The Meeting You Miss Might Be The One You Need

On November 14, 1997, it snowed in Dartmouth. It wasn't a big snowfall, just enough to make the roads and sidewalks white and slippery. I had intended to go to the AA meeting at Club 24 that evening (it was a Friday), but the snow gave me just the excuse I needed not to go. I probably should have went. I was planning to start My Big Adventure on the following day, leaving Halifax on a train bound for Wyoming. In the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous it states that "at certain times the alcoholic has no effective mental defense against the first drink." I didn't know it yet, but tomorrow I would encounter one of those times. Perhaps I might have heard something at that meeting that would have helped me make a better choice. Maybe I would have heard something that would have changed my mind about leaving at all. I will never know because I didn't go to the meeting. It became the meeting I missed.

Tomorrow, I will post an excerpt from The Seventh Crow entitled The Haircut. It will tell you what happened on November 15, 1997