Gopher State Roundup XXXII in Minneapolis, MN

My name's Don Popejoy, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, everybody. By God's grace, sponsorship, and the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've been sober since the 21st day of February 1980. My home group is a primary purpose group on Marco Island, Florida. I, I'm overwhelmed.

I'm overwhelmed with gratitude to have been a part of this weekend. I don't I don't think I have the words to express how much I appreciate, how honored and privileged I am to have spent these days here with all of you. I wanna thank Mike and and, the committee for inviting us. I wanna thank Eric for for being our host and and showing us all the grace and courtesy. I wanna thank all the speakers.

My god. Heaven these speakers have just grabbed my heart, and I know that they have yours too. And I wanna thank you. Over the years, at times, I have I have had the privilege of serving on conference committees like this, not this large, but like this. So I know something about the commitment and the hours of work and meetings and the effort that goes in to bringing us this kind of a of a energy driven filled, spirit filled conference.

I I wanna thank all of you on the committee, all of you that have volunteered, all of these 73 groups that are that have provided our hospitality. I wanna thank each and every one of you. And now we're we're about we're about to wrap this thing up. And and it's it's my responsibility to share with you in a general way what I used to be like and what happened to me and what I am like today. And and really, my story is the story of all the previous 7 speakers.

You know, what what I've what we've all really heard, me and all of you have heard this weekend, from from each of these speakers, even though their their stories are totally different, we've heard the same message. And and and what the message is that I've heard is that because of this simple program, the theme of your conference, our creator has entered into our hearts and lives, and we know this with absolute certainty in a way that is indeed miraculous. And what a what a glorious message of recovery it's been this weekend. Like like all the and many of the I think all of the speakers have really said, what I used to be like was that there was something missing inside of me. I used to kinda struggle.

I it was easy for me to tell about what my behavior used to be like, but it was more difficult for me to find words to express to you what I was really like, what I what I felt like inside. I probably, before I get into this, should clear up a little bit this confusing question of my geography. If you if you look in your program, it says I'm from Wichita, Kansas. If you read my name badge, it says I'm from Naples, Florida. My home group is on Marco Island, Florida.

And we're living today at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. If you're wondering if I know where in the hell I'm from, you've got a good question. You know? I got sober in a little town out in southwestern Kansas by the name of Ulysses, and we lived there for a long time. I sold my business in 1996 to some folks in Wichita, and we moved there and lived there for 8 years.

And that was our home and my home group. While we were there, we got a little condominium on a lake in the Ozarks, and we'd spend some weekends down there. In December, we made the decision to sell our house in Wichita. I'd quit working at the end of November. We bought a place in Naples, Florida and moved down there.

And then we discovered that summers are not friendly in South Florida because of hurricanes. So we decided we'd keep the place in at the lake of the Ozarks and, for safety's sake, go up there while the hurricanes are blowing through our new home. So that's the story of my geography. Couple of years ago, Susan had taken some of her girlfriends down to the lake condo to play golf. And after they left, I went down there and they had obviously put together a jigsaw picture puzzle.

It must have rained so they couldn't play golf. And the very centerpiece of this puzzle was gone. And I asked Susan, I said, where's where's the middle of the rest of the puzzle? And she said, the piece in the in the middle is missing. And I thought, my god.

That's what I used to be like. That's exactly what I used to be like. I had this piece missing in the puzzle in my life. The summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, I kinda went on a quest looking for the missing piece. And I and I and I had 3 first time experiences that convinced me that I might have found it.

In about March of that year, I, my flight instructor allowed me to fly an airplane by myself for the first time. And as I was cruising around over that flat Kansas countryside and looking at the clouds and the horizon. And I thought, god, it can't get any better than this. This has got to be what I've been missing all my life. And then, about the end of the school year, one of the girls in the junior class invited me to go to the junior senior prom.

And my dad let me take his 54 Ford Coupe. And I picked her up and we went to the prom. And she lived out in the country. And sometime between 3 and 5 o'clock in the morning, on a dirt road in Grant County, Kansas, in the back seat of my dad's Ford coupe, I was absolutely certain that I'd found the missing piece of my life. Then sometime in July of that year, my folks were leaving town and, going to Colorado fishing.

And I I asked them if I could use the the coupe to take some of my buddies to the drive in theater. And with some misgivings, he allowed me to do that. And I picked up 3 of my friends and we went out and we were sitting by the drive in movie. And one of them in the back seat, guess what? It said, guess what I got?

