It's weird; neither Lynn or I freaked too much about getting the loan and buying the new (used) car. In fact, I think the most distraught we got was when we realized the songs on the piped in music in the dealers' showroom - songs that we were recognizing from our past - were, in fact, from an oldies station.

I mean, really: is Cyndi Lauper an oldie now? Oh, wait, that record was a hit twenty years or so ago.

Maggie has one of those parenting moments:

It's times like this the burden of this kind of love feels too heavy. Like the weight of it will crush me before I learn to carry from the core.

Those many of you (un)fortunate enough to see me shirtless may have noticed that my left nipple points a bit unnaturally downward, like a pouting lip. It's not sad, it just does that because of my own experience akin to Eva & Maggie's.

I was a little older than Eva, so my Dad was letting me run around a little bit on my own at some neighborhood festival, and I was cutting through some bushes to meet up with him again when I met some BIG kids (maybe 8 or 9 years old; I was probably 5 or 6). There wasn't much room on this path through the bushes so they pushed me out of the way. As I tumbled, a branch poked a hole in my shirt and underneath it, a smallish cut under the Nipple-Soon-To-Be-Named-Droopy. I did what any self-respecting youngster would do; I started crying and looking for Dad.

We found each other, he comforted me, then left me under the supervision of friends while he searched for the marauding gang of youths.

I'm a dad now myself, and my son is a little younger than I was then, so I can imagine the emotions that must have been coursing through my Dad's - and Maggie's - worlds at those times. I'm gonna guess that a lot of people have wound up dead or crippled as the result of similar instances.

Then too, I remember my Mom, visiting us when the boy had been walking for a few months, but not yet talking. Some object frustrated him and in response, he whacked at it. "Tch," mom said, "He must be learning to hit like that somewhere!" In my mind, of course, I was certain she was pointing the finger of parental failure at me. Still sort of am, truth to tell you.

Now, a little less than four decades after Droopy entered my life, and watching the boy interact with his younger sister, I realize that it's really unlikely that there is or was dangerous malice in the actions of those boys in the bushes or Eva's agressors or my boy's rudely grabbing his sister's toys - they just really don't know any better. Does it indicate truly evil spawn or atrocious parenting?

I don't know. I started to make an unequivocal negative answer but then I got caught up in a kind of solipsistic cul-de-sac of arguments pro and con. I think I'll have to ask Dr. John, my philosophy professor pal. But until then, you decide.

The upshot for me, though, is that I think immediately responding in protect and retaliate mode - as my dad and Maggie did and as I'm sure I will - is justified and understandable. Worrying about it afterwards isn't really necessary, unless there's literally blood on your hands.

Not close enough to call a friend, too close to call an acquaintance.

Anyway, after the scary Christian fundamentalists bought his company and let him go, he used his tasty severance package to live on without a job for a while and took to hanging out in the bars with us, drinking and whiling away his days (and, more importantly, his evenings).
We had a lot of fun, in that way that drinking buddies do. Maybe my favorite story about him from those days happened on a night I wasn't out with the boys, but the story was recounted for me later with the kind of side-splitting laughter that makes it hard to tell a story.

It seems he was chatting up a young lovely, and, as these things will, events progressed from nuzzling in a dark corner of the bar to heavy breathing and groping in a parked car down the block.

Thing was, my friend had consumed a largish quantity of spirits and probably eaten next to nothing that day, so he dozed off during the make-out session.

His date was less than amused and woke him up brusquely by screaming and slapping his forehead. "Get the FUCK out the car, asswipe!" she yelled, reaching across him to open the car door. She pushed him out and slammed and locked the car door behind him,
This sudden action returned my friend to an increased level of sobriety. He climbed to his feet and began walking back to the bar.

He was at the door, getting ready to abashedly enter, when a thought struck him.

"Wait a minute! That was my car!"

An unpublished entry from 8/12/03. I didn't publish it then, just found it while doing some housecleaning.

It has a weird resonance now.

The original entry:

Losing without class / VIEW FROM THE LEFT

The conservatives just can't get over it. Clinton is history, yet they revive him at every opportunity.

The 'grafs that leap out at me in 2008:

Granted, it's better to win than to lose. But there is such a thing as grace in defeat. Whenever there's a winner, there has to be at least one loser. In a competitive society such as ours, learning to lose well is as important as learning to win well.

To be serious about it, liberal Democrats are no more graceful in defeat than conservative Republicans are. (Look how they blame Ralph Nader, or Florida, or the Supreme Court for the debacle that was Al Gore.)

But conservative Republicans really do seem to provide us with the best examples of how not to lose.

I report, you decide.

But, to quote Neil Young:

'Cause you know
how time fades away.
Time fades away
You know how time fades away
-"Time Fades Away", ©Neil Young.

Central to Buddhist teachings are the Four Noble Truths. That second one there, about the origins of suffering, can be more understandably phrased like this: "the root of suffering can be defined as a craving or clinging to the wrong things" (thank you, BBC)

Attentive readers here will recall that I am eternally doing battle with all of the accumulated debris in my basement, the objects of my prolonged tendency to throw nothing away (a trait I shared with no less than Andy Warhol). I guess I always have felt like all of this ephemera would be invaluable to my biographers as they tried to assess what shaped the life of this great man.

How are the kids teaching me about Buddhism then, you ask? Periodically, we all go down to my 'lurkem' and they marvel at my boxes and boxes of 'treasures' (as in 'one man's trash is another's...'). Sometimes I pull something out and realize that it's nothing I'll find use in again (although I always have creative and grandiose schemes for all of these things - or I just feel like the memories that they evoke are too valuable to discard) and give it to the kids.

The objects that led my mini-satori this morning were the dozens of Hot Wheels® cars, once treasured sandbox possessions, that I bequeathed to my son. The memories attached to favorite cars, like the replica '68 Mustang, brought back afternoons of building dirt roads and playing 'cars' in the sunny afternoons with long-gone friends.

So it was sort of hard to pass them to certain destruction. I paused, then I handed them over.

This morning, playing with the boy, I realized that whatever me-specific memories were attached to the car had all been replaced by memories of my son playing with them.

And I realized that my clinging - at least to this one thing - has painlessly been removed.

Hopefully, the boy doesn't gain it, at least not with the cars. He'll have his own clinging to deal with - he doesn't need mine as well.