Coming home

The title got you, didn't it? Someone asked me to write in a little greater detail about my non- girlfriend girlfriend. Here ya go. When you grew up in a Catholic household as the oldest son things could get a little overbearing. If you interview five children in the order they were born in you will find that things tend to ease up as parents learn how to rear children. For me, every single girl I looked at was concern for my mother to make sure she was a good Catholic. Of course, about fifteen years later when my sister announced she was marrying Jew nobody paid it any mind. What is interesting to note is Mom was born an Irish Catholic. Dad's mother was Lutheran, his father Baptist. He was raised a Congregationalist. Later on his own he became a Catholic. He attributed it to a chaplain he met in the service. He also never tried to force any religion on his children. In '81 when I returned home Dad confessed that the one secret he felt...

I was living in a tipi in the Rockies and somehow managed a ride home for the holidays of 1976. My divorce had hit me damned hard and to climb out of the ensuing depression I had decided to follow some of my childhood dreams, hence the tipi. As a kid I had always wanted to live in one for a winter. I think I had to share the driving because I hammered straight through from Colorado and forty hours seems to ring a bell. At any rate, when I arrived I was beat. I walked in the door and my mother saw me and the first words out of her mouth were “You're not going to join the French Foreign Legion.” I was screwed and I knew it. I was not going to hear the end of this for as long as I was home. Several months earlier when I was just settling into the tipi I knew that a year passes fairly fast and that I had probably figure out what to do when my year was up. I wanted to continue doing something adventurous. I was looking into possibly a game warden job in Africa....