The Terminal Uniqueness of a Garden Variety Drunk – Bill S.

My name is Bill and I'm an alcoholic. By the grace of God, I'm sober tonight. And that's the single most important thing that I can share from this podium tonight with you, that it is by the grace of a loving God and the tender loving care of people like you in rooms like this that I have awakened for the last 11,641 days without a hangover. Now, your little minds are just going... I think that computes to 31 years and a couple of months. And I can assure you that impresses me a hell of a lot more than it impresses you. I love Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I can say that tonight, but when I was a kid growing up in North Georgia, making a list of all the clubs and organizations I wanted to be a part of when I grew up, Alcoholics Aanonymous was not in the Hot 100. Tonight I can tell you, I can give you every club, every organization, every honor I ever won, every award I ever got. If you leave me AA, I'm a happy man. Because AA to me and to my home is a way of life. And it's a wayoflife beyond anything that I could ever have imagined when I was growing up. And I had a great imagination when Iwas growing up, but nothing could match this. is. My first exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous, I got sober July 26, 1982, but my first exposure to Alcoholic Anonymous came several years before that. A friend of mine who I knew was a member of this fellowship invited me to go to a meeting with him and I thought it would be a very great thing for me to do to go and support him. I found out he had other their motives for wanting me to go. But we went to the meeting and, excuse me, they read all that stuff at the beginning of the meeting. I didn't understand any of it. And people chattered in the meeting, and I didn'T understand what they were talking about. And near the end of the meetIng, they called this woman's name, and she walked up to the front of the room, and that crowd went crazy. They were whooping and hollering and clapping and waving and waving their arms in the air, and I said, what in the world is that about? Oh, we're celebrating Mary's 24th birthday. She looked a hell of a lot older than that to me. And somebody got up and set a bunch of stuff and then handed her something. I said what did he just give her? He said oh it's a poker chip. Oh, and then he brought out this little cake and gave it to her and she blew out the candles on it. And my friend turned to me and said said, Bill, if you won't drink for a year, we'll do that for you. I said, let me get this straight. If I don't drink for a year, you'll give me a poker chip and a little cake. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of that place. It was to be several more years before I went back to Alcoholics Anonymous, and this time I was to go back for me. And that's hard to believe to me that that's been over 31 years ago. It's been over 31 años since I got into a fight with the parking meter. It won. It's been over 31 years since I pulled up to a sidewalk mailbox and ordered a Big Mac and fries. It has been over thirty-one years since I drove into the wrong end of a car wash. I don't know what that woman was screaming so about. I was just as surprised to see her as she was to see me. But I don't do those things anymore, and I'm grateful for that fact. You know, I can actually drive down the road now and see blue lights behind me and not go into a total panic. I have a resentment against the police, though. For 31 years, I've been waiting to get stopped stopped at one of those DUI checkpoints. Give me that thing, let me blow in it. My grand sponsor who died with 40 years of sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous was pulled over by the North Carolina Highway Patrol. The man's name is Bill Hollingsworth. He was a wonderful member of AA. He was lousy driver. He was weaving down the road and the trooper pulled him over, walked up to the car and said, Pop, you had a little too much to drink. Bill looked up at him and said, Son, you're 35 years too late on that one. And for an hour and a half they stood on the side of I-85 in North Carolina and talked about Alcoholics Anonymous. No telling where you can find someplace to 12-step, if you're just looking. I love Alcoholics Anonymous and everything that it stands for. I believe with all my heart that I was born an alcoholic. I believe that from the first breath I took, the ism was right there in place. place. At the age of 15, I added booze to the formula and I began my journey into the pits of alcoholism. But the ism was always there. And I say that for a number of reasons, some of which when I was growing up, I never felt like I belonged. I never thought like I fit in. I felt like everybody seemed to have something that I didn't have. Something was missing. I could be in a crowd of people and feel alone and feel isolated. Now, I went back last year to my 50th high school reunion, and I was real sorry none of my classmates was there, just a bunch of old people. But you could have asked all those people, was Bill Sanders an isolator and a loner? And they'd say, oh my God, no, he was a member of everything that came down the pike. It's true. Joined everything, church, school, scouts, you named it, I joined it and I belonged to nothing. Always