My name is Dan, and I am an alcoholic.
I have a vague sense that maybe I have led the meeting before. You might think I would remember, but that's part of the talk. That and the fact that I am 80.
My first A.A. meeting was in 1969, in Washington, D.C. We met in the basement of a small Lutheran church located across the street from the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress's Shakespeare Library. The area was Capitol Hill where the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, My wife Carole and I lived in the Methodist Building, located next to the Supreme Court. The apartments there were mainly for members of Congress to have apartments away from their home districts. Carole, who worked on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress was allowed to rent an apartment there for us newly-weds of two years. She worked on Capitol Hill as an Administrative Assistant for a member of the House of Representatives.
I had quit my job as a Washington representative of a large aerospace company, the North American Aviation Corporation, a famous airplane, and aerospace corporation, the company that sent the Apollo into space, and earlier had made bombers and fighter planes during WWII. Our offices were on K. Street, in D.C., the street where most other aerospace companys's offices were.
The job was to take to lunch the staff of the Navy, Army, and Air Force who headed the aerospace research, as well as the office of the Secretary of Defense. I was on an expense account, a good one. And one of the main things that happened at those lunches was drinking, a lot of drinking. I nearly always returned to the office pretty dazed, and sobered up, and then lumbered off to a bar to continue the drinking.
A Saturday when I was pretty intoxicated by noon, one look from my wife was a sufficient warning, I decided to attend an A.A. meeting located only two blocks away. In a small Lutheran church.
At my first meeting, the speaker was from New York City, and he opened the meeting with "My Higher Power is the Fifth Avenue Bus."