20 Things

Seeing as it’s taken me more than a year to produce a measly 20 posts, I thought I’d observe a bloggers’ tradition by marking the occasion with the old “20 Things About Me” post. (Actually, I’m just lazy.)

1. I’m the oldest of three kids.
2. My brother, Sam, and sister, Melissa, live in Florida.
3. My parents just retired to the Blue Ridge Mountains and they love it.
4. When I was a kid my ears were my biggest source of insecurity.
5. Consequently, I always hated the Christmas special Rudolph’s Shiny New Year.
6. My parents had to remove me from public school because I was getting beat up so often on account of them.
7. They transferred me to a Catholic school (we weren’t Catholic), where in one week I was pushed off the top of a slide, held down in a fire ant bed and collared by a nun for trying to “get my cracker” at Friday mass.
8. Soon I was back in public school, getting beat up less often.
9. I was nine before I learned how to swim because my mother was so afraid of me drowning (logical, right?).
10. My Uncle Brad had a different approach. He threw me off the transom of his ski boat into alligator-infested waters and told me “Swim or get eaten!” Problem solved.
11. I wanted to be a drummer ever since I was six, when I first went to the Magic Kingdom and saw the Sons of Liberty Fife and Drum Corps.
12. I’ve played drums on and off since I was 13.
13. That was the same year I found out my biological father wasn’t the dad I had always known.
14. Years later I was told my biological father had been a drummer.
15. My other passion growing up was soccer.
16. One of my best friends was our goalie, David, who stuttered worse than Moses.
17. He used to eat lunch with me in 9th grade.
18. During lunch, David would talk to me about Christ’s return, salvation, stuff I’d never heard before.
19. I soon realized I was not going to heaven because I was a “good” person.
20. I find it ironic that a stuttering goalie led me to the Promised Land.