Kevin,
All my aunts and uncles lived in the same tiny mining town in northwestern Ontario, and after the mine closed and my grandpa’s garage went bankrupt they all moved west to British Columbia. I was born soon after this, on a sunny day in August, the firstborn child of a couple named Pat and Mike. Pat, my dad, was twenty-four years old, and he raced go-carts on the day of my birth.
In my very early days I was rambunctious, happy to run around, to jump in the water, to race my three-wheeled motorcycle as fast as I could. I have no memory of those days. In my earliest memory my grandma serves me a baloney sandwich impaled by a lit candle. It is my third birthday. When I was six my parents attended prophecy meetings at a local auditorium. They learned of the dragons and horses in the Book of Revelation and decided to abandon the Catholic faith for a strange, new Protestant one. When my mom told her sister that we would become Seventh-Day Adventists my aunt cried and cried and asked if she could take the kids. We stopped eating pork, stopped drinking and smoking, stopped watching cartoons on Saturday morning. I went to a new school where kids were religious but mean. My parents still fought after their conversion, but it was never as bad.
I guess I was a smart kid. I liked to read the encyclopedia for fun. I wanted to be a magician and a puppeteer. In kindergarten I was shown on the front page of the newspaper, playing on a computer. Later on, in a bizarre sleepwalking incident, I peed on the keyboard of my home computer. My love-hate relationship with technology continues to this day.
After many years of church school, speech therapy, and piano lessons I left home to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist college in eastern Washington. I learned how to write and lost my virginity to a sassy redhead in the back of a trailer. We awoke to fresh snow and well-dressed students on their way to church.
In Vancouver I finished a science degree, had failures and successes with college women, learned to cook and swim and sail. In Ithaca I’ve had the best and worst times of my life while trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.
Recently, I became an uncle.
Kevin—Age 27—Ithaca, NY
From 400 Words, Issue 1.
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