One Drunk to Another A Daily Reprieve
Watch The Kitchen Table
LIGHTS
Illustration · A front-room floor just after Christmas: a string of colored lights plugged in at the wall, part of it worked free and laid out in straight rows, the rest still one knot, every bulb lit all the same, and the box it goes back into. Not drawn from a photograph.

Daily Reflections · December 27

Problem Solving

Today’s words belong to Fred, the accountant in the Big Book’s third chapter, a man used to solving his own problems; a short story in the first edition reads like the same man telling it shorter.

Today’s reading

The reading for December 27 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 42: near the end of the chapter “More About Alcoholism,” in the words of a man the chapter calls Fred.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Past the drinking

    The passage is Fred’s: once sober, he says, he found that what had relieved his drinking reached the rest of his troubles too. The member who wrote the reflection reports the same of the Big Book’s program in their own life.

    • What trouble that had nothing to do with a drink have you taken to the program? What happened?
    • Which kind of problem do you still keep for yourself, and handle the old way?

  2. What a bad mood points to

    For the member who wrote the reflection, a flash of temper or a day of being thwarted isn’t a separate trouble. They read it as their alcoholism showing itself.

    • When did you last lose your temper? What was underneath it?
    • What tells you first that you’re off: your mood, your sleep, the way you talk to people at home?

  3. Whatever is left over

    The member leans on two things for any difficulty: the Steps, and helping someone else. In their telling, the second is what shifts the troubles that hang on.

    • Think of a worry that went away while you were busy with someone else’s. How did that happen?
    • Who could you call today, not to talk about your trouble, but to ask about theirs?

  4. Good at solving things

    This one is the page’s own thought. Read beside the history below, Fred’s record of fixing his own problems was the very thing that sent him back to the hospital: he counted on it once too often.

    • What are you good at working out by yourself? When has that kept you from asking for help?
    • Where are you still sure that knowing enough about a problem will be enough to solve it?

Behind the words

Fred, told twice

Today’s sentence isn’t in Bill W.’s own voice. It is spoken by Fred, the last example in “More About Alcoholism,” the third chapter of the Big Book, one of the chapters Bill dictated in an office in Newark in 1938. The chapter gives Fred a good income, a fine home and a partnership in an accounting firm. He landed in a hospital with the jitters, heard the members out, granted that he had some of the symptoms, and went home certain that what he now knew would keep him sober. The chapter sums up his plan in four words: “Self-knowledge would fix it.”

Then Fred tells the rest himself. He went to Washington to present accounting evidence to a government bureau, the day went well, and at dinner in his hotel he ordered cocktails without a second thought. Days later he was in the hospital again. What had made him so sure, he says, was his own record: he had been “usually successful in licking my other personal problems.” Two members came to see him. “They grinned, which I didn’t like so much,” he says, and then they laid out the program that “a hundred of them” had followed. Today’s passage opens the last paragraph of his account, so the man who had trusted his own problem-solving ends by crediting something else with solving them. The members had first met him only about a year before the chapter was written, and it says he had felt only “the first nip of the wringer.”

The Big Book never says who Fred was. But among the personal stories at the back of the first edition, in April 1939, is one of under two pages, “A Different Slant,” which its writer calls “one of the shortest stories in this whole volume.” Its outline runs close to Fred’s, as the card here shows. The pairing is this page’s own; the book doesn’t connect the two, and nothing in it settles whether they are one man. The story ran in the first edition only.

Arthur S.’s timeline of AA history names the writer of “A Different Slant” as Harry B., of New York, and follows him a little further. On January 18, 1939, three months before the book came out, he joined the board of the Alcoholic Foundation, AA’s first trustees, as its second chairman. By the same account he later drank again and was replaced that December. On December 27, 1939, Robert Shaw took the chair, the first nonalcoholic to hold it. The story in the book stayed as he had written it.

More on Harry B. and the board’s first chairmen: Class A and Class B, in AA’s service structure. On the claim that opens Fred’s chapter, that no alcoholic gets back to drinking normally: Normal drinking, in the disease concept.

One outline, two tellings

Fred, as the chapter tells him, beside the first edition’s story “A Different Slant,” row by row. The pairing is this page’s; neither text mentions the other.

  • FredThe chapter “More About Alcoholism” (1939, and in every edition since), told partly about him and partly by him
  • Slant“A Different Slant” (first edition only, 1939), a personal story told by its writer

  1. His work

    FredA “partner in a well known accounting firm.”

    Slant“Partner in one of this country’s nationally known concerns.”

  2. His home

    FredHe is “happily married and the father of promising children of college age.”

    SlantHe is “happily married with fine children.”

  3. The first hospital

    FredHe told himself he had gone there “to rest his nerves,” and made up his mind to quit.

    SlantIt was “the greatest shock to my pride I ever had,” and he made a firm resolve never to drink again.

  4. The second

    FredBack in the hospital, shaky, and anxious to see the members he had sent away.

    Slant“Within sixty days, after leaving the hospital the second time, I was pounding at his door.”

  5. What it taught him

    Fred“I had never been able to understand people who said that a problem had them hopelessly defeated. I knew then.”

    SlantA man with everything can find himself “as hopeless and helpless as the man who has a multitude of worries and troubles.”

Today’s passage is in Fred’s telling only. “A Different Slant” stops at the door.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Works Publishing, 1939: “More About Alcoholism” and the personal story “A Different Slant,” which is in the first edition only; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001, for the chapter’s words as quoted and the page numbers (the reading cites page 42).
  • Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy” (Bill dictating the book’s chapters in Newark, “More About Alcoholism” among the first four).
  • Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009. The entries for January 18 and December 27, 1939 (Harry B. on the Alcoholic Foundation’s board, and Robert Shaw after him), and its table of the Big Book’s stories (the writer of “A Different Slant,” and the editions it ran in).
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 27 · aa.org

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

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.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/december-27/