I really should say all week, instead of just yesterday. For several reasons. One was that a young man, fairly new, asked me if we could go out for coffee and talk. What a thrill it was for me to be sitting and talking to a man, who is literally struggling with just coming in.
I can remember back in time, back in the early 70s, being sent out on a twelfth step call by my sponsor. Here I was, maybe not six months in the program, and he wanted me to take another man, who had less time than I did, and go to this hospital in Riverdale, Md. and talk to a man who was a psychology professor. But, also, another drunk. I was more nervous than a frog on a hot frying pan.
Anyway, when we got there, this man was standing in the reception area in his pajamas, arguing with the person on the desk about his bill. His father was there and just looked helpless. Someho! w I got the nerve to say to this man that it was things like this that had put him here in the hospital and why not go back to his room and we’d talk about what was going on. I was surprised when he agreed and we went back to his room.
This man had burns all over one side of his face and body. He had experienced three grand mal seizures that morning. He had been smoking at the time and he was wearing a nylon shirt. He had rolled over on the cigarette and the shirt had caught fire and he had been pretty badly burned. Plus, he had chewed up his tongue pretty well and they had put some stitches in it, so that it looked like a road map.
Here I was, with another new guy, and we were supposed to twelve step this man. We were the messengers and I had no idea what the hell the message was. But, I plowed ahead anyway. We spent about an hour in his room, before he threw u! s out. Here is this man on the bed, burned, a chewed up tongue and he could talk circles around us. And then he asked us to leave.
I talked to my sponsor, as best as I can remember, about what happened. I guess we must have let it go as a bad job. But, I failed to ask him the most important question; why had he sent us on this mission? Months later that question hit me squarely between the eyes. I went to my sponsor and asked him why. He just looked at me and said, “The reason I sent you to that man was because I knew the man in the bed was you. I knew that if you could win the argument with yourself, you could stay sober.”
I never forgot that. Here was my first sponsor, a man, who never got beyond early high school, a rough, street scarred veteran of the bar wars, who could see through my character and know what was good for me. We was a man, as were a! host of long time sober individuals just like him, who intuitively and from experience knew what made guys like me tick. They could open us up like no professional ever could. They could see beneath the skin. “If you could win the argument with yourself, you could stay sober.”
Often, when I go to meetings, I can find myself listening and hearing things I don’t agree with. I often find myself in dialogue with myself and “arguing”. I find myself going back to the instructions in the Big Book. I find that I’m building a case of the whys and wherefores of how I’ve been able to stay sober. Sometimes I will end up in silence and just meditating; listening. And then I would know; once again I have won that argument with myself. Once again I have been able to stay sober.
One more thing. That man, my first sponsor, drank again, after six years. He died as a result! of his going back out. I was about two years “sober” at the time. I remember the man, who became my second sponsor, although he was there from the start, saying to me, “Now you have a choice. You can go with him, or you can stay and get sober.” Scared to death, I chose to stay and get sober. Once again, I had won the argument with me. What a lesson. AA is full of them.
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