, an A member. He was very emphatic. He said there's no such thing as an atheist. I have also heard it sad that there's not such a thing as alcoholism. We know there's such a things as alcohol. Alcoholism, the man that says there's none, he ain't one, is he? Well, the fellow that says there's no such thing as an atheist, obviously he's never been an atheist. There's a play on words that you can use and you can work out on paper the fact that there's not such thing as an Atheist, but in my experience, my life being what it had been, I had been unable to find and I had tried in a fumbling, faltering way to find some goodness, some living goodness, some personality, some force, some charm, some circumstance, some favorable force that you could even say that was luck that was on my side or somebody else's side. But I had been unable to deduce such a thing. It did not exist. But being big like I was, intelligent like I Was, That didn't mean that I didn't give you a chance to believe, because I did. But it just wasn't so. And when I came in AA, and I came into the program and set the bottle down, there was no power greater than myself. I thought. I believed. You say, well, how can you accept the steps of AA on that basis? It was very simple. In the steps it says, God is, you understand me. Well, I understood that there wasn't one. That was God as I understood him. And that's the way I worked it. And it worked. It really did work because there was a whole lot of the program that I didn't have to be concerned about right then. I mean, that eliminates a whole Lot of it right quick for you. And if you don't believe it, look at the steps because you don' t have much left except to admit that your barrel is over alcohol and I knew that I was powerless over alcohol. I didn't even have to think about it, but by the time I got to AA, a brain the size of an ant's brain could conclude that it was powerless over alcohol if it had been through what I had. I knew it. Didn't have to decide it or accept it. I knew It. And not only that, I knew That my life was unmanageable. But here I was going to meetings and I had gone out and gotten a job. I was afraid to cross the street, had not worked for a long time and I hadn't got a job and there wasn't any AA members to take me to work in the morning, friends. I had to go by myself. And I had talked to those people by myself and this was hell. I had trouble at times ordering a Coke of Coke From a girl behind the soda fountain counter And I'm serious I am serious about it The simple little things of living were too much for me But like Jim said this morning I had learned already to make myself do these things And I made myself do those things I made my self do these And the more I made meself do these things, the more afraid I was. The hopelessness of life was still upon me. There was no way out. I owed many thousands of dollars. And one day, one night at a meeting, I heard a young man say, and he was a young man and had been in AA for seven years and had gotten drunk 47 times, I guess, in that seven years. And then one day he said he asked God to keep him sober. He said, you know, I never thought about that before. It just hadn't occurred to me. I went to meetings and got drunk and went on 12-step calls and got drank and I tried to stay sober and I got drunk. And everybody tried to keep me sober and we got drunk, and he said, and then one day when I had suffered so much, it occurred to me that what they said might be right, and I asked God to keep me sober. And he hadn't had a drink for a long time. Well, I was having absolutely no trouble as far as I can tell staying sober. But being alive was hell. Just being there made me sore. It was worse than waters can, Bob. I'll guarantee you, just standing still hurts. And all these things that I had to cope with, a thousand things running through your mind at one time. Do you believe a thousand Things can run through your Mind at one Time? I do. Maybe it's only nine hundred Things that run through Your Mind at One Time, but it was too much for me. And one day, or the next day after this, I was sitting in the car and it was in August and I had taken my last drink in July, sitting there. I was not about to take a drink, I wasn't thinking about it, but the hopelessness of my whole existence on this earth was upon I was in AA and I wasn't taking a drink but I still had no place to go and if I got there I would have been inadequate to do what was necessary for me to do and as near as I could tell there was only one thing that I had not tried and I had seen until that time no reason to try why pray when there is nothing to pray to I mean, it just, that's logical, isn't it? If there is nothing there to hear you, why talk? I mean you're just talking to yourself and people that talk to themselves I felt were pretty funny people, you know and I didn't feel like that I was that kind of people. But when you've tried everything and there's nothing else to try except maybe one more thing you'll try that too. not out of any goodness in your heart but out of destitution and poverty of the spirit and the living because there's nothing else to do. And I was in a car by myself and the reason I was on a car I didn't know when I was selling automobiles that's why I was driving one and I was parked on a lonely street and I felt that it was a lonely state it was an lonely world and the thought that I might pray, I saw, you know how you can watch your mind and you can see a thought coming into it? Have you ever been embarrassed by something that you thought except you hadn't even thought it yet? You were about to think it and it embarrasses even you. And this was my feeling when I thought that i might pray in a minute. It almost made me sick because, just because it did. But I thought about it and I had no other choice and I took that choice. And I said something like this, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I had learned a little bit in AA about getting honest and I said, God, if you are there, if you are what and I mentioned a couple of names of fellows