This past weekend was my dad's 68th birthday. We all gathered around under the cypress trees and Spanish moss and clogged our arteries with smoked briscuit, potato salad and Mexican cornbread....ain't we a mix! It was really great to see my Uncle Bubba and Aunt Bernadine were there...I realized just how much I have missed seeing them over the years.

It's funny how you can just look up and see how life can age everyone before ya know what the hell happened. There are some nights when I sit in my little room with just my guitar, my regrets and my memories and wonder when the hell did I grow up? Surely it wasn't that long ago was it? Sometimes it seems like just yesterday all I had to worry about was putting gas in my Maverick and how I was going to get the summertime girls that visited the lake from Dallas out of their jeans. Somewhere, somehow along the way we all grew up and older. I guess I'm pretty lucky, somehow through it all I stayed sober and off any addictive substances...not too many in my circle ever did. Somehow we all worked out our dysfunctionalities in different ways I guess. There's just never been anything I wanted in a bottle...there were occasions though, perhaps that's how I wound up married to a stripper at 18, but I always say that one doesn't count, it didn't last very long anyway, and besides, I was hormonally challenged at the time...it's a mulligan. I never have lived through life looking through beer goggles, I guess I always just muddled through the hard way with my awkward self..

My brother and mother are making a good effort at sobriety, and I admire them for making the decision to get clean and sober after so long being a slave to alcohol. My Grama used to say they call it "Spirits" fro nothing, and I think she was onto something there. God knows alcohol has only brought grief and pain to our family...a lot of bad violent memories that I can not forget, jail cells, death, and broken marriages and relationships that simply can not be repaired after the damage is done. I am very thankful that these changes for the better are taking place in my family. There is a part of my that is cynical about real change in people, it's just the cop in me who has seen so many jailhouse conversions and broken promises. A man simply has to be sceptical to a degree to be a good cop, the trick is to not let it poison you to the extent of being a total cynic.

When did I get so jaded in my thinking...I sometime wonder how all this happened, but in between the cell phones, the radio calls, the long hours kids and dogs and cats that need feeding, well....I just shrug it all off. I used to see things as so black and white....my dad used to tell me that someday I would find the world wasn't so cut and dry like that, he was right...he seems to get smarter as I get older...funny how that work eh?

Sometimes, I just want to go back to a simpler time, sit under the cypress trees with my guitar like I did when I was 15, and lose myself in the cool wind off the lake and the sounds of the crickets and frogs as back up to an old Skynnard song.

Tonight I'll sit in my little room with my guitar, and pound out a lil music that nobody but me wants to hear, and wonder...where will I be at my 68th birthday party? Will I have have more regrets stacked up, more wounds, war, and pain to deal with, or will I have reached some serenity in my life? I think I'll just pray for mercy now, mercy for my family, mercy for my present and mercy for my future.