THE JOURNEY: As I head out of town with my youngest daughter who is a basketball player on an AAU team, I realize how different things are for the two of us compared to a year and a half ago. Back then we would have never been involved in making this happen for her in playing for a traveling team that plays all over the West coast. It wasn't really that we didn't want to back her in this endeavor, it was more that when Barb was alive we had different priorities and time constraint issues that would have made it impossible to make it happen. When she died those previous constraints went out the window like a rush of air leaving a balloon. It suddenly became painfully obvious that my daughter and I now had time on our side to use as we wished. Being both sports oriented it became easy to support her desire to pursue playing at a higher level of girls basketball and try to get her noticed by college coaches at these huge West Coast tournaments. I think we all find that in a blink of an eye we have time on our hands that we never thought conceivable when our spouses were alive. It is an interesting phenomenon. Where did the time really come from? And when you have many kids like we had and could never support this kind of thing for the older kids, it does make it a little awkward when your youngest gets all the attention now that mom died. The flip side is that it has really given us bonding time together during an unbelievable period in both of our lives that we would have never had otherwise. You figure it out by imagining two weeks on the road with a teenage girl driving all over California going to events that could impact her future. No pressure there. Good thing I am so layed back and have always told her to just have fun. And if it doesn't go well, it is going to be one heck of a long drive back from San Diego. I think the point for me here is that there is an ironic twist of fate that it took a death to bring us so close together. Life isn't fair sometimes but I wouldn't give up what is going on between my daughter and myself. I think my lesson if I could turn back the clock would of course be to have kept Barb here on this earth and at the same time develop this really strong bond with a daughter that I hope reaches her dream of playing in college basketball. It's too bad we can't always have everything we want. I will settle for three pointers from April for her mom.


PEACE BLANKET

CAN YOU HAVE A BLANKET MADE FOR PEACE
WEAVED WITH CARE
HELD TOGETHER WITH LOVE
PROTECTING THE SOULS THAT COME TOGETHER
THAT NEED IT THE MOST

PROTECTING THE DREAMS
WARMING THE HEART
BEATING IN ITS ALL CONSUMING
SENSE OF SECURITY

YOU ARE MY PEACE BLANKET
PROTECTING ME FROM HARM
LOVING ME WITH YOUR WARMTH
WEAVING ME INTO SOMETHING I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE
AND WAS JUST WAITING FOR GENTLE WEAVERS HANDS
TO RELEASE THE MAGIC THAT WAS ALWAYS THERE