I ask, who really cares?
Is it the young adult who throws love around like a tit full of cellulite?
Is it the middle aged lesbian who is compulsively aware of her plight brought on by ignorance and therefore, abides by no rules?
Are people basically good?
And, what is love?
Some of the most important questions we will seek answers to…We will continue to search out…Our whole life…Only to come out emptied handed.
Driving amongst the pouring rain tonight, the moon hidden by the sick sense of astronimichumor Mother Nature bestows upon us from time to time. In the sweep of my truck tires and the sounds of Adele, a distant and somewhat comical memory came up to me and shook my hand.
My mother, bless her soul, years before the anti-smoking fashion became all the craze; had been accompanying me for a quick toke off a Marlboro Red in a vacant parking lot…one awful, over stuffed Thanksgiving.
As we coughed and spat and enjoyed our cancer stick. A car of unknown not made in America origin strolled by…on the back were these words stamped out in red, white and blue.
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK, NICE PEOPLE SWALLOW.
Being a devout catholic who insists in finding the good in all of us, my mother stated, ‘how nice that is!’
I choked and hammered and hawed, ‘what do you mean, Ma? You mean that bumper sticker?’
She smiles from the inside out and states, ‘yes, isn’t it nice for people to promote such a thing? To get over your differences and swallow your words…I’ve always believed in that!’
At the time, back in the good old not so far from today…days, good ole Ma had an answering machine. And, I knew without posing the question what the next remark would be from my saintly mother.
‘I think I’ll use that saying for a new message on my machine!’
It was then and there that the roles reversed themselves and got twisted up in the game of life and sex and right and wrong.
Gently and with a newly lit cigarette in hand, I explained the facts of life to my mother. A situation I have been able to avoid ever since. To this day I wonder, what would Father John have said, if he called upon my mother at home to possibly come in next Sunday to hand out the sacrament and only got the answering machine? What if Sister Pat phoned and inquired about the new Bingo machine that had been on back order for months? What would her habit have thought of such a message?
Fun as it would have been in my own catholic girl’s do not start much too late, mentality. I had to burst my mother’s virginal bubble.
Tonight, though, while heading north of north. I smiled and thought, wouldn’t it be nice to feel that naivety again? To believe in the good that resides in all of us. To enjoy the love I have waiting at home with me. A partner who rises early and beds down at the crack of sundown. A lover who awaits me with open arms and a caring and comforting charm.
Thank Christ for memory it prompts the jaded edges of my composure to tread lightly when it is graced by the beautiful women in my life.
