Six Things of Many...

Six things about me no one knows:

1) If you asked me to name the thing that I feel most guilty about, I would probably tell you it was the time I killed a goose in San Miguel, Mexico. We spent summers there when I was a young teenager. While out walking the grounds of the Institute where we stayed, a goose came at me from behind, flying up at me in attack mode. Never having been around geese before, it scared me and I just reacted. Grabbing a heavy stick from the ground, I bashed that white blur squarely on the top of his head and he dropped like a stone. I didn't mean to kill him and I'm sorry.

2) The first time I saw what a woman’s vagina looks like, I was 9 or 10. Certainly I had seen naked women before, like when I was over at a neighbors house and her mom rushed out of the upstairs bathroom, wet and dripping from her shower, to get a towel from the linen closet in the hall. But no one shaved in those days so there was little to see. That changed when Bill Rosenving brought a very crumpled page torn from a medical book to choir practice. A line drawing, with arrows that named each part. The fact that he had it at all seemed terribly dangerous and exciting. Not because of the actual image of that unappealing and almost alien line drawing but because I thought it was so forbidden, like having a loaded gun or a human toe in his pocket.

3) When I drink liquids, I always count the gulps as they go down, and I always inadvertently skip gulp #12, going straight from 11 to 13.

4) I collect high-end fighting knives: neck knives, automatics, assisted openers, fixed blade, punch knives, armor piercing, carbon fiber to go undetected through airport security, hand hatchets...and many custom tactical knives made with beautiful Damascus steels, carbon fiber, and rainbow anodized titanium. Many are stashed all over the house and in my car. I always carry and feel truly exposed and vulnerable if for some reason I have to be without one.

5) If our house started to burn down, the first material thing I would try to save are two oil portraits of my fifth great grandparents. They've been in our family since they were painted in 1852. I don't particularly like them, especially the one of great, great, great, great, great grandma. She looks so sour and nasty. But the paintings aren't mine. I'm just the current caretaker and I take that responsibly very seriously.

6) I've never been scared by monster movies or fictional characters that defy logic, but I'm very frightened by my own over-the-top reaction to bullying of all kinds. Sometimes, I'm scared of me.