“It’s an unconditional love...that we have for you.  It doesnt go away…and no matter what you do I’m always going to be here for you.”  He always knows the right thing to say, my dad.  It is a happy declaration to hear, that your family and friends love you and will stand beside you no matter what kind of trouble you are in, particularly in my case when fucking up has become (over this past year) as routine as a 6 month check up at the dentist.  It’s easy to forget that the love of the people that are closest to you is interminable when you feel so often that you have been letting them down, that you have been letting yourself down.  When it feels like this, it escapes my memory that not once in my entire 20 years of life has my father ever let me down, even before I took my first breath.  Mama says just before I was born while she was lying in the hospital bed with my dad sitting at her side, the heart monitor sounded and showed that my heart rate was plummeting.  She says never in her life has she seen anyone look as scared as my dad did as he ran out of the room screaming for the doctor to come for me.  And the doctor did come.  My father didn’t give up on me then, nor did he give up on me today when I got my second alcohol violation notice in the mail.  Not once has he ever given up on me, even and most particularly when I feel like giving up on myself.  I know that he loves me that both my parents do no matter what.  Still it was nice hearing the words today, since they are so often and so easily forgotten.  It is nice, every so often, to be reminded that the love of a parent for a child or that of one best friend for another is as constant and as endless as a clock dial that ceaselessly ticks away every second of everyday.  It is, after all, as my father says, an unconditional love.