the perpetual outsider. outsider. I was scared of my shadow, I was scared of people. I'd carry on a conversation with you and never see your face, I'd only see my feet. Now the profession that I was in for 50 years until I retired a few years ago belies what I just told you because I spent 50 years in radio and television. I became at the age of 13 what was purported to be then the youngest disc jockey in America, and everybody assumed that that kid that they heard spinning records, bumping his gums, and playing rock and roll every afternoon after school was who I was. They didn't know that I was that same scared little kid hiding behind the anonymity of the microphone, alone in a studio, being somebody else. else. And I became the master of that. I mastered being somebody else, and I would do it through my entire drinking career. Who else? Well, it depended on who you wanted me to be. I could change philosophies, I could change religions, I can change political beliefs at the drop of a hat. I'd listen to you and I'd try to match you because I wanted to be loved. I was dependent on that. If I'd been honest when I met people in the morning and saying, good morning, how are you? I'd say, good morning, How am I? I was that dependent on what other people thought of me. I hear people sometimes around the fellowship say today, I've reached the point I don't give a damn what people think about me. me. I'm not like that. I care very much what people think of me, but I am, thank God, no longer dependent on it. I am who I am. All of my life, I would like to have been able to say, look at Bill Sanders and what you see is what you get. I can say that today because I'm okay with who I am. You may not be. That's your problem. I was a fairly young man when I came into AA, 39, the same age Bill Wilson was when he got to this fellowship or when he created this fellowship. I'm 70 years old now. Y'all may not believe it, but that's the oldest I've ever been. And I identify myself still, after 31 years, as a recovering alcoholic. A lot of people say I'm a recovered alcoholic, and I understand what they mean. And I have recovered from a hopeless state of mind and body. But I am a recovering alcoholic in that I'm still a work in progress. I don't think God's through with me. Because I'm still here. I'm still teachable, and I want to stay that way. I'm still growing, and I hope I never stop. I would like to be able to say I am a recovering alcoholic until the last breath I take on this earth. Until I step over, hopefully, to the big meeting wherever it may be. I'm grateful to be a recovering alcoholic. alcoholic. I'm grateful to be one of God's miracles, and I am a miracle of God, thanks to you. When I got my first year chip in a meeting of the 81-11 club, the room was full, and I was glad. I was happy. I got up and I thanked everybody, and And I praised the group, but I was so grateful that all of y'all were there to see how good I had done. The longer I stay here, the more I realize how very little I had to do with it. I showed up. I listened to you. I got a sponsor. I followed his directions most of the time. And here I am, a walking, talking, breathing miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous. You are too. You that have whatever between zero and 90 days, you're already a miracle. It was a miracle when I went a week without a drink. It had been over 20 years since I had gone a week without a drink when I got my first week of sobriety I love being around miracles I love watching them unfold I sponsor a bunch of guys people are amazed you know how many people I sponsored I tell that's how many I need to keep me sober I'm retired now and I have time I can say that probably three-quarters of my My waking hours are spent in some way or another with the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm thankful and grateful to be able to do that. As I mentioned earlier, I had my first drink at the age of 15. One Saturday night, some kids came to me, some of my friends, and said, Do you want to go over to South Carolina with us and buy some beer and drink? I said, Sure, why not? and we crossed over the old muddy Savannah River to a little beer joint in South Carolina where you could pull up behind the beer joint and honk the horn guy would come out and if you could see over the steering wheel he'd sell it to you and we came back and sat on the banks of the Savannah River they tell you you ought to go back sometime to where you had your first drink I can't do that because where I had my first drink is now about 300 feet at the bottom of Lake Hartwell. I can get close, but that night somebody popped open a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and handed it to me, and I took a big slug. And without a doubt, that was the most vile, putrid, god-awful tasting stuff I'd ever put in my mouth. And that probably explains why I only drank six that night. I'm not going into details about what happened between the second and the third beer. If you're like me, you know what happened. In that instance, I became wittier, smarter, sexier, handsomer, even taller than I had ever been in my entire life or for that matter, anybody I'd ever known in my whole life. My entire life. And in that moment, I thought, Bill Sanders, you have found a friend for life. And it almost