Tennis

As a boy, I was not the greatest of athletes. I lettered for the cross country team in high school, but that was the height of my accomplishments in organized sports.

My two favorite sports have always been baseball and tennis. Dad taught me baseball as soon as I was old enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.

It was Mom, though, who taught the game of tennis to both my brother and me during the summer vacations in between school years.

My brother, Adam, learned the game fast, but it took me a while. When I first started playing, I literally could not keep the ball inside the court. Almost every time I swung, I launched the ball over the fence. Mom was very patient with me, though. We actually learned to play using her and Dad's old wooden rackets. Eventually, I was able to keep the ball inside the fence and inside the lines, but it was a couple of years before I began putting topspin into my swings.

Adam, after Mom bought us our own metal rackets, used Mom's wooden racket to hit rocks from our driveway out into the corn fields surrounding our house. He played whole imaginary baseball games hitting those rocks, the New York Mets versus the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, sometimes. The rocks gradually busted the strings and chewed up the wood. He later said that he hated he messed up Mom's racket, as it really was a nice vintage wooden piece.

Adam and I played a lot against each other while growing up. He beat me most of the time, but my peak came when I was 19 years old. That was my freshman year of college, and I was in perhaps the best shape of my whole life. I took tennis as an elective course at Western Carolina University. The instructor was one of the football coaches, an old man.

He really did not teach us that much. I remember him telling jokes to the class like, "Do you know what the students cheer at Furman University games?...FU!"

Or "Do you know what the students cheer at Austin Peay University?... Let's go Peay!"

He gave us written instructions on how the game is played and how to keep score, but the only teaching of how to play was when he told us and demonstrated, "Remember, bend your knees when you swing, bend your knees."

For our final grade, he started a tournament pitting everyone in the class against each other. I easily won my first two matches. The coach stopped the tournament after that, as it was pretty clear that I was the best player in the class. I'm not sure that he liked me that much, as I think I acted pretty cocky on the court. He challenged me to game of ping pong, and it was closely contested. The old ball coach eventually won, though, and he seemed to take a good deal of satisfaction in that.

My freshman year, I met a guy named Thomas who was also a very good tennis player for someone who never played it in an organized setting. We spent many evenings competing against each other. It was about 50/50, who would win. My strength, he said, was that I could run everything down and get every shot back across the net.

Thomas was a nice guy. He and I were both from the eastern part of the state, and he gave me a ride home during the Christmas break of my freshman year- over six hours of driving. I was pretty naive during college, and it took me all year to realize that Thomas was gay. This sort of blew my mind, given my conservative Christian upbringing. I immediately cut off all contact with him. It is one of the regrets that I have from my life that I was such a homophobe in those years and that I cruelly abandoned a friend who had done nothing wrong.

My brother joined me at Western during my sophomore year, and we continued our matches against each other on the courts beside Reid Gym (courts that now no longer exist due to building expansion on campus). I remember that these courts played slower, and the ball bounced higher than on the courts beside the high school where Adam and I attended. The slower court helped my game against him, and I went on a long winning streak. Eventually, he stopped playing against me because I was trash talking too much.

One night we were playing against each other and got into a heated argument over whether a ball was in or out. Some guys playing on the court beside us stopped to watch in awkward silence.

Finally, I yelled at Adam, "I'm going to beat your butt! I'm going to beat your butt tonight!"

At that exact instant, the lights went out.

I think it was probably someone from campus security who was watching and was able to shut the lights down before things escalated even further. I never knew the lights to just suddenly cut off like that at any time before or after when I played tennis at night.

When Adam stopped playing against me, I would go to those same courts and hit a ball against a brick wall until I got blisters on my hand.

During my sophomore year, I took racquetball as an elective course. The course was fun and was taught by the quarterbacks coach of the football team. He would later become the head coach. He also started a tournament in the class matching the students against each other. I finished second.

Taking the course was a mistake, though, as it completely ruined my tennis swing. In racquetball, you break your wrist when you swing. In tennis, you should keep the wrist stiff.

Adam eventually started playing tennis with me again, but it was a pathetic show. I began launching the ball over the fence once more. It was like I had forgotten how to play, like I was picking up a racket for the first time. It was not enjoyable for either of us, and he could not understand what had happened to me.

