Jack

All this talk of who's better than who (and no one's better than me) triggered a memory of a man I knew for many years, the father of two of my best friends in the world.  I hung out at their house a great deal when I was younger so I got to see this man drink a whole shitload of alcohol.  I mean . . . he was clearly one of us and I could see this when I was not yet one of us.

I move to a new city, get sober in a tenuous, dude's-not-going-to-make-it sort of way, before eventually getting deadly serious with my recovery.  I would periodically come home to visit my family and knew it would be a good idea to get a road sponsor, so to speak, someone I could contact when I was out of my regular meeting loop.   This was during a time when long-distance phone calls were no small matter so making contacts with the locals was more important than it is today.  My friends' dad had gotten sober a few years before me so I gave him a ring and asked him to stand in when I was traveling.  His response could not have been more fervent and excited had I told him he had won the lottery.  He immediately offered to take me to a meeting that night.

The angle here is that this guy existed in a social circle far, far above mine.  He could have treated me like I was not worthy. that I was a twerp kid who hung around with his sons.  He did not do this.  Granted, I knew him fairly well over the years but we weren't buddies.  As I am pondering my different-ness at my morning meeting an image of him picking me up that night and driving me to a club house surfaced through the miasma of self-centered fog that usually envelopes me.  We arrived at the end of a speaker meeting.  He shook a few hands and introduced me around, mortified, then bundled me into his car and off we went in search of a different meeting, despite my protests that my time with him had calmed me down real nice and good.  The second meeting was well under way when we arrived but we did manage to get a half in.  He introduced me to a few people here, too, before driving me home.  I'm sure we sat in his car outside my house and talked some more.

I don't think I ever attended another meeting with him.  He died a few years back, extremely sober right to the end.  I have never forgotten this effort at helping a newer person get sober, someone with long hair and no money and liberal attitudes.  It's an extraordinary thing to people not in The Fellowship but very ordinary to those of us trudging the Happy Road to Destiny.