And we all said, what? And he said, I got a pint of tequila. Now the home that I grew up in knew all the agony and the pain and the heartache and the broken promises and the broken hearts of a home with active alcoholism because of my dad's drinking. And I had promised myself as a young boy that I would never drink, and that I would never subject the people that I loved and that loved me to the grief of alcoholism that we experienced in our home. And, one of these these guys took the lid off the bottle and the first one took a drink and handed to the guy sitting to the right of me, and he took a drink.

And without one single thought of any of that, I put that bottle of my mouth and took the biggest swallow I could take. And I thought I was gonna die. It burned and it hurt, and I thought, oh, this is terrible. And I passed it to the back seat. And about 30 seconds later, I had one thought that overpowered every other thought I had for the next 25 years of my life.

And that thought was that I hope to God there's some of that stuff left when it gets back around to me. I vaguely remember that night, the rest of that night. When I came to the next morning, I looked out the window of my bedroom and saw that the back end of my dad's car was all bashed in, folded up like an accordion. And when they came home, I started a pattern of my life that was continued till I walked in the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I got drunk.

I when I drink, the same thing happened over and over again. I drank until there wasn't anything more to drink, until I blacked out or I passed out. I got into trouble and then I had to lie and cover up my way out of the jam that I was in. And that became the story of my life. For a long time, those experiences that I had as a teenager, more or less filled this empty hole in the middle of me.

They didn't ever fit quite right. And you know how you do when you're when you're putting together a jigsaw picture puzzle. You find a piece and you think it's right and you try to push it down in and squeeze it and jam it. It doesn't quite fit. But you keep working at it because you don't have another piece to put in there yet.

And that's the way I was with all these things. Now I I tried all kinds of stuff to fill in the missing piece of my life, not just airplanes and and and and and sex and booze. I I'd try anything for a while, hoping that maybe it was gonna gonna fill up what was missing in me. I mean, I'm a bar drinker, and I I I like to drink in bars where the smoke's so thick. You can cut it with a knife, and and we can hear those ice cubes tinkling in the glasses where there's a little postage square size dance floor in the back of the room.

There's a country and western band playing sad music and people are polishing their belt buckles together. That's my kind of a place. Some of you know about those places. And I'd go to those places and and and I'd have these wonderful fantasies about how closing time was gonna work out for me. And and it never came true.

My closing times were a disaster. And and, I mean, the simple truth is they don't like to go home with guys that are puking on their boots. That's all there is to it. But I thought there's gotta be something wrong. There's gotta be some reason why this isn't working out.

And, oh, and you need to know one other thing about me. I've been about this ball headed since I was in my mid twenties. And here it is in the 19 seventies, and and, I'm I'm a child of the fifties as opposed to a lot of your other speakers who are a child of the sixties. So I vicariously enjoyed their sixties right along with them, though. I'll tell you that.

And, I decided, after giving this matter some thought, that the reason my closing time fantasies were a dismal failure was because I was prematurely ball headed. And I thought I need to do something to address this problem. So I I lived in this little town of Ulysses out in southwest Kansas, and I heard about a doctor in Wichita. And so I I got in my little single engine airplane and made an appointment with him, and I flew down to Wichita to meet him. I parked in front of a of a of a liquor store and a barbershop, walked across the street, walked upstairs to meet this doctor, and he explained to me that for $5,000, he could cut 50 holes in rows in the top of my head, and he could cut 50 plugs of hair out of the back of my neck, And that he could take these plugs of hair and transplant them into these holes that he had cut in the top of my head.

And if we got lucky, he could grow me about 10 corn rows of hair. And he said, what do you think?' And I said, 'Not much.' He said, why? And I said, good grief. 5,000 this is in 1970. I said, $5,000 is a ridiculous amount of money.

I'm not into pain. And I looked at him and I said, and you're more ball headed than I am. If this works so good, why don't you do it yourself? I paid him for my appointment, and I walked over to get my well, I first went into the liquor store to get a 5th, because there was one of these my kind of places was down I knew it was down on South Seneca in Wichita. And I looked up, and the easier, softer way just jumped right out and grabbed me.

Me. I mean, I was parked in front of this barbershop, but it was kind of a specialty barbershop. He had about 10 Styrofoam models of men's heads in the window. And on each of these heads, there was a full head of hair. It was a man's wig store.

