The Ability to Respond Instead of React – Dick M.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Dick Martin and I'm an alcoholic. By the grace of God, the actions of AA and sponsorship, I've been sober since September the 15th, 1965, and I'm very grateful for that this morning. It'll soon be 33 years that I will be sober in AA, another few days. And at that time, I will have spent half my life in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I can tell you right now that that's the better half of my life. There's no question about it. No question aboutit. And I really hope that James has started the tape when Al introduced me. There's a lot of people that don't know really how wonderful I am. You know, it's kind of funny. I don't what you know about this, but I know in my experience I've discovered leadership is an odd thing. The reason why I'm a leader in Alcoholics Anonymous is because I don' t like to follow. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else. It's just an absolute feeling of ego. Every year John gives me a topic which I summarily ignore, and this year it's something about being responsible. I am responsible, I think it is. And I want you to know in Toronto, I believe it was 1970. No, it wasn't. It was 1965 when I got sober. They came up with this responsibility statement. And they had delegates from all over the world who went across the stage and they said in their own language that when anyone anywhere wants the hand of A to be there, I want the hand to be their for anybody who needs it or whatever and for that I am responsible and that's about as close as we're going to get to that one this morning it is very true, there's no question in my mind that I really want AA to be there for the people who need it. AA was there for me when I came to AA and when I needed Alcoholics Anonymous. AA was there for my daughter when she needed to come to AA. AA was THERE for my son when he needed to come to AAA. AA was There for the people that I sponsor when they needed to come, and now their children are coming along, and I even sponsor a couple of them. It's kind of odd to sponsor generations of people like that, but it's kind of an interesting, I mean, there isn't much you don't know already. It's just kind of a simple, simple deal. Like a lot of people that have been here this weekend, I've been sober for a long time. And being sober for for a longer period of time does give you the opportunity to be able to be responsible one way or another. And the word responsible is just very simple. It just says that we have the ability to respond. And as long as God's in my corner and God's always in my corner, I'm going to have theability to respond I can act upon the situation I don't have to react to the situation, I can act to the situations One of the things that I've discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous is I like AA to be a certain way I like it to be action oriented and simple and I like it to be available to anybody who wants it, and I'd like it be there for people who need it, whether they want it or not. I have not seen many people come to AA who really needed Alcoholics Anonymous, who got it unless they wanted it. AA is a place for people that want it, unfortunately, not a place where people need it. If everyone who needed to be in Alcoholics Anonymous was an AA, there's no way that we could house them in any building at all. It would take quite a large place. Unfortunately most of the people who come to AlcoholicsAnonymous die drunk. Probably most of people who get and stay sober in AlcoholicAnonymous as a matter of fact end up dying drunk. know what happens to many of them. They seem to disappear. Bud was earlier talking about a fellow that's been sober for nearly 30 years, I think he said, who doesn't go to meetings anymore and he's missed and that sort of thing. I don't really miss people like that. They're missing it. They're the ones that are missing out. I'm not missing out, I'm here and I don't have time to miss people I have only time to spend with people who are here I can't worry about those that aren't here that's their problem my problem is being able to be here for the people who are here and the people want to be here because that's what we need to do we need encourage those who are incorrigible I suppose but I digress I think the I always often kind of wonder standing up here every nine o'clock at the Cornhusker Roundup and I wonder what I can say I really wonder what I can say and I'm not really much of a person to be at loss for words but I wonder what I can say I wonder what I can say that's going to be any different than it has I wonder what I can say that's going to encourage somebody who's thinking about going away you know I was talking to a fellow on the phone the other day he had had an injury and he's been so regularly length of time over 20 years he said you know I just get tired of going to AA and I get tired of talking to the guys I sponsor and I get tired of encouraging them you know I'm I'm physically not well, and just on and on and on. And I said, oh, shut up. All you're doing is you're just feeling sorry for yourself because you're injured and you can't come to the Cornhusker. I don't want to hear that crap. Just go to the damn meetings. We don't care whether you want to go or not. It doesn't make any difference to us whether you WANT to go. I don' t know how many times I've gone to AA meetings when I didn't want to go. I mean, there's times that I just assume stay home. I mean, that I'd rather stay home, and then what happens is that I think of people who are going to be there, and I think of the people who my sponsor, who look forward to seeing me when I get there because they know that I'm