Coffee Queen

During my first year of sobriety, I got the best ever service job in all of AA. I got to pour coffee at Chicago’s Irving Park YMCA for the Sunday morning breakfast speaker meeting. More than 100 people attended each week, and I must say that it was the first time I realized how many people were sober in AA outside my home group and the other three meetings a week I attended.



I was a little nervous at first. I had to fill the small coffeepot at the big cauldron in the enormous kitchen and carefully carry it to the long tables in the dining room. I very gingerly walked behind all the chairs, reaching around the members and carefully pouring the scalding hot coffee, praying I wouldn’t get an attack of the jitters.



After a couple of weeks of service, I was starting to feel like an old hand and was really enjoying the job. I found that I had The Power of the Pot. When I’m in charge of pouring coffee elixir to AA members on a Sunday morning, I am the Coffee Queen! 



In very short order, everyone knew my name! I’d hear people calling, “Hey Carol, over here, please.” I felt like I was in that sitcom based in a bar where everybody knows your name. I learned to smile all the time, to say thank you dozens of times each morning. 



It made me feel really good about myself for the first time in a very long time. A big bonus was meeting members from all over our area, although I didn’t know at that time that Chicago was its own area and the YMCA was part of the northwest Chicago district in which I lived.



There were other bonuses. I really learned how to listen and to identify with the speaker no matter how little our stories matched. I remember when I heard a most outrageous story of a fellow’s family enabling him almost to death and I was thinking that there was no way I could get anything out of his talk. Then he ended his story by saying that he came into AA after he called his family yet one more time to ask for help. His mother answered the phone. He said, “Hi, it’s John,” and she said, “John who?” I got the speaker’s point right away, as my family had been at the point of not picking up my calls either.



I also heard a story from a former nun who had some hair-raising adventures. She got nicknamed “The Flying Nun” after a popular TV show at the time because after a few nips during the school day, she went out on the playground with the kids and put all her students on the merry-go-round, pushed it faster and faster, her habit flying in the wind, and then jumped on, drunk and laughing. Again, I was wondering what I could learn from her story. That’s when it hit me.  She spoke of the shame, the guilt, the regret, the humiliation, and I thought, Yes, that was me to a T.



The best lesson I heard was while I was seated one morning just as the meeting started and someone was reading “How It Works.” I had the most important thing to say to a friend across the table. As I leaned across, ignoring the person reading, I whispered my news loudly to my friend. Then I felt an elbow jab into my ribs, taking my breath away. I turned to see that Katie, who sat next to me almost every Sunday morning, had elbowed me. She had always been so friendly to me from my very earliest meetings and I looked up to her as a mentor. I raised my eyebrows, questioning. She leaned over to hiss in my ear, “What’s the matter? Don’t you need to hear this anymore?” 



I was mortified. I told myself that I would never speak to her again as I listened to the rest of the meeting. But I got over my hurt feelings, and believe me when I tell you, I never talked through a reading at a meeting again. I had learned a painful lesson. 



I’m forever grateful to the AA members at the YMCA every Sunday morning who let me pour their coffee and loved me enough to put me on a good sobriety track. Service is the glue that keeps me in the AA seat.