The White Flag AA meeting (Memory and Forgetting)
one or two Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would come up to him after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him share and holy mackerel could they ever Identify with the deeply honest feelings he’d shared and how he’d done them the service of giving them the gift of a real ‘Remember-When’-type experience because they could now remember feeling just exactly the same way as Gately, when they first Came In
Context
Early-sobriety Gately spraying vitriol in Beginner Meetings, trying to get himself kicked out — and being thanked. Boston AA reveals memory as an organized communal practice with its own coinage: the newcomer's rage is valuable precisely as a mnemonic prosthesis, restoring to the mid-timers the feeling of their own first days. The term returns as a verb, blackly, at p. 610 (Texture).