And I walked in there and gave him $3 or $400 And I walked out a couple hours later, looking exactly like my hero, Glenn Campbell. I had a full head of hair, a pompadour that went from here to here. I was ready to go do the boogaloo. And I got in my car with my 5th to J&B and headed down to the joint and started drinking and listening to the music. And and I you know, this was a long time ago.

But but here was the drill. You got the rug and you got the shiny ball head. So the challenge is how are you gonna get the wig to stick on top of the shiny ball head? What they do, they sell you a roll of double sided adhesive tape. And you you cut this tape into little 1 inch strips and you pull the backing off of one side and you stick that around the inside perimeter of the hairpiece.

Then you pull the backing off the other side. Now you got one sticky side down and one sticky side up and you stick that thing on the top of your head and comb it in and you're ready to go do it. And I think that works pretty well for non alcoholic drinkers. I mean, I don't know about you. What happens to me when I drink Mr.

Justinian Brooks magic elixir, some real predictable things are gonna happen. I mean, I pour that stuff down my throat and it burns for a little bit and then it starts doing its magic. And I become transformed. I morph into another human being. I mean, this guy that was shy and uncomfortable around girls and didn't think he could dance, I'm suddenly the most social giant of the 70s, you know?

I can talk. I can do anything. I can dance And and and man, in about an hour and a half, that boo starts coming out the top of my head in the form of perspiration. Now, It's a bright audience now. Adhesive tape abhors perspiration.

So you know, what happened? Here I am, I'm dancing like crazy, I'm drinking that J and B Scotch. My head starts to sweat. The tape turns loose and the rug turns around sideways on the top of my head. And it's hard to be a cool operator.

It's hard to impress them in a 70 single joint, you know, with the part on your head running from ear to ear. Pompadors hanging down over your right ear lobe. Closing time, still a disaster. I parted company with that WIG. 2 or 3 years later, I was building an airport in Alamosa, Colorado, and I'd been out drinking.

I made it back to the to the motel room. And this time it hadn't come completely off. One side was still stuck and it was just hanging over here. I had that half scalp look. Real hip slick and cool, you know, you got to hang it over here.

And, all of a sudden it was time for my nightly oblations before the throne of American Standard. I went into the bathroom, got down on my knees, my head went down, the stuff came up and the other 3 pieces of tape turned loose and the rug fell right in there with the rest of them. I might have been accurately labeled as the town drunk, but I sure as hell wasn't a village idiot. I didn't fish it out. I hit the silver handle and waved goodbye to the whole mess.

Went to work the next day and said, Now you've got the real me. And I went back to the only thing that really ever ever almost perfectly filled the hole, and that was booze. I, alcohol and alcoholism just put a ring through my nose and took me wherever it wanted to take me. The 25 year progression of active alcoholism in my life, I developed this kind of a credo of living. It said, any means justifies the end.

Whatever I perceived it was that I needed to fill this missing hole inside of me, I went about the business of getting it no matter what the consequences. If I perceived I needed more money to fill up what was missing inside of me, I went about the business of making more money, and I ignored the constraints that were imposed upon the way I'm supposed to do business by the law. I I I became an ever area of my life a liar and a cheat and a thief. If I perceived Susan and I got married in 1960. And and and if I perceived that I needed more love or sex to make me happy, I went about the business of of getting it, ignoring the constraints of my behavior imposed by my marriage vows.

And I brought the terrible crippling affliction of infidelity into our marriage. I became a part time dad. We had 2 kids, Steve and Linda. We I became an absentee husband and a part time father. I'd I'd go out and I'd drink all week, and I'd come home filled with guilt and shame and remorse, and I'd take it out on Susan and the kids and verbal and mental abuse.

Became my dad had died in 1968, and I blamed him for all my troubles. I blamed him for the way that we'd been in our home. My mother lived about 10 minutes away, and I didn't speak to her. I I guess I blamed her for my dad. I had a brother that that, that worked in this family little family construction business, and, I thought he was a leech and a a drag on my happiness, and I resented him.

My life we've heard these words from speaker after speaker. My life was one of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization by 1980. Susan in self preservation mode, had gone to work. And she had a little photography studio in this little town of 3 or 4000 people where we lived. She had a lady working for her named Joyce.