going to have a hard time not being there. I've missed my home group maybe in 33 years. Maybe I've missed going to my home group 15 times, maybe. It certainly hasn't been any more than that. And I thought that I was probably having near death experiences then. By the way, you know, this is not virtual reality. A month ago, I guess it was, I got a call at about 815 in the morning. One of the fellows that I sponsored, Nob, called me up And he said, well, I just want to check and make sure you're still alive. And I had gotten a phone call, or his wife had gotten a phone called and said that she had heard that I had died. And I want you to know that the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. And I'm not going to die and let you get away with it, so better shape up. i uh i had uh open heart surgery uh in march the first of march end of february or whatever it was and i didn't have a heart attack my heart's in good shape i'm in good shape except i had a couple of blocked arteries and if i hadn't taken care of those you would have had an a a memorial service to go to eventually i'm sure but I decided that what I'm going to do is I sponsor 70-some-odd guys, and I'm not telling you that because I'm bragging, but I sponsor 70-something-odds guys. I do that because it keeps me sober. I don't know what it does for them, but it keeps my sober, and that's important for me. I also want to tell you that because I am a martyr. I think anybody who sponsors numbers of people ought to have a place on the cross. God knows I've tried. But I don't do that because I'm a good man. I don'T do that because I'M wonderful. I DON'T do THAT to be helpful. I DO that because it helps me to stay sober. It's one of the things that I do that helps me to stay sober. It'S something that I DO rather well. And as a result of that, I'M going to keep on doing it as long as I can. I like sponsoring people. I like being helpful. I like to reach out and try to not be important in someone's life, but try to be responsible to their needs. And it makes me feel like I'm a decent human being. It makes me feels like some of the things that I did in my past that I'm ashamed of and things that I did that were wrong, maybe it's some atonement for that and I can be at one with my maker in some fashion. Maybe I can, in some façon, make up for the things that are wrong that will earn me a little better place. I think that it works because I feel comfortable with myself most all the time. And I don't think anybody can feel comfortable with themselves all the same. the time. But I'm certainly comfortable with myself 85 to 95 percent of the time, and that's pretty damn good for a drunk the way I look at it. I came from a family of alcoholics. My father was an alcoholic. He died as a result of a drunken fall down the basement steps. He was celebrating the fact that he had been nominated to a federal judgeship. So you talk about people who are functioning alcoholics. He was certainly a functioning alcoholic, and he functioned alcoholically from my earliest memory. My earliest memory as a child was him coming home and drunk and raising hell, my mother screaming and hollering at him and so on and so forth. That went on all the time I was growing up. I never thought that I would end up being that way or being like he was. I never thought that I would be in the position, place anybody in the position to see me the way I saw my father. And I love my father and I didn't understand my mother and I understand now but I didn' t understand then. She was a person that I could never I wasn' t sure how she was going to be. Now I knew if my father was drinking He would be loving and kind and considerate and warm, and I knew I wanted to be around him. And if he wasn't drinking, it was yes, sir. And I'd kind of disappear from sight and stay away from him because he seemed to be kind of on edge if he was not drinking. And so I stayed away from Him when he was nicht drinking. And I knew how to act around him, but my mother, I didn't know which way to go. I mean, she didn't, one time that she was, at one time she would be kind and considerate and loving and caring. And the other time, you know, it was a hand across, a slap across the cheek. And I just didn't know what to do with that. And as an end result, I didn't like my mother. And I loved my father, but I didn' t like my moth er. And now I understand and I feel sorry for what she had become under those circumstances. but she didn't seem to have any way out. There was a fellow from Lincoln who came up to me yesterday and he was talking about a book written by Richard Peabody who had written a book about common sense of drinking, was the name of it. And I remember there was a copy of that Common Sense of Drinking in my grandfather's library and I don't know why it was there. My grandfather was not a drinker. but i thought maybe he had gotten it i remember the color of the book i remember it was a red book and had a fleur-de-lis on the front cover and i remember the words i remember that words printed on there and i never i didn't read it but i remember seeing that and perhaps he got it so that he could learn to deal with my father's drinking i have no idea but uh that was one of the early books that bill wet red and trying to put AA together. And drinking has always been an important thing in my family. And my grandfather on the other side was a practicing alcoholic, and he left his wife and three children and told her that he couldn't, he could no longer stay there and punish them the way he did. And he didn't mean to be that way, but he couldn'T help it. And he'd taken the Keely cure any number of times in North Carolina and going on. He was the engineer who put together KDKA radio and put the