was. A belief was set in place that night that I lived for a long time. And that belief is that alcohol affects everyone who drinks the same way it affects me. It doesn't. alcohol does not change everyone's personality alcohol does not make some people go berserk and do stupid things like I'll share a couple with you as we go along I don't understand the person who says no, no,no,no more for me one's my limit you ever wanted one of anything? one drink is the most useless But the one that really gets me, always has, always will and I will never understand them. That's the person who says, no more for me, I'm beginning to feel it. They don't get it. that is not where you quit don't understand those people and you know what they don't understand me they never did and they never will and I've quit trying to make them understand because they can't unless they have walked in our shoes unless they've sat in jail cells with us unless they have worshipped at the porcelain throne as we have they can't know quit trying to make them understand you're going to lose now when I came to the Alcoholics Anonymous people started lying to me right up front and unfortunately we've got people still around that tell this lie and that lie is just don't drink and go to meetings and you'll be fine I'm sorry folks if somebody told you that that's not the truth my first sponsor used to say Bill quit waiting on the elevator it ain't coming you're going to have to take steps you cannot stay sober on fellowship fellowship. It'll work for a while, and then it runs out. And suddenly, as our first speaker shared, you found yourself buried in the mire of sobriety. And I agree with her. That is one horrible feeling, because I've had moments of that in my years of sobrietty. When I get sloppy with my program I have days like that. I have a medallion that I've been giving to the guys that I sponsor which does not have the year of their sobriety or anything on it. On one side it says we are never cured of alcoholism and on the other side, other than the steps, it has my favorite quote from the the big book. Right smack dab in the middle of page 85. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. To me that is both a warning and a promise. Take it as you will. But I do know this, if I forget that fact I am placing myself in mortal danger. I am setting myself up to get drunk, and for me to get drank is for me to die. And you know, it's amazing how our disease sits in the back of our mind waiting for a weak moment, waiting for us to let down our guard. If I skip a few days of calling my sponsor, if I skip a few meetings, if i get sloppy with my prayer and meditation that little voice gets louder and louder and it'll say you know what you've missed three meetings this week but guess what you really don't need all those meetings see See, you're doing fine. And he tells me, you know, every time I miss a meeting, it makes missing the next one a little bit easier. And before long, my disease says, You can do without. And then it starts the little argument in your head. Should I? Shouldn't I? I'm going to share with you a story from my very early recovery that shows you how cunning, baffling and powerful our disease is. My sponsor told me I was going on the first business trip out of town. I had to go to Washington DC to have some dealings with some congressmen up there. And I met with my sponsor, had lunch with him, fortified myself with a meeting, went out to Hartsville International Airport, boarded the plane, and that plane had not cleared at the ground until that little meeting convened in my ear. And that meeting said, 800 miles from home. Nobody up there knows you're an Alcoholics Anonymous. You could probably tie one on tonight and by the time you came home Friday, you'd be out of your system. I mean, I looked around the plane to see if other people were hearing them voices they didn't appear to be I mean all the way up there those little voices just chattering away back there nobody's gonna know yeah he'll know but he ain't gonna tell anybody and I'm going like that they won't stop plane touches down at National Airport which is now Reagan I got out of the plane, got into a cab all the way to the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill. Those voices are chattering like crazy. I get out of that cab, walk into the big atrium lobby and like radar my ears pick up the bar across the other side of the atrium. I hear the laughter. I hear tinkling of the glasses. Now, my sponsor told me and warned me if you get in an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to drink, you're gonna lose. You can't win that argument so you can't let it get started. I heard it up here but I didn't hear it in here. I went over and checked in, went up to the room, dumped my bags, came back down and stood stood in the doorway of that bar for probably about three minutes. And the argument played out, and I lost. And I walked over and I sat down at the bar, and the bartender came and stood in front of me, looked at me and smiled, and then said something really weird. He said, Hi, buddy. How about a Coke? The what? He pointed to my lapel and he said, I figured by that pin you're wearing, that's what you'd want. I'd forgotten to take off this damned AA pin. And he knew what it was. He set that coke down, went