in AA if you're what they say you are if you can't hear then you'll know that I can't go on that I need help I need an understanding if you were there I need a understanding of you I do need help And I said, I thank you And that's all I knew to say That's all i could say That's it's all that would come to me And i didn't know I didn't ask for anything Because i didn' t know What to ask for I just didn't Know I couldn't think I was numb And nothing Happened Right At that minute I didn' T expect Anything to happen Really The world Didn' T change For me Very quickly I didn't even feel any better as a result of that, except that so quickly, so quickly that it's unbelievable, even to me right now. I'm not talking about quickly in the next few seconds or minutes, but I'm talking about that day, by the end of the day, a pattern began to form itself in my life. not in my life out there so much, but in my life inside. Something began to take shape and a word came from here and a thought from there and within the next few days I was suddenly overwhelmed with ideas, with thoughts, with hope, with it's startling even now to believe how completely my consciousness, my thinking changed. I did not change it. I had absolutely nothing to do with the changing of it. And where there had been hopelessness in all the departments of my life, suddenly there was a little hope here. And the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which had been hanging on the wall and which meant nothing to me, suddenly became the most important thing in my life. I'm talking about the 12 steps and the execution of those 12 steps. The working of those12 steps, as I understood them, became the most exciting thing that I have to this day ever performed. To begin to actually do, to think about, to do the thing that it says in the second step and the third step. to make a list of all the persons that I had harmed, for example, and I'm only trying to find examples now, became an exciting, exhilarating thing for me. I couldn't wait to get it done and to begin the process of making amends where I could and going to see the people to tell them I owed all that money, just like Jim owed all dat money, and I couldn'y pay them a cent. Not a cent, but I could see them and talk to them and I did, and I met the most wonderful reception that was imaginable. But the whole world that I lived in began to change and continued to change. And inside of me, things changed. There was an upheaval within me, and I was less afraid. All of the negative things that were inside of my began to subside. Have they subsided completely yet? No. they are continuing to subside now how rapidly around me did things change the prayer that I prayed was in August if there's someone new in this program and you're having a little trouble with things around you let me remind you tell you how it was with me I was living an exciting new exhilarating life, enjoying almost every minute of it in AA. I still had trouble with that work. I mean, that still didn't come to me right away. Not right off, but I was working at it and it was coming and things were working out. By the end of November when my feet were just almost completely through that pair of shoes that I had, that one pair that I had when I came in AA, I was forced to buy a new pair of shoe. I didn't have the money to buy them, but I got them. I had added to my wardrobe another suit. This made two. The first one, the one I had when I sobered up by this time, was practically non-existent. I wore it in the evening. I wore It after dark, and it gets dark early in the wintertime, but this time it was early. I still live in one of the worst houses on one of the most undesirable streets the most indesirable section I had been unable to get away from I was still three weeks behind in the rent I was paying my rent about a week not yet and I had been sober for five months, dry for five months. But I was still living a wonderful life. Things were better for me, better than they'd been for a long time. My life had come so far by this time that I knew I had come to know that everything was going to be all right. I knew it. I knew the truth. I knew because not only because the members of Alcoholics Anonymous that I loved had come for love were saying it, but I knew if because something inside said that it was going to be all right. And do you know that these last eight years, every, almost every day, not every day but every day every week every month each year this has continued to be my experience. That first prayer that I prayed I can tell you that it was not answered. It is being answered. It continues to be answered every day of my life since that day. That doesn't mean that that was the last one. No, because there's a... I am an alcoholic. I will always be an alcoholic and the inadequacy of myself at times comes full upon me. When I am not big enough, there have been days in these years of my sobriety when it was all I could do to just be alive that day and yet I knew that everything was going to be all right. I had accepted my condition and was no longer fighting with it. I was glad and am glad that I am an alcoholic and I wasn't trying to be one of those normal people. I don't want to be a normal person if there is such a thing as a normal person. I like what we have and what is coming to me, what is coming my way. Tonight before we came in here Joe and I were talking and we were looking at the stars and at the moon little things little little things in my life have an exaggerated importance. I say exaggerated, it is exaggerated and I like it that way. Exaggerated as far as maybe many people are concerned. The other day a bug lit in my hand and I sat there and looked at it for ten minutes, delighting in the beauty of what I saw and of what i felt. I walked in tonight and saw Harold's face and it was a wonderful experience just to see the expression on his face and the other day on the boat and water skiing. And I was at the Southeastern Conference in Columbia, South Carolina a few days ago and my oldest son who would not speak to me for five