Let It Happen

IN APRIL 1965, when I was a 119-pound, extremely shaky forty-seven-year-old man, dry for about six weeks, I was adopted as someone's "pigeon." George had eight years' sobriety in the AA program, which was inconceivable to me at that time. Whenever I could work up the nerve to ask George a question relating to what appeared to me to be a complex problem, George would invariably reply, "Time and patience will see most problems resolved as they should be--if you just don't take the first drink today and go to a meeting tonight."