In college, I had a pretty strong crush on a girl, and I remember her walking by the court one night and seeing me play. I hated that I looked so pitiful out there as she went by- if only she could have seen me before I took that darn racquetball course, maybe things would things would have turned out differently between us. But probably not. In my head, it was a very important thing at that time, though.

I never did get my swing back. Instead, I developed a method of basically just punching the ball flatly back across the net, without topspin, and using the other player's velocity. Adam said it was very frustrating to play against me and that he could not get better himself with me playing in that style. I never was able to get back to the level when I was 19 and playing almost every day against Thomas, taking full swings and hitting with topspin.

Now, in my 30s, I have not played in years.

On the professional level, tennis has arguably changed more than any other major sport in the past 30 years. This is due to the rapid increase in racquet technology, the change from wooden racquets to graphite composites to whatever material is used today.

It is really a power game, now. No one serves and volleys any more, and you do not see the strategy in building points like you used to. I quit keeping up with all the changes, but I remember when Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon in 2001, that was a turning point. Ivanisevic, 6'4", had a big serve, but that was about it. Since his win, tennis has increased the size of the ball by 6% and changed the type of grass grown at Wimbledon to try and slow the game down. The real solution is to just go back to wooden rackets, but that will probably never happen.

Now, the men's game is two guys standing at the baseline and just hitting the ball as hard as they can. The best players are over six feet tall, whereas before shorter guys had a chance. To me, the game is not that interesting to watch anymore.

Enough about how things used to be, though.

Tennis, like baseball, has given me a lot of joy. I can write more blog entries about individual matches that I watched or played. I can write about specific shots, even. Perhaps in the future I will do so.

"Angeles," a Water Gun, and a Rainbow

This evening in Miami, I walked from my apartment to the grocery store across the street. My apartment is on the third floor, the top level. As I made my way down the stairs, I saw that I have some new neighbors on the ground level. A young man and woman with a newborn baby stood in their fenced in courtyard. The woman held a bottle to the baby's mouth, watching the man spread bags of reddish brown mulch on the ground. They looked up at me as I came down the stairs, and I nodded to them.

I decided not to try and start a conversation, or to tell them that their apartment is in a bad location. The man was spreading mulch most likely because there was no grass in their courtyard, only dirt. There is no grass because I have noticed that every time it rains, water funnels off the roof and pours into that yard in buckets. Any vegetation is drowned out.

I felt some sympathy for them, new parents in a new home, trying to make a go of it in this world. I imagine that it was probably much the same for my own parents when they were getting started with me in a small apartment on Christa Drive in Wilmington, NC.

My first and some of my best memories come from this time- the early 1980s.

One day, I remember playing in the front yard with mom. I heard talking coming from the apartment next to ours. The window was just low enough that I was able to see over the edge, and out of curiosity I walked over and looked in through the window at the people inside. The woman sitting in her living room saw me and said hello.

Mom corrected me, though, and told me it was not polite to look in through windows at other people in their homes.

The woman who lived next to us was named Angela. My favorite TV show at the time was CHiPs, a show about two motorcycle cops for the California Highway Patrol in Los Angeles. Here is a video clip of how it came on each week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hzt9RA_VQ



Watching the show come on again with the music, the way the cars and the film look, reminds me that my childhood is truly a different era, now.

Anyway, I had picked up on the name of the city as a boy watching the show, and I identified it with the name of our neighbor. When I saw her, I said, "Hey, Angeles" instead of Angela. I remember her with thick glasses and a blue bandana in her hair.

The first rainbow that I ever saw was in the back yard there in Wilmington, too. I remember looking at it really hard, trying to discern where one color stopped and another one began. As I recall, it was not quite a complete rainbow. I've seen a perfect rainbow only a couple of times in my whole life.



Perhaps I am mixing the two memories, but it seems that the same day that I saw my first rainbow, I was also introduced to my first water gun. It was a small plastic pistol that Dad filled for me. Another one of our neighbors, a man with a dark mustache, was playing with his child in a kiddy pool in the back yard. I ran up to him and squirted him in the chest with the water gun. Dad told me to stop, that what I was doing might be fun for me but that the man probably did not want to play.