Joyce, I like Joyce. Her husband, John, worked with me in this construction highway construction thing, and we'd get together socially. And Joyce and I got in the kitchen to fix drinks, and we'd have 3 shooters and make 4 mixed drinks and take them out and watch John and Susan watch the ice cube melts, and we'd chug ours down, go back in the kitchen, and have 3 shooters and make she was fun to be around. And then then she did the dumbest thing. New Year's Eve 1979, in alcoholic blackout, she tried to kill herself.

Fortunately, she wasn't successful, but then she did this really ridiculous thing, she started going to this outfit called Alcoholics Anonymous. Now by this time, I had a little business interest in Denver, Colorado. It's about 300 miles away. And I was running away from home every week to go out there to get drunk and do the things that that that I do when I get drunk in Denver, to live this doctor Jekyll kind of doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde kind of life that I know so many of you know about. I'd left to go out there for toll season.

I'll be back in a day one time, and I came back a week and a half later and found all my clothes on the front porch. And, she said, well, you either gotta go to marriage counseling or or or you've gotta move out. And we didn't want anybody to know there was anything wrong in Camelot, so we'd get in our little airplane here, but we can fly to Wichita, the other direction, 250 miles to see this marriage counselor. One day he said to me, he said, does your drinking cause trouble at home? And I said, are you the dumbest counselor in the world?

She comes in here and talks to you for an hour every week, you know it causes trouble at home. And I think what he said to me is then, why do you drink? But what I heard him say is, why do you drink at home? And I thought that's a heck of a good question. I've got this little business in Denver and I can maybe make it 3 or 4 days in Ulysses without drinking, and then I can fly away and do my drinking and what I do when I drink in Denver.

And that was the life that I had in 1980. And I'd gone to work, and the phone rang, and it was Susan. And she said, Joyce and I I told her I I was going to Denver on business. And, joy she called and said Joyce and I need to go to Denver with you. We'll meet you at the airport.

And and I guess, you know, you think about it, the last two people in the world I wanted to go with me to Denver, Colorado were my wife, for obvious reasons, because I've told you about the kind of life that I lived, And this goofy woman that had just joined Alcoholics Anonymous and wasn't drinking anymore. And I could normally have come up with 10 reasons in 5 seconds why they couldn't go. And I guess this was my first indication that the end was almost near because I just said, okay, I'll meet you at the airport. And we got in the plane and flew to Denver and checked into a little Holiday Inn where I kept a room. And I don't know what they did.

They went off to do whatever they came for, and I went to the bar. And that's the last thing I remember about the 20th day of February of 1980. I woke up the next morning in that hotel room, and I knew where I was because I woke up, I came to there a lot. And and then I realized things something was really wrong because Susan was there. And I I got up, and I I still had on the dirty shirt that I had on the day before, and she woke up and ordered some coffee.

And I guess she called Joyce's room and asked her to come down and have coffee with us, because I'm I'm wearing the clothes I had on the night before, and I've got my arms around this coffee cup, and I'm shaking so bad I can't drink it because the coffee's all pouring down my dirty shirt. And, someone knocks on the door, and Susan opens the door, and Joyce comes bounding into the room with her bright, clear, little AAIs. And she says, good morning, Don. How are you? And you've heard other speakers talk about it.

Peter talked about it eloquently. And this was my moment of truth. This was my wimpy moment of truth. I said, Joyce, I'm not worth a damn. And, Tammy, I think, last night referred to Win o Joe.

Win o Joe is the 1st AA speaker I ever heard. Win o Joe used to say, Joyce answered me with these words. She said, Don, I know how you feel. And Wino Joe used to say the 5 magic words of Alcoholics Anonymous, I know how you feel. And I can't believe it.

I heard myself saying, Joyce, would you tell me something about this thing you're doing called Alcoholics Anonymous? And then what happened, my friends, is that, you see, god not only sent me an angel, he sent her on a cloud because it started snowing right then, and we couldn't fly back. And Susan sat there for the next 24 hours and listened to Joyce tell me about AA, about we talked about drinking and not drinking, and and she shared with me a guy who thought there thought I was doomed. She shared with me that she had found a way up and out. Now last night at the countdown, when, when we got to the 3 month point, there were still a lot of you out there standing up.

And please keep in mind that Joyce had been in Alcoholics Anonymous since January 1st, and this was the 21st day of February. If someone had to be sober a long time, if someone had to have done all 12 steps, if someone had to know all 12 traditions, if someone had to be able to recite the 12 concepts of service to carry the message of recovery, 1 alcoholic to another in Alcoholics Anonymous, you'd have a different speaker this morning. She'd been through step 5. She knew a little bit about their traditions. She didn't talk much about that.

