THE LONG VIEW

When Pat R. was nine years sober, she left Houston in order to go to college in a small town in northeastern Texas. Pat said, "I put the three kids, three cats, one dog, and all the house-plants into the Pinto and set out in the middle of June for Commerce, Texas. Texas in June is hot and it was an awful long drive." Perhaps she was sustained by the cooling thought that when she got to Commerce, one of the first things she'd do would be to call the AA contact she'd been given. "I believed there was an AA meeting there--I never would have gone somewhere that didn't have AA!" However, when she made the phone call, she got bad news: the AA contact in the group had passed away. There was one person left--and when Pat called him, she found out he was drinking again.