down to the other end of the bar, served two or three people, came back, I'm still sitting there staring at that coke. He looked at me and he says, You ain't got any business in here, do you? No. He said, where you belong is two blocks down the street, upstairs over the furniture store. There's a meeting in 20 minutes. Get the hell out of here. I did two things that night. I walked back into a bar and I thanked an angel in the shape of a bartender for saving my life. he laughed and said you weren't in as big a danger as you thought you were when you thought standing at that door for so long I thought you was looking at somebody but when you sat down and I saw that pen and I knew what you were up to and there was no way in hell you were getting a drink out of me one more little miracle he was a substitute bartender who was just working that night the other thing I did is I got down on my knees beside a hotel room bed in Washington. And I told the God of my understanding, if you have gone to this much trouble to keep me sober tonight, I will never test you again. And I don't. I stay out of bars because I've got no business in bars. I belong in rooms like this with people like you. Will I go to a comedy club and see a comedian? Sure I will, as long as I'm armed with some of you. I don't know how many chances my God will give me. And I don' t dare test him to find out. Because I see people that come in and out of this program. And they're always grateful when they come back that we're all still here for them. And that they got us to come back to. The trouble is, so many of them never bank on the fact that the day will come when they won't make it back. My first sponsor told me buy your dark suit you're going to a lot of funerals. I know what he meant today. I didn't drink that much in high school, I grew up in a little bitty town in North Georgia and if you grew up a small town you know one thing, that there ain't no such thing as anonymity in a small town. Everybody knows everybody else's business. And I knew that if my Southern Baptist mother ever caught me drinking I would not need Alcoholics Anonymous. I would have needed an undertaker. But then I went off to college 40 miles from my hometown and damn I wanted to find out if Georgia won or not. They did. Yay! I can relax and finish now. He was 31, 31 in overtime when I left. But when I went off to college, I had my first taste of anonymity. Nobody cared how much I drank. Nobody cared if I didn't go to class. And I began what I know today is my journey into the depths of alcoholism because you see, alcohol remained my best friend until it became my worst enemy. And I don't know when that happened. I have never met anybody in AA who knows the date and the hour and the minute when they crossed over that line from a social whatever drinker to an alcoholic. college. I've never seen anybody that knows, and I certainly don't. But it happens to every one of us. And it's because we've got a disease that is so sneaky that it even tells us that we don't have it. Only disease known to mankind that denies itself. I had an opportunity to to spend a weekend about 15 years ago with Nell Wing, some of you may know was Bill Wilson's private secretary for the last 20-something years of his life. And after Bill died, she stayed on as Lois' caretaker until she died. And I asked Nell if it was true that Bill had said if he could write anything different in the big book, he would have said never have we seen a person fail failed she said oh hell no he would never have said that he knew that if he said never there's a guy gonna try and say I did and go out and do it she said I only heard him say one thing that he would've done differently in the book in all the years that she was with him and that was he said if he had it to do over he would have said cunning baffling powerful and patient because our disease is patient I don't know if you read the biography that was written a couple of years ago about Bill Wilson but you know what he did on his deathbed any of you read it know he begged for a drink now he was delirious he was dying but even with that his disease surfaced and the craving for the drink came back some people faulted him for that I don't he shows me that he was an alcoholic to the very end and that he He was a human to the very end. And I know my disease is just as patient as his, it's never going to give me a chance if he can help it to escape from its clutches. Those voices in the back of my mind, they just chatter away sometimes. times. And I'll tell you something about them in a minute, but when I was in college, I had some terrible things to happen, and I tried to drown myself in alcohol, and it got to the point where there was not enough of that, and so I made a pretty serious suicide attempt. And i won't go into the details of it, but thank God it failed. and it failed through a series of coincidences. And you know what a coincidence is, don't you? A coincidence is a miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous. After they pumped my stomach out, it was the doctors in my family's decision that I needed some serious help. So I began my journey through the next 30 years of visiting the neighborhood shrinks. and I went to every kind of those that there are counselors, psychiatrists psychologists, psychological, social