She talked about her experience and her strength and her health. And I found myself saying, would you take me to a meeting of this Alcoholics Anonymous? I wasn't very sincere about it. I thought it would sound good to Susan, And I thought, well, maybe I might go for a few times and, you know, get the heat off and the screws backed up a little bit and everything will be all right at home. And it quit snowing the next morning and we flew home.

And Susan was starting to speak to me a little bit again, and I thought, this this deal is gonna pass. It's gonna be okay. And we got we got back, and I was on good behavior, and she'd fixed supper, and I was out in the kitchen helping do the dishes, and the doorbell rang. And I it's cold. There's a foot of snow outside.

It's middle of February in the high plains of Kansas. And I, I opened the door, and there stood Joyce. Joyce is a big, strapling, corn fed farm girl from Kansas. Tall as me or taller. And she's standing there in her winter coat, and I said, hi, Joyce.

What are you doing here? And she said, Donald, you promised me you'd go with me to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I said, oh my god. I didn't meet tonight. It was probably about 5 or 10 degrees, and wind was blowing.

And she grabbed me right by the scuff of the shirt and dragged me through the front door. And she said, and this she gave me, a loving invitation to alcoholic salons. Her exact words were, get your miserable ass in the car. We're going to head. I made her drive out in the country and come in the back way.

I knew where those idiots met. The crazy part of this is I've been going back ever since. We walked in the door, and they they had a guy there, and he shook my hand. He said, the coffee's over there. Get a cup and come sit down by me.

And, I don't remember much about that first meeting. She came to get me for a week and took me to meetings. And and and seemed like right away, they started saying, well, you need to get a sponsor. And, and then the next meeting, when they shook my hand, I walked in and they said, have you got a sponsor yet? This this is a little town.

You know? This is the only group in town. They meet 5 nights a week, and we're going to all my 5 meetings because she's coming to get me. And I see I see this guy in there that I thought, well, I'd kind of admire him because he was the best bar fighter in Ulysses, Kansas. And I thought, well, I'll ask him to be my sponsor.

His name was Louie. So I asked Louie to be my sponsor, and he said, yeah, I'd be your sponsor, but you have to agree to do some things. And I said, what is that? And he said, you've got your I'm gonna give you some assignments to read out of this book that we sold you, And and I'll come by and get you and we'll go to the meeting and we'll we'll go to the other towns around here to meetings and we'll, we'll go through these assignments. And you have to agree to come to the meetings with me.

So I said, okay, I'll do that. And he started picking me up. And I mean, I'm getting thrown out of places, you know, in in in in my street life. I'm getting thrown out of good bars and bad bars and good joints and bad joints. And here, this guy, really neat guy, is coming by every night to pick me up and take me to a meeting, and he's given me these things to read in this blue book.

And, of course, what he did right away was he started me on this journey that has just indelibly changed my life. He he took me through the steps, the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And and he'd have me read in the book, and and and then we'd get together and talk about it. He took me through the first three steps, and he'd say, don't read ahead. Just read the assignment that I give you to read.

And I don't like directions like that very good, so I'd always read ahead. And I started reading stuff that really I didn't like at all. And he said, Don, it's time now to do the 4 steps. So he said, you need to write your 4 step. Well, by this time, it's about, it's it's it's April.

And, and I said, okay, Louis. Construction season is getting ready to start. And I get really, really busy in construction season. And we'll have to wait till about next November or December to do the do the rest of this stuff because I just don't have time. And he came down the next morning to my office and he threw down a big, cheap yellow notepad.

It's about that thick and about that long and 3 number 2 pencils. And I said, what's this for? And he said, write until you run out of paper or you run out of pencil lead. He subsequently regretted telling me to write my inventory that way. And I said, oh, I just don't have time, Louis.

And he said, here's the deal, Don. He said, you're gonna get drunk if you don't do the rest of these steps. And he said, I can't stand the heartbreak seeing you do that. So he said, then I want you to ask somebody else to be your sponsor if you can't do this for me. And, man, I mean, a funny thing had happened to me on the way to and from AA.

I'd come to want what you had. I didn't wanna give up my old life yet, but I'd come to want what you had. And I thought, well, maybe I can do this. So I sat down and I wrote. I didn't write inventory like like the book says to write inventory.