years oh he spoke when he was forced into a position to speak and for whom I prayed and did everything I knew to do to reach that boy. I did everything I could in my inadequacy to make up to him and I could not. But this boy had traveled a long distance to meet me in Columbia on that Sunday morning because I was going to be there and he could be there. He's in the Air Force now and he had his girl with him and she is a beautiful girl and they were a handsome couple as they walked to meet us across the lobby of the Wade Hampton Hotel As I looked at that boy's face, I could see that he was proud for me to see his girl for the first time. But he was even more proud, and I knew it, for her to meet me for the First Time. For her to make me among my friends who were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he knew that they were there. And he asked me which ones they were, if I knew this one or that one. And he asked me to point some of them out to him. This is miraculous to me. My second son, Gary, is a wonderful child. If this boy has ever lost his temper, if he's ever thought an unkind thought, none of us know about it. He's a beautiful soul and a beautiful spirit. To be with him as his mother and I are divorced, and this has happened since I've been in AA. To sit down with my children when they're with me and have breakfast is something that is so delightful to me that I can't express to you the enjoyment that I find here. It's living to me at its fullest to be close to the people that I love, to my children. Not long ago, this summer as a matter of fact, my boy spent the summer months with me and we traveled together. One morning, about six o'clock in the morning, I felt this warm body slide into bed beside me and it was my youngest son, Alan. And it was, as I said, six o´clock and I was about half asleep and he got into bed and he was about half asleep. He had gotten out of the bed with his brother and he came in and he put his arms around my neck and he said, and he's about to go to sleep again and he says, Daddy, he said I love you. And I said, Son, why do you love me? And he said because you're so good and I thought, no, no that's not right. I didn't tell him that that wasn't right because he was already back to sleep but I thought and I thanked God for it no, not because I am good because I'm sober by the grace of God through this program of Alcoholics Anonymous I am sober and I've learned just a little bit of the lesson that is here for me to learn how to become, how to be what I am, how to experience the ecstasy of the miraculous thing of being alive, just being alive. The experience that for so many years was a fearful thing, so fearful that I've been unable to describe it to you. which through a power that I know is God, because I have felt, I have known, as our 11th step says, the conscious contact of God in my life. What has happened to me and what continues to happen to me is not something that I have done, that I can take any credit for it. I have experienced it as a spectator, as someone that is beholding something that continues to be too marvelous for me to believe. And yet I accept it as being true and eagerly look forward to the next experience of being alive that I know will be there for you and me. We see the member, or not the member. We see The Alcoholic who does not come into AA and we think, gee, that's tragic. But there's something that's only a little less so, I think, and that's the one that comes in and who does Not Know comes in and gets dry, but who does not know the miracle of living, of the increased livingness that can be his as a result of these steps and his experience. I've seen, I have been the beholder of this thing in so many of the lives of those that I love in AA. And I've seemed not as it happened in the beginning for some of you but as it has continued to happen in your life. I'm glad I'm an alcoholic and I wouldn't change a single thing that has ever happened to me in my whole life because it took every one of those things to bring me to the point where I could see, could feel and could know and I'd rather die than take a drink tonight because it would put me back where I was and I don't want to go back where I was when I drank. I don' t want to go back to where I was when i first came in AA. I want to continue to have this miracle happen to me. In closing, I just want you to know how grateful I am that you are here and that you've had me here to be a part of your life because I love you. I really do. In clothing, I'd like to read you something. It's one of those many things that came in the early days and continues to mean a great deal to me. Something that I used at times when I needed something and it helped me. And as I read this, and incidentally I had some copies made up because I knew that I was going to close with this. And if someone wants a copy there's some over here. It's a prayer out of the book, The Prayers of Peter Marshall, and it's called The New Man, The New Men. Notice how many of the steps, I find all 12 of our steps in They're all there. I know, Father, that I must come to Thee just as I am. But I also know that I dare not go away just asI came. Often I have known failure. Failure in the moral realm. failure in ethics failure in my attitude failure in my disposition I have confessed all these defeats to thee and thou hast graciously forgiven me yet I know father that merely to forgive me will not suffice for unless I am changed I shall make these same mistakes again at last I know God that only thou canst correct that within me which makes me do wrong where I am blind thou must give me sight where I fail to heed thy voice thou wilt have to do something about my deafness even where I deliberately choose to do what I know is wrong thou wilt have to do something about my will so God I acknowledge my total dependence upon thee make me over into the person thou dost want me to be that I may yet find that destiny for which thou didst give me birth for their help those of you in AA who are so plenteous in mercy and in love I give you my gratitude