Background

Let me start by saying that I have an odd relationship with the word background. For six years, my web design students had a predictable habit of forgetting the silent g. Even when we say it ourselves, the word comes off sounding like back-round. So if they were designing pages, for example, coloring their screens and their division blocks, inevitably one, two, or ten of them would raise their hands to tell me something wasn’t working, that no color was showing up on their page. In the beginning, it took me several minutes to make my way around the room, helping them spot the same error. But eventually, after a few months, after a few years, I didn’t have to leave my desk to solve the problem. All I had to do, from the comfort of my chair, was ask them if they remembered to type a “g” in the middle of the word and they’d almost always smile and sigh. Regardless, I suppose background is still the best word for me to use when I think of explaining how it is that I became a teacher, an author, and a librarian. Or how, more than anything else, I became a storyteller.

All that to be said, my life is a messy canvas of American inconsistency. For example, I was born in Rochester, New York, back in 1977. And considering my relationship with cars and big cities, I could probably make the case that I’m just a typical New Yorker. But if you ask a real New Yorker, they’d no doubt insist that being from Rochester doesn’t make me one of them. And I get it. My family moved to Indiana when I was three, Ohio when I was five, and Oklahoma when I was eight. None of those things make me a Colt, a Buckeye, or a Sooner either. So if you’re keeping track, we also moved to Iowa when I was eleven and Oregon when I was fifteen. Frankly, the word vagabond comes to mind when I think of my childhood, but that’s a little dramatic. It also sounds too much like something out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. All I really know is that home, friends, and family became something of a moving target for most of my life. So I used my imagination. I turned Matchbox cars into characters. I held sticks into the sky and pretended I was He-Man. My parents even bought me a typewriter in third grade, where I wrote pages and pages of this story and that story, pages that usually ended up in the wastebasket of whatever place we once lived. Back then, I wasn’t very good at saving things that might be important later. Back then, I didn’t think too much about the future, aside from telling one of my teachers that one day, I’d become a famous writer. What can I say, I had goals.

Unfortunately, a transient life didn’t lead to a stable life. By the second, third, and fourth year of high school, I was skipping and bombing classes, running off to watch movies, play at the arcade, or go hang out with the girls at some other school. As a result, I barely graduated, wrecked a bunch of cars, took a handful of odd jobs and con jobs, racked up a mountain of debt, and even got blacklisted by every major bank in the country for writing too many bad checks. Or to put that another way, I developed a track record for bad decisions. And even when I tried to make good decisions, I didn’t fair much better. I struggled through an early battle with Crohn’s Disease that came to an emasculating end. By the start of my twenties, I was in a complicated, tangled relationship that left me haunted and shaken, long after it was over. By the age of 24, I was a train wreck of isolated embarrassment.

It wasn’t until I met my wife, Melissa, that things actually turned a corner. Melissa was my paragon, someone who had lived almost all her life in the same city, the same house, with the same friends. Considering my years of mobility and volatility, she was marked by years of stability and responsibility. As a violinist, a pianist, and a Grade-A student, she was my model of excellence in every form and fashion. She took a restless, wandering, prodigal boy and loved him for reasons that didn’t make any sense on paper. Because we made each other laugh, I suppose. Because we knew how to listen to each other, to talk or even argue without being caustic. Because we pushed and challenged each other. Because we gave each other the space to fall, to get up, to move forward. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine that I ever could have made her better, because she was already a masterpiece, but she definitely made me better.

Three years into our marriage, at the age of 28, I returned to college with a few scattered credits and that joke of a diploma from high school. Five years later, I had a degree in history and political science, I had a published book about church segregation, and I was starting a Masters in Library and Information Science. I even managed to acquire a job teaching fourth grade at a Title I elementary school in South Florida. Three years after that, I was teaching middle school web design at a Title I magnet school and I had become an academic research librarian with the University of Central Florida, a job I held for nearly ten years. At the present moment and the foreseeable future, I work with elementary and middle school students at a charter school for gifted education and I have been given the floor to encourage and support my colleagues through weekly staff emails that I’ve never shared outside the privacy of our campus (aside from one or two). Whatever I am now is a far cry from whatever I was for the first twenty or thirty years. But all of those early years are still a part of my story. All those things that happened are, for lack of a better word, my background.

The truth is, when I went back to college at the age of 28, I felt short on time, like I had already wasted a decade and couldn’t imagine wasting another second. So began my compulsive, internal clock. Newly obsessed with learning, I started buying every book on the syllabus of every class, including those that were only listed as recommended titles. Soon after that, I started picking up books that were mentioned in the bibliographies of the books I already owned. It wasn’t long before I was marking up my books with highlighters, with pen lines, with notes in the margins. Before long, I had a mountain of books, a room of shelves taller than me, a private library that continues to grow, into closets, into drawers, into other rooms, into more books than I can ever expect to read in my lifetime.

But I keep reading, challenging myself each year to read at least 60 new titles, and I keep writing, now seven books to date.

Perhaps the easiest thing to say about me is that I’m always between writers.
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