Let's Be Friendly With Our Friends. . .

IN ONE wonderful month last fall I celebrated my first anniversary without a drink, completed a year of rewarding psychotherapy, and attended Bill W.'s twenty-fifth anniversary banquet in New York. I call that month "wonderful" because I was literally filled with wonder at the changes that had taken place in me, changes beyond my understanding for which I was deeply grateful. Grateful to my many friends in AA, to its founder, and to my doctor, through all of whom God had worked with mystery and patience to restore me to sobriety and a blessed measure of sanity. I felt that I was ready simultaneously to start a new stage of growth in AA and to do without psychiatric care. It was, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the end of my beginning.