The man said it was okay, though...

Now, back to the present, where I sit in my apartment in Miami, typing this blog entry. It is almost midnight.

Earlier this week, I received the news that Mom has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. The diagnosis explains some of the things that I observed last summer with her when we went on a family vacation out west. As I am learning, it remains to be seen how fast her symptoms will progress and how severe they will be. We are watching for how she responds to the medication she started this week.

Her condition has me thinking about a lot of things.

I value my early memories of my parents, and writing this blog serves an important function for me. My parents will not be around year after year. I finally began to grasp some of what that meant when I was a student in law school. The bad news from this week only confirms it.

Mom and Dad both have been pretty brave and cheerful about it, though, and there is hope that she can live with the disease for a long time without a major impact on her lifestyle. I am lucky that they have lived long enough for me to come to this new appreciation of them.

The Happiest Year of My Life

My job has been especially exhausting in recent days. I also have to work quite a bit this weekend to get ready for a slate of activities in the upcoming week.

I really do not have the energy to write a new entry just now. In the future, I hope to write about my many great experiences when I was a student at Western Carolina University.

For today, though, I will just briefly note what has been the happiest year of my life so far.

It was the summer of 2007 through the summer of 2008. During this time, I returned to Western Carolina as a graduate student.

My friend, Melissa, who was also President of the Graduate Student Association at WCU, asked me to take over writing a blog for them. She is the one who first showed me to how to do that on the internet, and it has been an enjoyable exercise ever since.

Here is a link to the blog that I wrote during that year:

http://wcugradstudentblog.blogspot.com/

I hope next weekend to feel rested and relaxed enough to write something original.

Rocking Chairs

I was not the best brother growing up.

One of the regrets that I have is how much of a hard time I gave my younger sibling, Adam, when we were boys. I was pretty good at arguments and enjoyed getting into them, especially with Adam. I rode him relentlessly whenever he made a mistake.

At one point when we were teenagers, I nicknamed him "Money Boy," for whenever he did things that cost the family some cash. It could be anything from accidentally breaking a drinking glass, to another time when he backed the family car into some bricks at the entrance to our driveway and damaged them.

I would stay on him about these things for days and weeks and even months, saying stuff like, "That one's forever, man."

I could be a real jerk about it, and I remember I got him so mad one day that he threw a quarter at my head, which just narrowly missed my left eye. It put a divot in the sheet rock of our dining room. Naturally, I never let him forget about that, either.

It was wrong to be tearing him down all the time. I should have been building him up, instead.

Adam was a very good athlete growing up.

We played in a church basketball league as teenagers. After one game, he was a little amazed and irked when I told people that he and I combined for 40 points in the game. It was true. I had six, he had 34.

Baseball in particular, he was good at. We played on the same teams at various times growing up, and anyone who played at that age knows that the best players on the team either pitched or were put at shortstop. Adam did both. He threw pretty hard, and a lot of guys in practice did not want to hit against him. I had no fear of him at all, of course, but that did not mean I could hit the ball when he pitched. Like any good athlete, Adam had his own stories he could tell of feats on the field.

One that I remember in a junior high school game was when a pitcher threw three straight balls to him. Adam was thinking of becoming a switch hitter, so with the count 3-0, he turned around in the box to bat left handed, to give the pitcher a different look. The pitcher laughed at him, and then threw a called strike. Adam turned back around to bat right handed, and on the next pitch slammed a double into the left field alley.

Around this same time, though, he also began struggling with some shyness at school. We went to a rather large high school. It was 4A, which at that time was the largest classification that high schools received in North Carolina (1A was a very small school, for example).

This was when I should have been encouraging him and helping him out, rather than constantly looking for ways to tear him down.

One of Adam's regrets which he talks about every now and again is that he did not play baseball in high school. In all of the leagues that he and I played in growing up, it was him and another guy named Jimmy who were always the best players. Jimmy went on to play some minor league ball in the Montreal Expos organization, if I am not mistaken.

