There was an old baseball player named Hank Greenberg, who wrote a book with that title; Don’t Die On Third. It rererred to a baseball term about getting to home and safety. Safe at home. Last night we read the Third Chapter and it reminded me of that term and the book.
There’s a lot in that chapter. The first is the desire in each one of us to be able to drink safely. I think that no matter how long we have in sobriety, that desire is still there in each one of us. Whatever that seed is, it’s still there, though we don’t know it conciously. It will be there to the day we die. Alcohol is patient. It can wait forever. It just wants us to take at least one more drink. And then…
We come into this program knowing everything. And, again, no matter how much time we have, and no matter how we practice these steps and come to understand the importance of ego reduction, something inside us tells us that we can still go it alone. We still enjoy those moments by ourselves, where we can sit back and relax and think our own thoughts. Just like we did in the bar or with the bottle. Those great thoughts, which some of us wrote down on cocktail napkins. We forget that the man on third is dependent on the man at the plate to get him home.
The idea that we’re like other men has to be smashed. Why? Because most men know that they can’t succeed without others. That thought doesn’t occur to people like us. And, if it does, we’re prone to rejecting their help. If we’re hurting, we, like a bear, want to crawl into our cave. We isolate and want to be alone. We don’t need the batter at the plate. We can steal home by ourselves.
One of the men at the meeting expressed his idea that the people described in that chapter had drank again because they wanted to. He said that there is a certain amount of planning that goes on before the alcoholic goes back to drinking. I spoke to him afterward and reminded him that when the insanity returns we’re not rational. I had told him stories about others I had dealings with and what happened to them. I told him I could remember getting calls from some men, who said they were on the verge of taking a drink and could I come and help them. I remember one man, who called at midnight and I got another man and went over to his apartment and sat up until dawn, talking to him. He said everything we said made sense and he had to agree with us.
Then he got up and went out into his kitchen, opened the freezer, where he had stored a bottle of gin and promptly drank it down. He continued until a week or so later, when he collapsed and had to be hospitalized.
I remember another friend, who found himself sitting in a bar with half a glass of beer in front of him. He was startled he said and asked the bartender whose drink this was. His of course. He had no memory of going into the bar. Another man told me of going back to his office on a Friday only to find his partner and another man having a drink. His partner handed him a drink and he drank it. There was no thought in any of these cases, I found out. At least not a rational one.
Bill W. certainly knew us. He said that the price of sobriety is eternal vigilance. Awareness. But that alone does not suffice. Someplace in the literature, Bill refers to the problem of only going to God as a bushleague pinchhitter. I pray I may not forget that only He can get me home safely.
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