Sophie’s cake

I hadn’t taken a drink for two years and five months. It was Thanksgiving, so I drove my wife and two daughters up to Pittsburgh to visit my mother-in-law for the long weekend. I was looking forward to the trip, not for the food or the in-laws, but so I could read the stories from the back of the 2nd edition of the Big Book that had belonged to my late father-in-law. I didn’t even know he’d been a member of AA until several years after his death, when, on my first sober New Year’s Eve, I was filled with so much nervous energy about not drinking that I decided to re-shelve everything in the family library—in alphabetical order! It was then I discovered my father-in-law’s Big Book inscribed with his 1962
sobriety date.