After creating my first post for my blog I want to get some actual content here as well. I thought I would start by sharing a story from my childhood that has always made a large impression on me throughout my life.

I do not remember how old I was, but if I were to guess I was probably 8 years old when this happened. I lived relatively small house with my parents and older sister, and we had this fantastic wooded area back behind the house. I always thought of it as my personal forest, however it was not very large, but large enough that once inside you could get far enough in to the point where you would no longer feel like you were in the middle of suburbia. My father has an Alcoholic until they day he died at the ripe old age of 50, and this is important to this story. One day I was home alone and wandering around in the forest back behind the house, and I had discovered some glass bottles, they were bottles of liquor my father had consumed and instead of putting them in the trash he used to throw them up into the woods from the back porch. I think he did this out of laziness or it also might have been to hide how much he drank from my mother. Well I had seen these bottles many times and really hadn't ever thought about them or done anything with them before, but that day was different. I took it upon myself to find as many of those empty glass bottles as I could and I proceeded to toss them from the forest down into our backyard which had a tiered garden with lots of large rocks. As you may imagine it was quite satisfying at the time, the loud cracking noises and shards of glass flying everywhere in the backyard. I really don't know what I was thinking at the time, because it created an awful mess. What happened next is what I will never forget. On this particular day my father arrived home before my mother, which I honestly don't recall how that could have happened because my father always worked a lot and my mother always seemed to be home. He quickly discovered what I had done, and I can remember the fear I had then, having done something so foolishly and making such a huge mess. My father never scolded me for what I did and instead acted as if I wasn't even there, he then proceeded to clean up the mess which I had created. I still have those images in my head of him crawling around in the garden on his hands and knees picking up shards of glass, both his hands and knees were bleeding quite profusely. I just stood there and watched him, I didn't even try to help. I think back on it now and then, and have come to the conclusion that he was so full of shame from being an Alcoholic that he wasn't mad at me at all, he simply wanted to hide the mess from my mother.