Nine Years in the Same Chair

He started the meeting nine years ago — found the church basement, paid the first month's rent himself, carried the literature box in his trunk. He hasn't held a position in six years, which is the elegant part: he doesn't need one. New secretaries check with him before changing the format. The treasurer asks him, not the group, about the rent. The group conscience votes with his eyebrows. Then in February he lands in hospital for six weeks, and the group discovers what it is: nobody else knows the landlord's number, which key opens the cupboard, or why the rent has stayed forty dollars under market. The meeting doesn't die. It finds out it was never quite a group — it was a man with attendees. To his credit, when he comes back he sits in the fourth row and lets them keep it. That is the day it becomes a group.