Who knows how far Adam could have gone? I don't know that he had the stuff to make it all the way to the big leagues, but he believes he could have played college ball. I have no doubts about that, either. He would not be the first from our family. Our Uncle Jerry was a pitcher and first baseman at N.C. State University, and our cousin Jon also played some college baseball. That would have been enough, to play ball at a small school like Western Carolina University where we both attended.

In our big high school, with lots of guys trying out and getting cut from the team, the head coach actually came to Adam and asked him to play. But Adam said no, and it was because he was not happy in school.

I could have tried to help him with this. I remember Dad getting frustrated when Adam told him the story. "The coach came to you and asked you to play!?"

Anyway, Adam is enjoying life now, successful in his job, raising his son and teaching him to play sports as well.

But to title of this blog entry. One of the crueler things that I confess I did to my brother was when we were both young boys and I caught him asleep in our wooden rocking chair.

He was small enough then that he could sleep in the chair on his knees, facing backwards, his nose tucked in between the wooden splats of the back of the chair.

The temptation was just too great as I walked by. Without thinking, I gripped the top of the chair, yanked it backward and then pushed it forward hard again. My brother's head whip lashed back and then slammed against the splats. To say that was a rude awakening for him was an understatement. I don't know what possessed me to do that, other than just plain meanness...

One of my first memories of a rocking chair was in Wilmington, North Carolina. I was probably about three years old, and I can remember mom sitting in the chair and holding me while she watched TV. She rocked us back and forth. I had my head on her shoulder, and I was trying to go to sleep.

Though I was not watching the TV, I can remember what was on. It was "The Jim and Tammy Show," with televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Mom must have been nodding off and going to sleep herself, as I remember that when the rocking chair stopped moving, I kicked my leg into her side and she would start rocking the chair again. Eventually, the rocking would slow down and stop once more, and I had to keep kicking my leg to get her to keep rocking the chair.

So, I suppose two memories that I have of rocking chairs involves me being sort of abusive to members of my family. As for my mom, though, I think I was too small for the kicks to hurt. Eventually, she stopped responding to them and we both went to sleep.

Petey and Me

In my mid 20s, I lived in a condominium at Carolina Beach, North Carolina. My home was just one street back from the water.

When I walked out on my balcony, I sometimes saw dolphins jumping out of the ocean. Once, I saw a whale, the water spewing from its spout and seagulls circling overhead, perhaps attempting to feed on the whale. Another time, I noted a fishing trawler that seemed to be way too close to shore. Surely enough, about two hours later, it hit a sand bar, broke apart and sank. Luckily, the crew was able to swim to the beach and no one was hurt. That story made the six o'clock news.

In one of the other condominiums lived a man and woman who owned a big Tennessee Walker hunting dog. I worked from home fairly often, and I could hear its foghorn bark during the day when I suppose it was alone. To me, the dog always sounded stressed out.

Sometimes, when I was walking on the street down below our units, I would look up and see the dog with its head stuck out between the railings. It always had a wild glare in its eyes, but it never would look directly at me. Though I am no veterinarian, I tend to understand dogs much better than I understand my fellow human beings, and I suspected it was suffering from anxiety due to being cooped up in that small space all day. A Tennessee Walker is bred to roam through the woods and run racoons up trees, after all.


The owners only let the dog out of the condo so that it could relieve itself. I happened to be outside on one of these occasions, and asked permission to pet the dog.

I learned the dog's name was Petey. The owner was a woman in her 40s or 50s with bleach blond hair, an unnaturally dark tan, manicured nails and careful makeup. She struck me as a woman who normally has a poodle, not a hunting hound dog. Her boyfriend or husband was the blue collar type with a hair style close to a mullet. He drove a van, and I believe he worked as a painter.

They were nice people, but it bothered me to see Petey so vexed all the time. I offered to take him on runs with me.

They agreed that it would be good for Petey to get some exercise.

My runs with Petey as the sun went down turned out to be some of the more enjoyable experiences of my life.

Petey was a very intelligent dog, and I could see a change in his attitude almost as soon as we hit the road together for the first time. The owners had a long but strong leash for him. He started out with a sprint, and it was all that I could do to keep up. He pulled hard at the leash and dragged me along.

