Counting Noses

Before there was a word of Tradition, two men counted their sober friends and got scared about whether they could stay together. A November day in 1937, Dr. Bob's living room in Akron. Bill W. told it at St. Louis (A.A. Comes of Age): "All told we figured that upwards of forty alcoholics were staying bone dry." They wept for joy. Then the fear came: "Would the forces that everywhere divide society finally invade and smash us up". The Steps were not yet written and the book was scarcely an idea. There were no rules to lean on, only the question: "How could we possibly hang together and cling to our new life line". A life line is the rope thrown to someone drowning. Nine years later that fear became the second sentence of the Long Form (Big Book, p. 563): "A.A. must continue to live or most of us will surely die." Not should. Must. Forty sober drunks were very nearly the whole of A.A. that afternoon, and if they split, there was nothing left for the forty-first. Today the forty-first is still out there, and a room is still all that stands between him and the bottle. Test it tonight: count the noses in your room, and ask what would be left for the next one through the door if this group came apart.