Up From Coal Country

My journey in sobriety began three months before my 25th birthday when I entered rehab in 1981. However, the seed for my recovery was planted more than a year prior. I came to on Christmas morning 1979 and went downstairs, where my mother asked me what I had done with the AA card a cousin gave me the night before. I had no clue what she was talking about. I snuck back to my bedroom and went through my wallet and found a card from the Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania group of AA. This certainly was not my first blackout, nor would it be my last, but I had started on the road to recovery without knowing it.