WLW radio together as an engineer. And I didn't know that. I'd worked in broadcasting for probably 10 or 15 years before my mother told me that. And I don't think that she wanted to tell me then to tell you the truth because she didn't want to think about him. And that was, you know, when you have a family history like that of alcoholism, it just drifts down and John knows what I'm talking about because in his family it was the same way. It always seemed to be at least one in every generation if not more that just had a terrible problem with drinking and weren't able to do anything about it well when I introduced the idea I was able to do something about about it and I was able to stay sober and I'm one of those very fortunate people that I've never had a drink since I attended my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and if you're new and if You're still sober I want to tell you something you can stay sober for the rest of your life if you just keep on going just one day at a time I uh I know that the people that i around me that I love that I that I really care for that are in AA, I know that they're going to die sober because I can see them practicing this program and their life a day at a time. And that's all we've got to do. We just only have to do this thing a day at a day. A day at the time. We don't have to go through it for the rest of our lives. We can only just do it today. The longer I stay sober and the more I realize how fragile life can be, the more important the idea of living a day at a times is to me. It is so nice to be able to only have to live a day at a time sometimes because life is tough. Life is difficult sometimes. We go through our ups and downs, and life is just that way. And that's the way life is. That's the ways life is for everybody. And we have something to bolster us against those hard times and something to temper us down a little bit when life is great. and it's just alcoholics and animals. I know that there are people in AA who believe in taking their inventories over and over and ever again. Some people take it every 12 weeks. I know of a group of people who do that and they just take one step a week and when they get to the fourth step they write a fourth step and the fifth step they make a fifth step and so on and so forth. I think that that is so personally introspective. I think it would drive me crazy to be so intense. I think that we have a measure for taking care of our lives a day at a time that way and I believe it's a tense step and I don't believe it is necessary for us to write and rewrite and write and rewrite our inventory. It just seems like it's stirring up a cesspool as far as I'm concerned. And it just doesn't make any sense. I think we need to learn something from everything that we do. Perhaps we can learn not to do those things that put us in a position to have to write a fourth step. I have been recalling recently, there was a priest by the name of Father Ed Dowling And he was a saintly man, and he discovered Alcoholics Anonymous in a conversation. He had heard about it, and then he went to New York and saw Bill Wilson and talked to him about it. And then he returned to his home city, which was St. Louis, and began AlcoholicsAnonymous. He was a non-alcoholic, but he started AA in St. Lewis, which gives you some idea of why AA is in the shape it is in St., maybe. maybe they should have had an alcoholic start I don't know I'm just kidding really AA starts where it starts and how it starts and it doesn't make any difference but in 1955 when they had the second international there Father Ed was having a conversation with Chuck Chamberlain who certainly is one of our mentors and certainly one of my mentors and one of the real lovely men in Alcoholics Anonymous, a real man. He was a man's man as well and loved the gals. He was just our kind of guy, wasn't he, John? He really was. He was our kindof a guy. But he was having a conversation with Father Ed Dowling and somehow or another the idea that when they died they were going to go to heaven was in discussion. And Chuck said, well, certainly you, Father, of all people, as saintly as you are, certainly you'll go to heaven. And Father Ed Dowling said, if I go to Heaven, it's going to be because I'm backing away from the gates of Hell. And I completely and absolutely understand that. I have stood at the gates OF Hell many times and looked in there at all the fascinating things and thought, oh man, that's my kind of place. all of the temptations all of the temptions but somehow or another most of them I've been able to stay away from and because of that I'm comfortable because of that I'm comfortable most of the time I just back off a little bit I enjoy the thought and God knows I had some terrible thoughts every now and then I wouldn't want my wife to know what they were but I don't want to know what hers are either. But it's just, it's for sure that if I back away a little bit, I'm not going to get in trouble. And if I don't have intimate, private conversations with women, I'm Not going to have problems with women. That's all there is to it. My private, intimate conversations with a female are restricted to those with my wife. And I have those with her. And she's played a special place in my life ever since I've been in AA. I probably met her when I was sober for maybe two or three months, something like that. And as a matter of fact, it was about two months. When I was sober for three months, I invited her to speak at my sponsor's home group and I was allowed to chair the meeting that night. And our relationship began from there. She really didn't want to have much to do with me. She was going with a fellow who's the forerunner of the postal people today. He was