workers, ministers you name it, I went through all of them damned every one of them when I'd walk out of their office because not one single one ever did one single thing to help me now I can tell you tonight in rigorous honesty there is a remote possibility one of the more or more might have been able to help my if I had ever once told them the truth. Second or third question, you think you might have a drinking problem? Nope, nope, I drink fine. They'd go off treating something else. One of the shrinks I went to was a very famous shrink. They were over in Augusta, Georgia. And this psychiatrist and his partner had had a, what became a famous client. It was a woman who had three distinct personalities living inside her body. And they had written a book about it. It's called The Three Faces of Eve. And at the time when I was seeing them, the movie had just come out. And it won Best Picture of the Year that year. Joanne Woodward got Best Actress. And I kept quizzing my doctor about this patient of his. And with the confidentiality, of course, he wouldn't tell me much of anything. But I wanted to know all I could about this woman who had three personalities living inside her body. Because I felt like if I could get mine down to just three, I'm not kidding I have these conventions that go on up here in my head sometimes and they talk and they chatter and they decide things and there's something I hate to share with y'all tonight I really do hate it but I have to be honest they they don't like you you. They don't like for me to hang out with you. They'll do anything to keep me from hanging out with you. But you see, I've come to like me better when I'm with you because you people in these rooms have a way of bringing out the best in Bill and you keep doing it and you keeps doing it so I stay close to to you. I mean, it's over 31 years and somebody said, well, you don't have to go to near as many meetings, do you? I said, I don't know. I still go to four or five meetings a week. You need all of those? I don' t know. But why don't you keep going to so many? Because I don't want to. And they kind of shake their heads and walk away. I had one friend who was a very dear friend who supported me all the way through my first year of sobriety and you know, I kept hearing if you're not an alcoholic you can never really fully understand what he's saying. And this guy who was a local talk show host here in town and a fellow broadcaster and a very close friend supported me all the way through that first year. And I said, he understands. He knows because he wasn't an alcoholic. He knows. He understands. I got my first medallion. I went and showed it to him. He put his arms around me and gave me a big hug and he said, I am so proud of you. You can probably have one or two now and it wouldn't bother you, would it? He didn't understand. As I said at the beginning, they don't and they won't. and sometimes my disease will use some of these people to say come on you have one you know if a flight attendant on a plane offers me a free cocktail I just look at her and smile and say honey you don't have enough huh or I'll use my wife's favorite line her favorite line in the cocktail party when somebody approaches her her multiple times and trying to get her to have a drink. Marlene just looks at him and smiles and says, no, I make it a habit never to drink when I'm sober. And they're standing there going, she's on the other side of the room by then. The truth is, they don't care whether I drink or not. They just want me. See, I didn't care about whether other people drank as long as I felt like in my mind they were drinking as much as I was. I found out very few of my friends were drinking as much I was when I asked them after I got sober, they said are you kidding? We couldn't have kept up with you if our life depended on it. You see, my disease told me otherwise. I had a lot of wonderful experiences in broadcasting over 50 years. I met a lot lot of wonderful people. I got to interview presidents and a lot of celebrities and found out they're pretty human themselves, and found a lot them like to drink too. I don't have time tonight but sometime I will share with you the night that I got drunk with Lyndon Johnson. And then interviewed him. And I did a damn good interview, too, until I got down to the point where I asked him a question about his wife, Ladybug. Now, most of y'all Y'all aren't old enough to know the president's wife's name was Lady Bird, not Lady Bug. Thank God he thought it was funnier than y'all did. Another time I went with a group of broadcaster friends to a reception at the White House and they had an open bar. You know what that means for us? I availed myself of it quite freely. And these people I thought were my friends, I found out weren't. They were not because just before, well, one of them grabbed me on each side of me and they ushered me out of the White House right before I was ready to tell President Reagan my plans were straightened out in the mess he'd made. I'm sure there was some good ideas the life of me don't remember what they were my career was checkered with things like that but it was a successful career it almost wasn't 31 years ago I had a job hanging by a thread 31 years ago I was on the verge of being drummed out of my profession. But thanks