The Benevolent Intoxication

I FELL in love with AA some eight years and several weeks ago. It was love at first sight, passionate, unquestioning, all enveloping. It was also, as first sight love traditionally is, blind and yet endowed with rosy splendor. For me this unjudging enchantment was the very stuff of life and nothing weaker would have served. I had been cold and dead so long that a lukewarm affection would never have survived the honeymoon. And what a honeymoon it was! Each day new minted--each member of my love's family a creature endowed with wit and wisdom, compassion and charity, humility and love. This benevolent intoxication lasted far beyond its usefulness and so when reality at last forced its way into this never-never land, halos fell by hundreds and all my holy siblings developed not just feet but arms and legs and heads of common clay. In other words life-as-is instead of life-as-dreamed came to me as it must to all of us if we are to grow into and on with this AA union.