Practical experience shows that nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. It works when other activities fail. This is our twelfth suggestion: Carry this message to other alcoholics! (BB 4ed, Ch.7, pp 89:1)

When I entered the rooms, I was given the gift of desperation. I went through the steps in 6 months. The career I thought I had lost was restored and a marriage on the brink of divorce was saved. I had a sponsee and even set up a new meeting. But once I’d done all that, I sat down on my laurels.

measures permitting) going for lunch or a cup of tea after meetings to experience that ‘we are not a glum lot’.

With this attitude, suddenly my own affairs also fall in place, not that they simply resolve themselves, but with this attitude, I am given strength from my HP to cope with living life on life’s terms.

After a few difficult events in my life, my serenity was gone, and I experienced “dry bottom”.

It is like fitness. It is not enough to sign up for the gym and even learn how to lift weights, it requires constant lifting. AA is no different! As Bill says: “We are not cured of alcoholism. What we have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God’s will into all our daily activities.”

I asked my current sponsor for guidance and threw myself into more AA service. I started to visit prisons and share experience, strength and hope with medical students in the social sciences. I became more active in meetings and intergroups and sponsored a few more newcomers.

Now entering my sixth year of sobriety, I am as close to the BB as possible: “practical experience shows that nothing helps but intensive work with other alcoholics”.

So, my greatest lesson in sobriety is: I need to give it away, to keep it.

The best part of it, for the most part at least, is that it is also fun! I often propose (covid

My greatest lesson in sobriety

My greatest lesson in sobriety is to stay in the now. AA is a 24 hour program so whoever got up the earliest in this room today has the longest sobriety.

My last drink was April 4th, 1979. My 90th day of Sobriety was on Saturday July 4th, 1979.

meetings going on around the clock. To this day I don’t know why I chose to stay alone, it never crossed my mind until now to ‘hang’ with sober members at their backyard BBQ’s.

I was raised in a small town called Freeport, Long Island, New York. My first home group was Roosevelt We Care in the next town. Thanks to Zoom, I am still able to attend their Saturday 1030am morning meeting and their Sunday Sunrise 930am morning meeting which is an absolute joy since I moved to San Francisco, CA to live nearly 35 years ago.

Now that I write this and look back on it, Roosevelt We Care was a St8 meeting and of course I was gay and very closeted in those meeting rooms but every one knew but me. Haha. Anywho, late that evening I got back home exhausted but I didn’t drink that day. That was my last holiday in Sobriety. To this day, holidays are for normal people. For this alcoholic, holidays are AA marathon meetings with plenty of good food, mostly homemade and tons on non alcoholic beverages. Don’t let me start talking about the Dessert Table; Scrumptious! Another great lesson in sobriety.

My 90th day, July 4th, fell on a Saturday that year and I was petrified. I didn’t have a car so I walked home. It is the only holiday when everyone, all the neighbors talk to you. They are all out in the backyards BBQing Ribs, Chicken & Hot Links Pork Sausage. “Hey Man”, he yells, “jump the fence, grab a drink or a beer and stay a while till these ribs get ‘Jumping’ ready”. I managed to avoid jumping any fences that day but I was scared to death about drinking. I walked over to Freeport Detox Hospital on Grove Street in Freeport and stayed all day and evening at their pocket meetings at the hospital.