It Really Is Me. Dammit.

Love:  A feeling of strong affection.  (Ed. Note:  Really?  That's it?  I need to try another dictionary site . . . )

OK, Webster has it as "strong affection for another rising out of kinship or personal ties." Pretty consistent.

My mother spent a lot of time - just about all of the time she had that didn't involve religion - doing nice things for me, loving things.  I was definitely the center of attention.  For dad, on the other hand, alcohol was the center of attention.  It was the fulcrum around which everything pivoted.  It was the Jesus Nut of dad's life, the wheel stud fixing the tire to the axle.  You do everything you can to protect those small pieces of hardware.  You can fly a helicopter with a disabled engine ("the only thing you can't do is go up," a pilot told me once) but if the Jesus Nut comes off it's sayonara.

So be it.  That actually makes more sense to me than the mom thing.  Maybe I learned more about love from my father's relationship with alcohol than I did from my mother's love of her kids.  That's a scary thought but I bet there's a grain of truth in it.  I'd rather get between a mama bear and her cubs than between a drunk and his alcohol.  Dad was a miserable SOB when he wasn't drinking.

So I must assume that everything my mother did for me came from a deep-seated love.  How can I be bitching about that?  My wife didn't grow up in that kind of environment, that's for sure.  With my mother everything was done with my welfare foremost in her mind, even the warnings against danger and pestilence and plagues that have burrowed so deeply into my consciousness and caused me so much trouble over the years.  She simply didn't want me to get hurt, to suffer at all, as unreasonable an expectation as there can be.  I would hypothesize that the best parenting technique is to point your kid in the right direction and hope that they don't screw up too badly.  You can't protect someone from all harm and if you try all you're doing is pointing how much harm is out there.

Wear the world like a loose garment.

“A skillful traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving,” says the Tao te Ching.

"Be on the lookout for mountain lions," she told me as I hit the road for my first SoCal hike.  I spent the next four hours with the hair on the back of my neck at full attention, bracing for the impact of a leaping mountain lion.  Needless to say, it wasn't a relaxing hike.  I finally broke down and did some research on mountain lion attacks in my neck of the woods and found that the last one was sometime just after the Dark Ages.  I'm more likely to die of The Plague than from a mountain lion bite.

I think I slipped right back into bitching!  Man.  My mother would be mortified if she knew I was reminiscing like this which is why I prefer to believe that souls in heaven can't see what we're up to.  Either that or the souls have an infinite amount of patience and understanding.

My dad came to most of my high school basketball games, often driving a long way on country roads in the dead of winter to find the small schools with which we competed.  This is the extent of his involvement in my high school life.  I think he took me to one college basketball game and one at the pro level, and one major league baseball game.  Never a football game.  And this from a guy who worshiped sports.  The money thing again, I suppose.

Mom fed me well and took care of the laundry and fussed over me on fuss-able holidays.  I never really got any direction on money and sex and relationships.  I could have figured out the washing machine.

I'm really becoming aware of the fact that I was a fearful, anxious human being right out of the womb and that there is nothing anyone could have done about it.  This is why alcohol was such a godsend - it took this angst and made it vanish.  Unfortunately for me this technique is equivalent to sending a wide receiver with a shredded knee back onto the field after injecting a big syringe full of Novocaine into the joint.  

Does the knee hurt?  Not anymore, it doesn't.  Will it hurt tomorrow?  You better believe it will.