Happy Cinco de Mayo hangover my friends. Hopefully your feet didn’t swell too much from all that margarita salt, and you weren’t able to slide your hooves into your Crocs and shuffle to the mailbox to see if your stimulus check arrived. I went barefoot…still no luck…maybe tomorrow.

I failed Spanish in college so I can’t really say for certain what the exact translation of “Cinco de Mayo” is in English, or whatever language happens to be your mother tongue. “Mother tongue”, what an unfortunate, and mildly disturbing, phrase.

If I owned a deli I’d have a sandwich on the menu called Mother Tongue, and whenever someone ordered it I’d tell them to clean their room, stand up straight, and stop hanging around with those hooligans. Sound advice with a side of bacon. Everything should come with a side of bacon…even a side of bacon. Redundancy would never be so welcomed.

Speaking of (pun intended) …Mother’s Day is creeping up on us. I think more things should “creep up” on us, it would add an element of pensive exhilaration to life and all its stuff.

Come to think of it, I don’t think my dear mother ever told me to clean my room, stand up straight, or to stop hanging around with those hooligans. Possibly because she’s quite realistic, and readily saw the folly in wasting her breathe on such triviality when there were much more potentially serious matters at hand. Namely, combustibles and flammables, the dynamic duo of choice with my brother and I (aka…those hooligans).

Thankfully our level of idiocy has seemed to skip a generation, and my wife was able to mother our children with “normal” motherliness. By “normal”, I mean extraordinary, and in the complete absence of combustibles and flammables. Boring kids. I never once had to start a sentence with, “What would have happened if….?”.

The pat response to such a question, if you’re a hooligan with an exasperated, yet, loving mother, is a moderate, but thoughtful shrug with a slightly downturned head and wide upward turned eyes that poignantly express innocents and more than a hint of dullardness. Trust me.

I have been quite fortunate to have tremendous women in my life. Women that are strong, but caring, sweet, but a little salty, and capable of unquestionable love in the face of mountainous dullardness. Us hooligans…us fricken' idiots…we love you, and we always will.

As I roll into finals week at the college, my inbox is full of papers, papers that I assigned, and which I now regret. One of my requests of the students is that they properly cite their sources so that the reader can differentiate between their thoughts and thoughts of their sources. It is painful for all involved, but it is my job, and I am quite thankful to be able to keep on keepin' on during these plague ravished times.

So to cite my sources…although it can be eerily difficult to differentiate between his thoughts and mine, “dullard” is one of my brother Gabe’s favorite words, so when I use it, I think of him (insert sarcasm).

Happy May, Happy Mother’s Day…Spring is here, and sooner, or more likely later, we’ll be able to get out and about and cough and sneeze to our hearts content. Like people only a mother could love.