Never like the way I write inventory today. I wrote the story of my life. On page 489, in the second edition of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, on page 489, the story's title is called Joe's Woes. Most of us grew up with the 3rd edition and know a different story on page 48 9. But in the 2nd edition, it's called Joe's woes, and that's what I wrote.

I wrote Don's woes. I just wrote the immoral litany of my life. He had told me to show up at his house on Tuesday night at 7:30, and we were going to do step 5. And I got there, and he did a strange thing. He said, Let's get down on our knees.

And we got down on our knees and did the 3rd step prayer. And then we got up and I handed him my inventory, and he handed it back. And he said, You wrote it, you read it. God is listening and I'm here. And I sat there for the next hour or so.

That's why he regretted telling me to do my inventory this way. I sat there for the next hour or so reading him the immoral story of my life. You know, I I read to him about my infidelity. I read to him about my lying and and cheating and stealing in business, about the illegal business practices that I was involved in. I wrote to him about coming home and being verbally and mentally abusive to Susan and the kids.

I wrote to him about how much I was hating my dad and my mom and my brother. I wrote all this stuff, and when I was almost done, he said, Don, stop for a minute. And I looked up, and there were tears running down his face. And I thought, my god, I have so offended him, he's gonna ask me to leave. That's what I thought, Because, this is the best guy I knew.

I'd never known anybody like Louie, the kind of spirituality that I didn't know people had, a goodness that I didn't know people had. And he said, my friend, do you realize you're telling me the story of my life? Sometimes we hear people share from these podiums about the sense of freedom they get at the end of step 5. What I got was a sense of hope. I thought, my golly, if he could have ever done anything, what I have just read him that I have done, and get from where he is there to where he is now, maybe there's some hope for me.

And I went ahead and finished my inventory, and we got down on our knees again, and we did the 7 step prayer. And then he said, we need to see what we can sort out of this mess. And he said, what we're looking for here are your defects of character. And and and and who you're angry at, and why you're angry at them, and what it affects about you. And then we need to take a look at what your part in it is, and what part fear has played in it.

We need to take a look at sex life, and I'd written a lot about my sex life. And then because I'd read ahead, I knew in a little bit what he was gonna come to. And he said, and then out of all this, we're gonna make your amends list. And I said, we gotta stop right here. As I said, I can't clean this deal out.

There's no way I can do this. And I wasn't being real honest with my sponsor, because I think more than not thinking I could do it, I wasn't sure that I wanted to do it. I wasn't sure that I wanted to give up the life. What what Louis told me was this. He said, Don, if you keep living your life the way you're living it, if you keep violating your marriage vows, if you keep breaking the law in the way you do business, if you keep treating your your your your your mom and and your brother and all the people that love you the way you're treating them, he said, you haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of staying sober.

His sponsors was a ex professional rodeo cowboy named Jerry. And Jerry used to sit in the meeting and say things like, if you're a drunken horse thief and you decide you wanna quit drinking, you're probably also gonna have to quit stealing horses. And I didn't know if I wanted to quit stealing the horses in my life. And he said, you can do this, Don. You you you can he said, what what you gotta do is quit doing what you're doing and start doing something else.

And he said, the other thing you've got to quit doing is saying I'm sorry. He said, you are the world's expert at saying I'm sorry, and cleaning the house doesn't have anything to do with saying I'm sorry. Cleaning the house has to do with how can I right the wrong? I'm wrong. I have harmed you.

How can I amend the harm? How can I right the wrong? And he sent me home with this long list that we compiled out of that inventory. We talked about what, somebody talked about this weekend, Tammy maybe, that we're supposed to go home and take the book down from the shelf and find a quiet place and see if our work is solid so far and see if we've been trying to make mortar without sand and all that good stuff. And that's not exactly what Don did.

I went home and wrote a loader letter of resignation to Alcoholics Anonymous. Louie had convinced Susan and I that we should go to a little AA conference in in the Paladora Canyon, south of Amarillo, Texas called Cedar Glen. And, some people in the group had rented a Winnebago, and they were gonna come by and pick us up in this Winnebago, and and we're gonna drive down there. And I thought, what I'll do, I'll we'll take this letter of resignation to Louie at this conference. That would be an appropriate way to resign from Alcoholics Anonymous.