to God and to you, in these meetings and those steps. In the year 2000, I was inducted into the Georgia Broadcasting Hall of Fame and I owe that to you. I owe it to Alcoholics Anonymous. us. I had to do a lot of traveling in the last years of my business career, and it reached the point where when I would leave town and be gone for several days, my wife didn't ask where I was when I didn't come home for three or four days. She didn't know if I was on business or otherwise. You see, more and more often my behavior became more andmore bizarre and more and more often I would wake up in strange beds with strange people in strange cities. More and more often my behaviour was so bizarre that my daughter avoided me at every opportunity she had as she was 10 or 11 years old. And I didn't even realize that the only look in her eyes was a look of fear and of hate and of disgust. She never knew when Dad's going to come home in the middle of the night in a drunken rage, and so she never invited friends to come spend the night. But you see, my disease that outfitted me was something that I didn't know I had. And it's what I tonight call my alcoholic blinders. Yeah, I might have a problem with alcohol, but it's my problem. It's not your problem. Stay out of my face. I know tonight that my disease touched and corrupted every person that it came in contact with employees family most definitely family friends it reached out like the tentacles of an octopus and sucked him in God bless Alamance because Because most of the good active allylons I know are crazier than the drunks. But we made them that way. We were addicted to the booze, they were addicted to us. And we were not pretty pictures to be addicted to. My wife came to the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous before I did. And for four and a half months she went to meetings and tried to stay sober, coming home every night to a raging drunk. For the rest of my life, I will make living amends to that woman for what I put her through. She would walk in the door from a meeting and I would yell at her, fix me a drink. And she'd go to the liquor cabinet and get it out and beautifully make me a Drink and bring it and hand it to me. Until one evening she came home, I yelled out my usual, fix-me-a-drink. She quietly went over and mixed the drink, brought it and handed it to him and said, enjoy that, Bill, because that's the last drink I'll ever make for you as long as you live. And the way you're going, that won't be long. I regret the fact I never drank the last drink my wife made for me and ended up smashed up against the wall. But you see, you people were getting to her. And she was doing something she didn't even know she was doing. She was 12-stepping me me from home. She was 12-stepping me when she didn't even know what 12- stepping was. She was a walking, breathing miracle and she didn t even know it. I kept thinking that she's going to try to con me into going to one of those A&A meetings with her but she didn't. Didn't say a word. There were a few little clues left around the house like I I'd go in the bathroom and lift the toilet seat, and there's how it works taped to the wall. If you don't believe it, you ask her. But on July 26, 1982, I came out of a week-long blackout drunk. And when I came out of that drunk, I looked down and in my left hand there was 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 the thought going through my head was is this all there is because if it is you can have it and then I remembered what another old recovering drunk had told me he said when he came to Alcoholics Anonymous he had expected God to open the gates of heaven and let him in he said he didn't but he opened the gates of hell and let me out and if where I was on the evening of July 26, 1982 is any closer to hell I hope I never know it I got up out of my chair and I walked in the bathroom I cleaned up as best I could gargled about a half a bottle of Listerine drank the rest I didn't tell that, I gotta tell you, I didn t tell that for years. I m a career alcoholic and to have to stand up here in front of you people and tell you that my last drink was Listerine that's embarrassing as hell but it's the truth I got in my car and drove back to that little 81 11 club and I walked in slid down behind a post in the back of the room and the God of my understanding has a sense of humor because I looked around that post at the front of that room and sitting there there chairing the meeting was my wife. She didn't see me until the end of the meeting when a man got up and explained those poker chips, and I got up out of my chair, and I took the longest walk I've ever taken in my life to the front of that room, and the man pressed a white poker chip into my trembling, sweating hand, and And I walked back and sat down. I choose tonight to believe that an old Bill Sanders walked to the front of that room that night and died, and then a new one walked away because my life has never been the same. I tell newcomers who come into this meeting, and you people with under 90 days hear me, hey, fasten your seatbelt because it's a wild ride. You hear it said in the meetings don't quit before the miracle happens. I don't like that. I say don't quite quit before the first miracle happens because they never stop. They just keep happening