an early practitioner. He was alcoholic and he got drunk and they put him in the Washington Hospital Center and he broke out and stole an ambulance and drove it home and barricaded himself in the house with a couple of shotguns And that's the kind of guy that she went with. She asked me if I was going to go postal on her, and I told her no. Oh my God, she had a terrible picker. She really did. but I'm glad she did. I'm Glad She Had a Bad Picker because when I came along and she went with me, I was so much of a better example. It was just an easy mark for her, I suppose. But here very recently, as a matter of fact, last Wednesday we celebrated We celebrated 32 years of being married. During that time, divorce has never been threatened. We have threatened homicide. Homicide in our family is okay. Suicide is completely out, but homicide occasionally is an interesting thought. but uh we've never had uh kind of i thought about it every now and then i we have a we havea fellow who's a uh has a doctorate in psychology who's married does marriage counseling and that sort of thing and we have sent so many people to this fellow over the years i think that he ought to give us some sort of a professional kickback I mentioned that to him one time I was having a conversation about someone I sponsored that he was talking to and he said well, I really don't think so he took umbrage at the remark that I even suggested but I'm very lucky we're both very lucky we haven't had that necessity I hadn't had the necessity to do that. And we're lucky because a lot of people have, and it's very difficult for them. Marriage is a very difficult thing to live with someone else on an ongoing basis for many, many years, and it'S hard to do THAT. But frankly, and to be very honestly, I think what we have to do more than anything else is to be polite. And I think the closer we are to another person, the more we haveto be polite it just requires that or else we're not going to be able to tolerate them and they're not gonna be able to tolerate us it just it requires us to be polite and we're both very fortunate I had a terrible first marriage and it I think about it now and I I wonder why why I ever married that gal I mean I really do I mean I was lonely but it doesn't seem like to me I was that lonely she was uh she was very difficult and she was she was very high maintenance as someone mentioned to me today and she just required a lot of attention and when you're giving attention to a bottle of whiskey you can't give attention to a woman I'll tell you it just doesn't work that way but she put up with me as hard as much as she could put up with me. It was a very difficult thing for her to do. I remember one of the last major events in our lives at that time. I was a member of a group of people in college. We called it the Saturday Afternoon Martini Club, and the Saturday afternoon martini club met on Sunday afternoons, and we did this to be difficult. And we drank a lot. It was just a drinking bunch of people. That's all it was. It wasn't any particular upper crust thing or anything like that. We were all college students. If you want to call that the upper crust, you can. But we were just ordinary people, and we got together and had a nice time. Everybody chipped in a little bit of money every time we had a meeting, and once a year we would have a formal dinner, usually at someone's house. We had it catered, and we had wine and champagne and brandy and cigars in the library, all of that sort of thing, just had a grand dinner. And it was just bullshit is what it was. I don't know any other way of describing it. And we were pretending to be something that we weren't. We were pretending to be grown-ups, I suppose. But I was married and had two kids and my wife and I went to this thing and she decided that she wanted to go home earlier than I wanted to go and so I reluctantly took her home. We got in an argument in the car on the way home and I got there and I put the car in park and she got out and I reached over and locked her door and put it in reverse and went back to the party. I was kind of a guy, I was. And I went back there and drank and they gave me a bottle to get rid of me finally. I was living in Washington, D.C. and I was overlooking it. I drove back towards home and stopped at an overlook of the Potomac River at Chain Bridge. I was just sitting there drinking and smoking a cigarette and drinking and smoking a cigar. I'd been drinking so much that it wasn't doing anything anymore. I wasn't getting any drunk or anything like that. It was just, I drank myself sober, I suppose you might say. And I'm not sure that I understand that, but that's exactly what the condition was. The sun had come up and I was sitting there and I Was looking at the water and thinking, Jesus, where can I go? There must be some place I can go. I don't want to go home. I don' t want to face that anymore. And I decided that I didn't have any choice, really. A knock came on the car window, and I thought, oh, Jesus, it's got to be a state trooper or something. And I looked over there, and it was a man who had crawled out of the bushes, and he had not shaved for days and days, and probably five or six days. He was a derelict and a homeless person, we might say. and I rolled the window down and I said yeah what do you want and he says I really need a drink and I thought to myself Jesus that's where I'm going to be that's what's going to happen to me I know that that's what's gonna happen to my life and I took the bottle and I handed it to him and he said could I have a cigarette so I gave him the cigarettes but I closed the window and I though Jesus you know there but for the grace of God I'm gonna stop drinking and I went home and I told my