A big influence in my life

My cousin "Jim The Mountain Man" encouraged me to do a post about people that have influenced us all the most. I have always wondered what made some people think so differently from me. I often suspected that it was the way they were raised, or the people that influenced them in their younger years.
The biggest influence in anyone’s life is usually a persons parents. That was also true in my case. I was raised with a coddling, over protective mother that would have surely smothered me to death, if it hadn’t been for my “man’s man, devil may care Dad”, who did not smoother me, but gave my adventurous soul wings.
My earliest recollections of being out with my dad was when we would go fishing. He would fish and I would play on the shore and stack rocks, bang things and generally do things that you shouldn’t do while fishing. I remember that he would let me eat the fish eggs that he used for bait, and every now and then I would get a sip of his whiskey that he sipped to stay warm. It was great sport for me because I knew that I was getting away with things that my Mother would never allow.
Working in the garden with my mother, I would watch the birds swoop down and eat the worms that were exposed by the spading. Being the curious, adventurous, free spirit that I was. I picked up and ate a few worms. That was until my mother caught me. You would have thought that I had eaten dirt or something, I had already tried that and it didn’t taste good at all. I had trouble understanding why I got in so much trouble for tasting a few worms. Who knows, it could have been a new gourmet delight. I’m sure that my dad wouldn’t have had any problem at all with me tasting a few worms, he would probably asked me how I liked them.
That’s when I first started noticing that people were different.