Dad Brought Christmas Back

I'M twenty, a non-alcoholic, and that's my dad up there speaking. You know the old challenge, "My dad can lick yours." Well, mine can't--at least in some fights--and he knows it, and I am very proud of him for facing his own son and about seventy-five other people--many of them strangers--to talk about how once he was almost licked. I've been to many AA meetings but this is the first time, after six years of Dad's sobriety, that I've heard him speak before a group.

There is a lot to be learned from hearing an alcoholic relative talk about his drinking and his eventual release through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

First of all, from my seat in the first row at a Westchester County, New York, group, I feel a part of the Fellowship as never before. Insofar as Dad's story is "typical," I am a typical son who faced adjustments which thousands of others have faced, and it is both a humbling and strengthening revelation.

I say I feel like an AA member without having had a drinking problem. How is this possible?

A few weeks ago, while talking with two of Dad's friends in his group about future plans, I said I thought I'd like to get out of this country and go to some other where I could work for people. I guess everybody contemplates this sort of ideal at some period in his life.

I got some good solid advice.

"How do you know this is what God wants for you?" I was asked. "Maybe it is, maybe not. Maybe your 'package' fits right here where millions of people need help."

What it came down to for me, was, "accept the things I cannot change." There's a path meant somewhere for me--perhaps to Africa, perhaps to Manhattan, thirty miles south of my home town. But wherever the path leads, the plans of the Higher Power are unquestionable. Over them I am powerless. From an admission of that powerlessness, however, strength to choose the right path will be given to me.

Thus the program does apply to me and perhaps to many other non-alcoholics, beginning with the First Step.

Secondly (to get back to that meeting), hearing from Dad some incidents of his agony heightens by contrast the miracle of his rebirth in AA. Most of the pain has been cashed in for new health and self-knowledge. Most of the shame and guilt and remorse has been diverted and harnessed and returned as a power he can use in Twelfth Step work. He can laugh now, and make others laugh, at what was once shameful, and he can strike a spark in someone who needs warming up. Communication in AA is an astounding thing to witness, and tonight I can see it happening with my dad.

Hearing Dad talk, then, not only involves a strong personal attachment to the speaker, but to the meeting, the group and the whole of AA. I can appreciate the value of membership in this miraculous Fellowship. I can appreciate that Dad's life has been saved, that our family certainly has, and that our friends in AA are of whole cloth, essential to the fabric of our lives.

Hearing Dad remember makes me remember too. I remember the trip we made one pre-AA night across a Massachusetts bay in a flat-bottomed rowboat with a small outboard motor and how friends of mine were amazed at Dad's nerve in attempting the trip. Maybe they knew, as I did, that the captain had a hidden liquor locker. Night cruises last summer in a seventeen-foot boat on Long Island Sound were the best we made, with Dad navigating by shore lights he couldn't have seen at one time and, on clear nights, with the moon reflecting off a straight wake.

I remember the fear I had my first year away at school that Dad would be unpresentable on his visits, and I can still remember the relief and pride I felt, after he joined AA, in introducing him to my teachers, friends and roommates, as if for the first time.

I remember once lying in bed listening to a loud Christmas party going on in the living room below. There was a sudden silence. I got out of bed and started cautiously downstairs, but a guest blocked the way and said with a weak smile, "Your father is going to be all right. Now go on back to bed." I hadn't even asked what was wrong. Everyone left a few minutes later.

Tonight I can appreciate all the more the AA Christmas party the group always has, with singing and a very unlikely Santa Claus, with presents for everybody and mutual respect and unspoken congratulations for another year of sobriety. I am confidently looking forward to our seventh Christmas in AA which I feel sure will be celebrated quietly at home and at a midnight church service.

Finally, I can appreciate tonight the courage Dad has been given to talk openly about what was once very secret.

These are things you can't wrap up in gift paper.