Because I did a couple of more thoughtful Facebook posts this past week while tending to my Mom in Venice, FL….my daughter Erin suggested I start a blog to capture some of my thoughts.  OK…I’m game, but note to self…I am usually right and think know what is best for others.  It’s a gift and burden that I live with.  I want  my thoughts to be meaningful, seriously…as I have a pretty active mind and I have lots of opinions and I do care more than I wish about our world and what we are doing to mess it up.  My normal language is naturally earthy.  My Dad could cuss up a pretty decent storm and caught constant and sometime intense hell from my Mom for it.  My Mom uses the word shit better than anyone I’ve ever known.  When I was in maybe fourth grade I got in a shit load of trouble for calling my brother Johnny a GDSOB.  My parents made me stand in front of the tv in our garage apartment  in Athens, WV, where we lived when they returned in their mid-thirty’s to get their teaching degrees . My punishment was to  say it in front of the three of them, ten times.  I made it through eight or so and started to cry like a little girl and swore I’d never cuss again.  Within minutes of making it outside and away from the family embarrassment and terror I called Johnny many bad things again and told him to never rat me out like that.  He didn’t!  It’s all been downhill foul language wise since.  Ann busts my chops pretty regularly.  Drinking makes it worse, but thank god I don’t drink all that often around others.  So I will try to tell my little vignettes minus too much colorful language.  My girls laugh as I’ve told stories a thousand times beginning with “I was born in a little coal mining town in West Virginia” …..so it begins with Matewan52…..I was born a preemie in an old folks home that had an incubator in a coal mining town in WVa, in June of 1952.  My Mom, an angel who will be covered in depth later, had gone through several very difficult pregnancies and I was just one in a series.  Through extraordinary efforts by she and Dr. Roy I arrived very early and only a few pounds.  The only thing my parents were told in the hospital was “don’t get attached.”  The did!  My grandfather Thompson said I looked like a “skinned squirrel.”  Dr. Roy instructed the nurses to only give me O2 when I turned blue.  That wise advice likely kept me from being blind as I had significant retinal and eye issues associated with premature birth, that could have been much, much worse.  For those first weeks and months of life I lived in the incubator and was fed through an eye dropper.  When you see a lady breastfeeding her infant and get that warm and fuzzy Awww moment, I get that from eyedroppers.  You make the best of it!  But eventually I got to cross the street to our house in Matewan, tucked between Aunt Fonnie (Whitt) and my real Aunt Lou and Uncle Ken, who lived next to Dr. Roy.  I began life loved by a large family and whole town who prayed and fed me continuously so poor little Tommy could survive to be Johnny’s brother and Betty and Bill’s little boy.  I milked it for all it was worth and 60 plus years later I am still the luckiest guy ever.