wife what had happened and I cried and she called her mother and her mother came up and I told her this story and told him that I was never going to drink again and I've sincerely met it with every fiber of my being that I would never drink again. And I went to bed and because I was just exhausted. And I woke up about two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and I went to the refrigerator and opened the refrigerator, and there was beer in the bottom of the refrigerator. And I opened a can of beer, and my wife came in and said, what are you doing? What are you doing? You swore you were never going to drink again. And i didn't have an answer for her. I couldn't tell her. i couldn't Tell her why i was doing that. i just took another drank and I woke up and I was in a puddle of my own urine in front of the refrigerator when I woke, up and she was gone. She had taken the kids and gone to stay with her mother. But I didn't know. I don't know why it was that I couldn't keep my promises. I didn' t know why it was that I couldn't stay sober when I wanted to stay sober. I didn't know what was wrong with me, and it just went on and on and my life was just that way, and of course it's no wonder that she wanted a divorce. I would have killed somebody if they treated me like I treated her, and there's no question about that in my mind, and she was certainly long-suffering and had a difficult time. And I know wives of alcoholics and wives and relatives of alcoholcs have a tough, tough time of it and it's a hard thing to do. But somehow or another we break them in some fashion and it is just a horrible feeling. It is a horrible feel that I'm going to have. I knew there was something terribly wrong with me and I finally after having the idea of going to Alcoholics Anonymous and I discussed it with doctors and I've discussed it with psychiatrists and all of them said things like well you're not ready for that yet or no you're really not an alcoholic you're too young one guy said you gotta drink 20 long years before you become an alcoholic all kinds of rationalization and justification and I knew somehow or another they were wrong but I couldn't do anything about it because I didn't have the power within me to do anything Big Book talks about lack of power being our dilemma and it was my dilemma I couldnít make up my mind to do everything of and by myself I had to have someone else say yes that was okay because I just couldnít do it I didnít have the strength I didníd have the inner strength to be able to make up my mind and take a course of action And so I came into Alcoholics Anonymous a beaten and warped guy who didn't have any opportunity to make it anywhere because I didn't know what to do. I came to AA because there wasn't any other place for me to go. Actually, AA was just the last place. I figured I'll go there. If that doesn't work, I guess I'll just drink myself to death. And it really surprised me that AA worked. I went to my first meeting, and my first meeting was a service meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The area chairman was talking about the service structure of AA, and I was Ernie the attorney, who is still active AA member. I was 12-stepped by a fellow named Buck Doyle, and he took me in my first meetings, and many meetings thereafter. But after that first meeting I was twelve-stepped in the traditional sense of the word. I went and sat with them in a hot shop, and they talked to me and told me what they were like and what happened and what they're like today. I knew that what they was saying was true and I was able to identify one alcoholic to another. And that's the one thing that Alcoholics Anonymous has that other organizations don't have. That's the reason why AA is successful with alcoholics because you have the relationship of one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic and the new guy understands that we know what we're talking about and where we're coming from. And therefore, he will give us his confidence for a moment or two and take some actions that he doesn't believe will work either and proceed on course. I think that 12-step work and sponsorship is the absolute most important thing that we do in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know of anything else that we use that even approaches that in importance. It's the single most important things that we can do is to reach out and be there for somebody else and be able to carry the message that that's what we were like, this is what we are like, and this is how we are going to live. This is what happened, and maybe you'd like to come along. Maybe this can happen for you. I don't know that it can happen for you, but maybe it can happen for You. I hope that it can. If it can, I'll be glad to do it and I'll be glad spend any amount of time day or night. It doesn't make any difference to help you because it helps me because I can stay sober that way. And that's why we do those things. We do them with the idea of being helpful to someone else which barely masks over this other thing. And That's the need for us to stay sober ourselves. And we really need that. We're kind of nice and selfish at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it, but this is far from being a selfish program. This is not a selfish program. Help others program is what it's all about. And I always had something on the inside of me that said that I ought to help somebody else. I have a need on the outside of me that says you ought to be helpful. I don't know what it is. I curse it sometimes, but it's still there. And I am glad it's there. I'm glad that I have that because it saved my life. I think God works mysteriously in our lives. Some years ago we built a house in Fontenelle