Weeding Out the Crabgrass

LONG AGO and far away, I was a young alcoholic. After booting the AA program around for five years, I sat down to take my first sober inventory. That was thirty years ago, and there was not much help available. Worse yet, much of that was contradictory; I was offered the choice of a confession, a case history, or a half-baked self-analysis. It didn't seem to me the founders of AA could have meant any of those things, and Bill W. himself later expressed some dismay at the shades of meaning the members were putting into "nature of our wrongs," "defects of character," and "shortcomings." He said all those were just synonyms for the problems we found during inventory. Fortunately, I had guessed right on that.