and keep happening and keep having. Last week my sponsor celebrated 47 years in sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. The miracles are still coming every day in his life. A very dear friend that I think many of you in this room knew, Bill Root who died the first of this year. 56 years of this fellowship. And he told me just days before he died it's still getting better. And he said the miracle of them all is in a few days I'm going to meet my sober wife face to face again thanks to another miracle. that's what I want to do I buried three sponsors in my journey and recovery I have a fourth now every one of those sponsors were exactly who I need at the time that I needed them did I pick those men I'm beginning to think I didn't I'm getting to think there was a divine intervention going on there, and there's been a lot of those in my life that I didn't know about. One of them was a man that I was determined that I wasn't going to like. My first sponsor, a man named Doc Crandall, had said he was treating me with two diseases. One was alcoholism, and the other one was terminal uniqueness. He kept saying, Bill, one of these days you're going to wake up and discover that you're you're nothing but a garden variety drunk. And when you do, that's going to be the happiest day of your life. I thought he was crazy. But one by one, y'all stripped away the uniqueness until it was all gone and I stood naked in the eyes of God and this fellowship and realized Bill Sanders is nothing but a Garden Variety drunk. And for the first time in my life, I knew I belonged I fit you were what I had been searching for for my whole life and I almost wasn't smart enough to pick up on it my second sponsor being my sponsor became a sponsor I know by God's intervention but it was a terrible fluke you see Doc, my first sponsor had talked about that terminal uniqueness he said don't know what way I know for you to get over that I want you to learn some about acceptance. He said for the next month, and he did this three different times, three different months, I want You to go home and out loud to Yourself read pages 448 and 449 in the big book. In the new big book it's page 417 or 418. He said I wantYou to read that outside every day for a month until You get a handle on what acceptance is. Well, I did it. I got so tired of accepting she's the answer to all my problems today that if I ever make this sucker who wrote that, I'm going to punch his lights out. A while after my sponsor died, I was invited to speak at an AA conference in Omaha, Nebraska. And I got there and I got a copy of the program and I looked at it and I called my wife and said, look who's here. She said, who's that? that? I said, Dr. Paul O. That's him. I met him. I didn't punch him out. Pretty nice guy. Now listen to what God did. Less than a month after that, I'm speaking at an AA conference in northern Pennsylvania out of a state park in the middle of the woods and they put all the speakers in one little cottage. Guess who's right across the hall from me? Dr. Dr. Paul and Max got to know him a little better that weekend. And about a month after that, I'm in Longview, Texas. Guess who's there? And it was at that conference that he came up to me and he asked me, he said, Bill, we're having the anniversary of my home group in Laguna Beach in October. Would you come out and be our speaker? Now, folks, I want to tell you something. I did not plan to say what I said. I did not mean to say what I said. I don't know where it came from. But I said, yes, I will if you'll be my sponsor. And for the last 10 years of his life until he died in 2000, Dr. Paul was my sponsor and I know God put him there because I learned so much about sponsorship, about love and about acceptance. And my wife and I learned such a lot. We learned so many things from Paul and Max about happy ever aftering together. When Paul died in 2000, they had been married 63 years. Our marriage nearly fell apart. But you see here again, God had other plans. And my wife and I are now thanks to this program instead of divorcing soon to celebrate 47 years of recovery and of marriage and of happily ever after because of you. I could go on and on and on about the miracles in my life my life is full of them and I'll probably experience another miracle of some kind before I go to bed tonight it's fun waiting for them to happen my prayer is that I'm in the right place at the right time to do what God has in store for me to do if not but one of you who have less than 90 days heard something that I shared tonight night. It may help you stay sober another day. Then it was worth my while to be here. We had a lot of friends in this room. It's always good to see old friends. I'm going to keep coming back, and I'm gonna keep going to a lot meetings. I'll go to a lot of them that I don't need to go to, but you see, I don' t know which ones they they are. So I just go to all of them. And the prayer I pray every night, among other things, I end it by saying thank you God because I almost missed all this. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Sobercast is ad-free, and we'd like your help in order to keep it that way. So if you'd like to help us be self-supporting by pledging a dollar to a month, visit SoberCast.com and look for the donate links. Thank you very much.