Hills and lived up there in Bellevue for a number of years It's a nice community. There's a golf course wandering through it, and it's surrounded by a private forest. That sounds like it's pretty hotsy-totsy, but it isn't all that hotsy totsy. It's just a nice neighborhood, and we loved living up there. I retired from broadcasting after 27 years, and we built a house to encompass a business in the basement. And we lived there for 15 years, and the business outgrew the basement, so we had to do something about that. We moved it out, and in the meantime, we have this basement that's designed for a business and not designed for living and that we revamped, and it's a nice big rec room, I'll tell you that. But the neighborhood isn't doing quite what we would like it to do, And we've thought that, well, we're getting older. We kind of like to have a house on one floor and that sort of thing. My wife is getting aged and arthritic. But actually, we just wanted to do that is what it was. And I don't think there's any explanation for wanting to do it. I think what we were doing is fulfilling something that God wanted us to do, is what I think. I'm probably wrong, but that's what I like to justify it that way. We looked around for a piece of land to build a house on, and we couldn't find anything that was reasonably enough priced in a neighborhood that we could stand. So we decided that one day we'd just drive around Fontanelle Hills and see if there was any houses up there for sale that we liked. And we saw some places, but, you know, we didn't even get out of the car. We just drove around and looked and said, yeah, there seemed to be, and we ought to talk to a real estate agent sometime and find out about it. I was thinking on the way home, right next to the house that we had built there in Fontenelle Hills, it was a house that belonged to a man by the name of Fitzpatrick. And I thought, you Know, that would be ideal. I remembered the house, and it would have been ideal for us. But it wasn't for sale. So we wandered on from there, and about four or five days later I called a realtor friend of mine and talked to him about it. He said, Jack, he says, you know, he said, I've got an in-house deal. He said there's a house at 420 Martin Drive. And I said, where's that? I said I used to live at 502 Martin Drive, and he said well, I don't know. He said it's the old Fitzpatrick house, and I said you're kidding. And he said no, and then I said well. I said, can you meet me up there in about 15 minutes? And he said, yeah. So I got Peg and said, honey, come on. I'll show you the house we're going to buy. We went up there, and I said where's the contract? And that was it. So we're moving in there next Sunday. This time next week we'll be toting and fetching with a little bit of help from our friends, I hope. and uh we're gonna have one of those dreaded aa moves and uh that we've all gone on in our in our group we do those things all the time and i'm um looking forward to it we all have a grand time it's uh we are looking forward this being our final resting place and uh I had the terrible responsibility this year of another person that I sponsored died. And he'd been ill for a while and gone in the hospital on Monday and I'd gone to see him on Tuesday and he was taking some tests and I couldn't see him. I went back home Wednesday afternoon and I'm usually not that persistent in visiting at hospitals. I don't like to visit in hospitals because I don' t like to disturb people. I think when people are in hospitals, they're there because they're sick and they need to rest. They don' d need me to come in there, but Bruce was there. Bruce was one of the members of the Cornhusker Roundup Committee and served well many, many years. But Bruce was lying there in bed, and he was feeling some better and looking forward to getting out the next day, as a matter of fact. And we sat there, and we talked for three hours. And he talked about all kinds of things and cleared the slate. And I enjoyed the talk, and he enjoyed the talking. And I left, and I kissed him on the cheek. And I came home, and when I told Peg that I'd seen him, I felt so good because it just made me feel good to do that. And he died that night, and I feel so fortunate that I went to see him, that I did see him because if I had not, I would have felt terrible guilt from not seeing my friend. We buried our friend, but he was sober. And I'm not saying that in a small way. That's an important factor. He died sober. He died as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he was a proud man and a good father and a good husband. And he became everything that an AA member should be. And uh, he was a fine man, and I just hope that I can be like him somewhat. I uh, I want to thank you very much for being attentive this morning, and it seems like I've been doing a little visiting this morning. But I don't know whether you got anything out of it or not but I did I just want to close by saying one thing I I went over to my son's house the other day and I'd stopped by it was on Friday as a matter of fact they were taking care of our dog who was part shepherd and part lab and relentless at eight months old and they'd taken care of her and I'd gone over to pick her up and they asked me to stay for dinner and I had a salad with them and my grandson Joe who many of you know was there and he had a cold and his eyes were weepy and red and he wasn't fussy he was just feeling bad and we left or I had to leave and so I left and he got on his hot wheels and went down the road a little bit and I stopped the car and rolled down the window and said, I hope he's feeling better. And we chatted for a couple of minutes and he blew me a kiss. Thank you. applause Thank you.