Daily Reflections · December 16
Partners in Recovery
The month AA’s first book came out, Bill W. and Lois W. lost their home in Brooklyn, and for the next two years AA friends and family took them in.
Today’s reading
The reading for December 16 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, pages 89 and 100, in “Working with Others,” the chapter on Step Twelve: the sentence the chapter opens on, and two from a paragraph eleven pages on.
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Themes and asks
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Kept by the work
The passage opens on something the first members learned in practice: working with other drunks protects the one doing the work.
- When has helping another alcoholic kept you from a drink, or from something like one?
- What happens to you when you go a while without helping anyone?
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Side by side
The passage puts the one helping and the one being helped under the same daily obligation. Read beside today’s title, that suggests neither of them is finished, and the older member isn’t simply the teacher.
- What is the person you’re helping teaching you?
- Who is walking beside you right now, and whom are you walking beside?
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The reason under the deed
The member who wrote the reflection prays daily to be of some use to people, and keeps self-centeredness in check by minding why a good thing gets done, not only that it does.
- What good thing do you do partly for the credit?
- Which old habit would you most like to be kept from today?
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Carried
The passage ends on a promise that holds in any circumstances. The history below tells of the month AA’s first book came out, when the man who wrote its opening chapters and his wife lost their home, and of the AA friends who took them in for two years. Read beside today’s title, that suggests the partnership runs both ways: the people you once helped may one day carry you.
- Who carried you through a stretch when your circumstances were bad?
- Whom could you take in this week, even for a meal or a ride?
Behind the words
The tables turned
Today’s reading joins two places in “Working with Others,” the Big Book’s chapter on Step Twelve: the sentence the chapter opens on, on page 89, and two sentences on page 100. (December 8 reads the paragraph after that first one.) The lines on page 100 end the chapter’s advice about a newcomer whose family has broken up, just after it tells the reader to remind him that his recovery doesn’t hang on getting his family back. In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, the chapter’s first sentence spoke of the reader’s own immunity, and the next counted the work among the spiritual activities. Both words are gone from the book published that April. The promise the passage ends on was in the draft already, word for word; the sentence before it was reworded.
The book came out that April. That year, too, the mortgage company found a buyer for the house where Bill W. and Lois W. lived, 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, Lois’s family home since 1888, where they had been paying it a small rent to stay on. On April 26, 1939, they moved out, with nowhere to go and, Lois wrote, no money for even a small apartment. (December 15 tells of the drunks they had taken in there in 1935 and 1936.)
Their AA friends took them in. Pass It On calls it the tables turning: at Clinton Street the Wilsons had kept a home for drunks, and now sober drunks were putting them up. In May the group meeting at the home of Hank P. and his wife, Kathleen, voted them a “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund” and passed the hat for it at meetings; Lois reckoned it came to about $20 a month. In 1939 and 1940 they moved 51 times by her count, not counting weekends. Asked later how they got through those years, Bill said, “We were invited out to dinner a lot.”
On November 14, 1939, near the fifth anniversary of Bill’s sobriety, the New York members and their spouses sent him a letter, signed by more than 50 people, asking him to keep on with AA’s work for a time, if he could. They owed him a debt, they wrote, and they pledged to help him “carry the load.” He went on looking for a paying job. The same year, with nothing of his own, he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation to ask about a grant for Dr. Bob S., who might lose what was left of his practice, Bill wrote, and probably his home, if he kept up his work with drunks at that pace. He asked nothing for himself. Pass It On remarks how well the letter described Bill too. Nothing came of it.
In January 1941 the Wilsons went to see a house standing empty on a hill at Bedford Hills, in Westchester County, and broke in to look around. As Pass It On tells it, the woman who had built it had lost her husband to alcoholism, and her best friend had been helped by AA’s members in New Jersey. She and a friend of hers worked out terms the Wilsons could meet, and that April the house was theirs.
More on the two years without a home: About fifty homes, in Number One Man. On Lois’s side of them: Stepping Stones, in Captain of My Soul. On the draft of early 1939: Loan copy, in By the Carload.
Way stations
Lois called the places they stayed way stations, and counted 51 moves in 1939 and 1940, not counting weekends. Here are seven of the stops, from leaving Clinton Street to a house of their own, as Pass It On and Lois Remembers tell them. The tags are this page’s.
April 26, 1939Lost
182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn
Lois’s family home for half a century, sold by the mortgage company. Their furniture and her grand piano go into storage.
That nightTaken in
Hank P. and Kathleen’s
Spring 1939Lent
Green Pond, New Jersey
A member’s family lends them a summer bungalow until the end of May. The train is a four-mile walk away.
1939–40Taken in
Bog Hollow, Monsey, New York
Bob and Mag V.’s rambling farmhouse, where their room is so cold it’s called Upper Siberia.
February 1940Taken in
Morgan R.’s apartment, Manhattan
He wants them to stay. The Alcoholic Foundation’s advisory committee meets there every week, and Lois cooks its supper.
November 4, 1940The members’ club
334½ West 24th Street, Manhattan
AA’s first clubhouse, a former stable whose rent two members had guaranteed. A room upstairs about ten feet square, orange crates for dressers, for five months.
April 11, 1941Their own
Bedford Hills, New York
$6,500, with nothing down and $40 a month. After 23 years of marriage, their first night in a home of their own.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “Working with Others” (the reading cites pages 89 and 100).
- The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. “Working with Others.”
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 12 (leaving Clinton Street, the members’ hospitality, the fund, the letter of November 14, 1939, and the letter to the Guggenheim Foundation), chapter 13 (the room at the 24th Street clubhouse) and chapter 15 (the house at Bedford Hills).
- Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 12, “Living Around” (the fund, Green Pond, the 51 moves, Morgan R.’s apartment and the room at the clubhouse).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 16 · aa.org
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Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.