So we got down there, and Johnny A from Laguna was the speaker, and we listened to him. And there's this this guy in the group that I knew. He was a few years behind me in school. His name was Bernie. After the meeting, Bernie came up and took me to the arm, and he said, Don, I've gotta talk to you.

And I said, okay. And we went out and sat down under a tree, and I said, well, what is it, Bernie? And he said, ever since you walked into the Ulises Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've been afraid I'm gonna get drunk. And I said, oh my god. Why?

What have I done to you? And he said, no. You don't understand. It's what I have done to you. He said, I stole something from you that you don't know anything about, and I have to make amends to you for it.

And he told me what it was, and I thought it was a pretty trivial deal, and he asked me to set a monetary value on it. And I said, Bernie, I don't want your money. And he said, you don't get it, Don. He said, I've gotta do this to stay sober. And so we agreed on something, and he he paid me for this little thing he'd stolen off of one of our trucks one time.

And he got up and left, and I sat there and I thought, my God, you all really do the deal. And you do it so that you don't have to drink. See, I'd come to want what you had. I'd come to want I think Linda talked about it. I'd come to want what I could see inside of you.

I didn't I didn't know what peace behind eyeballs was like until I sat in a room with you. I I didn't know what it was like to be comfortable in your own skin until I got to sit in a room with you, and I wanted that. And I realized, sitting under that tree at Cedar Glen that night, that it all started one day at a time without taking a drink of alcohol. And I thought, well, you know, if Bernie can do this, maybe I can do it too. And I went over to my sponsor's cabin, and I banged on the door, and he let me in.

And I said, what do you want? And I said, well, I came over here with my letter of resignation, and he just went into hysterics. He had he had an inside groove on this deal. He was also Bernie's sponsor, so he knew what was going on. And he said, are you ready to do the deal?

And I said, I guess so. So we took out the list, and he said, we'll do these 1 at a time, and I'll tell you how I did mine. And then you won't do them until we talk about them. And he said, we're gonna start at home. And I said, Louis, I I I read to you all about what it's like in our house.

Susan and I met December 7, 1958, a day of infamy a few years earlier. Pearl Harbor. We met on a blind date. I've been we were going to Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. And I had lost a date to the winter formal that I had with this girl, because she caught me drunk with another girl in a joint.

She was narrow minded. Susan Susan had lost her date because the guy she was going with was flunking, and then he got campus for grades. So they fixed us up with this blind date, and I showed up at her house wearing a tuxedo, carrying a ukulele and singing Ain't She Sweet. The reason I was singing Ain't She Sweet is the only other song I knew the chords to was, My Brother Bill's Got A Still on the Hill, and I didn't think that would be appropriate. And we've been on this journey together ever since.

We got married, and we went to the service, and we came back, and alcoholism progressed. And and, and I brought infidelity into our marriage, and she knew it. And I had written to Louis that how bad things were behind the closed door of our bedroom. And Louie said, Don, it may surprise you to learn that good sex oftentimes begins in the kitchen. And I said, Louis, there isn't a chance in hell Susan's ever gonna go along with that.

And he said, that isn't what I mean. He said, you people, he said, you've got to build a new relationship. And I said, Louis, she doesn't trust me. When will she ever trust me? And he said, it'll be some time after you have lived for a period of time trustworthy.

Trustworthy. He said, you have to become trustworthy in your behavior. You have to treat her like a loving husband would treat his wife. See, that's essentially all you have ever asked me to do in this simple program of Alcoholics Anonymous is, by god, grow up and accept responsibility for your behavior, Don. Grow up.

Act like you're a mature adult. Quit acting like a spoiled child. And and and essentially, that's what it's all boiled down to in my behavior. You asked me to change all of my behavior, but all you asked me to do was act like a grown up, act like somebody that had some good sense. And I went to Susan, and I told her I had been I had wronged her and harmed her, and asked her what I could do to right the wrong.

And she said, don't do it anymore, and suit up and show up around the house here. And Louis said, you got to talk to each other. And I said, we don't talk. We stand in the backyard and scream. We don't want the kids to hear our screaming, so we stand in the backyard so the neighbors can hear our screaming.

And he read me out of the book where he's where it said he said, you don't you can't get angry. And he read me out of the book where it says, this is getting serious. Let's talk about it later. And we've used that little simple tool for for for all these 25 years. And we started to talk, and Susan has started going to Al Anon by this time.