A Quiet Invitation

I felt alone, alienated. I was just a couple of years in the program and had recently moved from a village of a few thousand to a city of over half a million. I missed my friends and my home group. I missed the meetings I knew well, the ones that saved my life. The big-city meetings lacked the friendliness, the warmth, and the intimacy of my village groups. The largest meetings I had known were never more than a dozen or so; "small" meetings in the city were often in excess of forty people. I felt lost in them. Speaker meetings were the most common, with often well over a hundred people sitting in a large room. Smaller discussion meetings like the ones that sobered me up were rare. There were none within miles of where I lived. Complaints about what was wrong with the new-to-me AA were a part of almost all my phone calls to my sponsor back home.