The Thursday Meeting Had a Star

He is eleven years sober, funny in the way that keeps a room warm. Nobody decides anything — it accumulates. Visitors ask whether he's on this week. The group, sensibly, schedules him: first Thursday of the month. On his Thursdays, sixty chairs; other weeks, twenty-five. It runs three years and helps a great many people — which is the difficulty, because in March his firm moves him two provinces away, and by June the Thursday meeting votes to fold itself into Tuesday's. No one did anything wrong. He never asked for the crowd and often looked uneasy in it. The meeting had simply stopped being a group with a speaker and become an audience with a habit, and an audience goes where the show goes. A group organized around a principle can lose any member and hold. A group organized around a person is one job transfer from the end.