Overwhelmed

Suffocate:  To overwhelm, or be overwhelmed (by a person or issue), as though with oxygen deprivation.

Such a powerful force, love is.  I don't understand it at all.  I can only imagine how much good it does, how it shapes everything with which it comes into contact.  I find that too often it's so easy to hate and so much more difficult to love.  At least it's a lot easier to ignore love, to take it for granted, and concentrate on that which festers and devours.  The negative is compelling - the positive is boring.

I was at my local grocery store today.  One of the employees there is a woman who is going to retire in a couple of years - she has the day count ticking off on her phone, mostly as a joke, a conversation starter.  I found out about this in the midst of one of stream-of-consciousness, non-sequitur laden interactions with people that I so enjoy.  If you think it, say it - that's my motto.  Because today is Sunday the store was empty, giving me the chance to stop and talk with her for a while.  With a lot of women I know even casually I open my arms for a hug as I approach them, letting them make the decision as to whether this is appropriate behavior or not.  I got a big hug, surprisingly big.  I must ooze harmlessness.  Clearly, I'm still not a player.

Is this love?  I really enjoyed that 10 minutes.

I can't even get my arms around how much my mother loved me.  I know dad loved me, too, but it was more oblique with him, less important, sort of an off-the-shelf requirement.  Mom showed me through her actions and her words that she loved me while dad did what he wanted most of the time so it was a lot harder to tease out what was going on with him emotionally.  It wasn't that he didn't love me but rather that he had other things on his mind, typical of most alcoholics.  When I was drinking ya'll were contributing to my fun somehow or you were just getting in my way.  But I do know intellectually that all this love helped in large measure to shape me into the person I am today.

Now alcohol - that's a love/hate relationship.  For me that's love and that's hate in its purest form.

With most people that are important to me my memories are studded with specific instances that populate a wider ebb and flow.  When I think of someone I think of events, an action of some kind.  When I think of either my mom and dad I have the sense of a presence more than a person, a background hum.  I'm sure this is as much my fault as it is theirs - I was, after all, being chased by a lot of demons that demanded a lot of my time and I wasn't very good at opening up and letting people know who I was.  There was a lot of scary shit banging around inside my head that it seemed wise to keep hidden behind drawn curtains.

Perhaps this is typical of a parent-child relationship?  At least for some of us?  I truly believe that one of the greatest and most traumatic events in my life was when I chose to go to college 500 miles away from The Old City.  I mean I was homesick for the first year, so depressed I could hardly catch my breath half the time, but it was my metaphorical toss into the deep end for someone with no swimming skills.  I was a barnacle on a rock and I wasn't coming off without some dynamite.  College was a cattle-prod to my forehead.  Get going, dude, get on with your life.

During this time the overriding sense I had was that my mom and dad were freaked out about the money they had to spend.  Now I worked during the summer and at school - this cash going towards my education - and I had both a large scholarship and a few loans, but still money drove the equation and very reasonably so as my parents weren't wealthy.  That being said I recall clearly that as I was unable to afford a phone I had to walk to the student union, once a week at a preordained time, so that my folks could go to dad's office and make a toll-free call to a pay phone.

I don't believe money was that tight.  I believe this was an irrational fear of not having enough money - fear of financial insecurity, to coin a phrase stolen directly and verbatim from our literature.  My inheritance - while not huge - confirms the fact that there was some money that could have been spent on a couple of phone calls that wouldn't have broken the bank.  What I would give to take some of my inheritance, time-travel back to my freshman year, and start feeding coins into the pay phone so I could talk to my family whenever I wanted to.

What do I see?  Fear.  Not enough money, too much danger, sickness and illness on the prowl.  Man, I was terrified as it was - I didn't need anybody piling on.  

But wait!  I might be going to hell!