Seventy-One Years Old and Seventeen Years Sober — I Call Myself a Spiritual Teenager Until Twenty – Tim R.
About This Speaker Tape
Tim shares from the Monday 8 p.m. Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NAVA Club. His sobriety date is April 30, 2007 — seventeen years at age seventy-one. He flips the numbers and says he feels like a spiritual teenager, with a few years to go before he'll call himself an old-timer. He traces his sponsorship line back through Tim Moore to Ken Horvat of the 615 a.m. Dawn Busters to a man called Papa Bill, who greeted him with the question, 'Are you happy, joyous, and free?'
He was born near Otis Air Force Base, son of an Air Force jet pilot and former Auburn tight end who died in a crash the day before Tim's third birthday. An uncle told the toddler he was now the man of the house. He was a pack-a-day Parliament and Marlboro smoker by fourth grade, hiding crush-proofs in his shoulder pads at football practice. A stepfather with a well-stocked bar modeled three-month dry stretches broken by binges that ended in the drunk tank. As a kid he poured after-dinner liqueurs into Kool-Aid slurpies and carried them to his bedroom. By high school in Sandy Springs he was buying bags of pot and reselling nickels to his twelve-year-old brother's treehouse crew.
He graduated UGA in journalism on black beauties and all-nighters, then at twenty-six tried to become a jet pilot. He talked his stepfather into a letter of recommendation, then forwarded that letter to then-President Jimmy Carter, who actually wrote back on gold letterhead. He cleared every hurdle until the eye exam, lied his way through, and was told he could fly as a navigator but never in a fighter. He walked to the package store, drove home knee-walking drunk, and quit the Air Force dream instead of the drinking.
At fifty-two a family member's intervention rattled him. He went cold turkey that Thanksgiving on his knees, got a one-year AA medallion from his family a year later without ever attending a meeting, and then 'romanced' his dying mother with a glass of red wine that became months of sneaking. His sister drove him to NAVA on a Monday night. He picked up a white chip, met Tim Moore, was told to go home, kneel, ask a Higher Power, and read the Big Book until he fell asleep. He made it one paragraph. Three years into sobriety, stage four colon cancer took forty percent of his colon and his lymph nodes; he worked the steps through chemo and his oncologist eventually hugged him goodbye. Today he commutes fifty-five miles from Gainesville to the Fresh Air Group at the Hawk Club and back down to NAVA on Monday nights.
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