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.

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.

My boy asked me this afternoon if germs were strong enough to hold a car up.

Huh.

How would you answer that one?

(Click image to enlarge.)

Let the record show that today, only a few hours after the calendar start of Spring, only a few days before baseball's opening day, Milwaukee has received more than a FOOT of snow.

I drove my neighbor into her job this morning, entirely missing some gigantic landmarks I usually navigate by (huge municipal buildings, usually almost an eyesore but today obscured in the thickest snow I've seen in a long while).

Finally, after skidding/sliding to a stop for a traffic light, I shook my fist and shouted directly to  the heavens, "Is this all you got, God? Is this all you got? 'Cause I'm not down yet, you son-of-a-bitch! You never knocked me down!'

God has been unavailable for comment.

Which is probably a good thing, since I'm guessing he could still muster up some sort of a NEW Horseman of the Apocalypse, probably something involving network TV.

Or maybe he already has.

Attentive readers may recall that I've been doing battle with all of the detritus in my basement for quite a while.

I spent a while down there again yesterday, trying to throw shit away in the brief time I had before I got all weepy and sentimental and starting putting away stupid meaningless pieces of ephemera to 'look at again a little later' and make a final decision about later. When I make more than three piles, I try to make it a rule to stop and come back after my resolve is hardened to be a more efficient, cutthroat and heartless archivist. Petty emotions must not stand in the way of a less-cluttered basement!

At some point, standing surrounded by teetering boxes of crap, I had a satori of sorts.

These memories that I'm hoarding in the basement, I need to let them go. The strongest ones are already in me - they're what make me me. The others - well, I try to keep this in my mind as I'm sifting through the offal of my years. If my basement was struck by a tornado and I lost everything in it, would I miss those things?

Well, no. Maybe it's all of this zen crap I've been reading, but I feel like at least one precept has started to sink in: nothing lasts forever. Our unhappiness really is caused by allowing ourselves to become stupidly attached to things. This is actually a pretty basic part of Buddhism - the first of the Four Noble Truths.

So I suppose there's a weird sort of parental pride in my (then three-year old) son's reaction to seeing his mom fight back tears as she explained why our cat wouldn't ever be coming back from the vet. Ever.

"It's okay, mom", he said, giving her a hug, "Everything dies."

Wow.

Probably this seems simple and obvious and even pedantic to you. It's a big deal to me.