After a mile or two, though, he slowed down and the leash went a little slack.

We went down streets that neither one of us had ever seen before. We came across a park with multiple baseball fields. I took Petey inside one of the empty fields and closed the gates. Then I took him off his leash.

At first, he did not know what to do and just stood there. I ran out into center field, and he loped along behind me. I turned and charged at him, to get him to play. To my surprise, though, for the very first time he looked me in the eyes. Petey snarled at me.

"It's okay, buddy!" I said as I laughed. "I'm just playing with you. I'm just trying to get you to run free a little bit."

The snarl immediately disappeared from his face and he began wagging his tail. I jumped at him again. This time, he understood. He jumped back and took off running on a sprint across the field.

Now, he felt his freedom, and he circled back to run at me. I sprinted at him like I was going to tackle him, and he peeled off at the last moment. The two of us played like this, running in circles on the baseball field, for about ten minutes.

This wore him out. I put the leash back on him, and took Petey over to another field where an actual midget league ball game was going on.

As we stood along the first base fence, watching the game, Petey leaned against my leg, exhausted.

Still, once we left the game, he jogged most of the way home with me. We went about six miles that day.

The owners would not let me take him out again for a while, as they said he was walking with a limp and was obviously sore. I had overdone it with him for the first day.

Very soon, though, I was out with him again. Petey got into shape fast and was able to tug at the leash during our entire run if he wanted to.

I found that people were scared of Petey when I went for runs. He was a big dog, carried himself like a beast, and he grunted when he ran. One lady who was out for a walk and heard Petey's grunts coming up behind her, turned and actually screamed in fear. Then she gave me a dirty look as we went by her.

One day, I took Petey for a run down the beach, and many more people we came across gave us disapproving looks. I later learned that it was against the law to have a dog on that beach, which explained their reactions.

Petey cracked me up on another occasion. We ran down Lake Park Boulevard, past a bar called "The Fat Pelican."

A woman who was quite the regular there stood outside the entrance smoking a cigarette and talking with a man who also fit into the scene well.

The woman held the cigarette down by her hip. Petey stopped dead in his tracks as we went by and put his nose about a half inch away from the end of the cigarette, smelling it. Then he pointed to the cigarette like a bird dog.

I could tell this made both the man and the woman uncomfortable, but for some reason neither one would look at us or acknowledge that we were there. Maybe they were scared of what Petey was going to do. Who knows? Like I said, he lumbered like a beast and grunted as he ran.

I began laughing. "Come on Petey, let's keep moving." I tugged at him, and with some difficulty pulled his nose away from the cigarette.

One day, Petey got a bunch of sand spurs on his leg. I tried to take one off. He gave a little yelp of pain and bit my arm. But it was not really a bite. He just put his teeth on my arm and did not clamp down. It was a gut defensive reaction to pain from him, and I was impressed that he was smart enough to know that I was not trying to hurt him. Still, it was his warning to me and I left them alone. His mouth was much bigger than my forearm.

The owners later told me that he removed the spurs himself by chewing on them.

It got to be where Petey would recognize the sound of my footsteps coming up to his door. He would begin howling and jumping against the door like he was going to knock it down.

His reaction to me surprised his female owner. "Petey doesn't get that excited even when I get home," she said.

I'd put his leash on, and down the stairs we would charge.

I think Petey's favorite part was when I let him go down into the ditches along the road. The leash was long enough for that, and he leaped through water that sometimes came up to his neck.

Of course, he got filthy doing this, and I did my best to hose him down when we got back to the condominiums. I remember the man's reaction when I brought him back after one run, though:

"God bless, Petey! You got dirt on top of your head, even!" (Petey just looked at him, panting and wagging his tail.)

The man mentioned that his wife was getting a little put out over the dirt that Petey tracked into the house.

Not long after that run, they moved to a house further inland from the beach, taking Petey with them.

I gave them a call, leaving a message on their voice mail and offering to continue to take Petey out for runs. They never returned my call, though.

I missed Petey for a while after that. I hope that the house where they moved had a fenced in yard where he could run around. Otherwise, I'm sure that wild eyed look would have returned, along with the strained fog horn howls.

Petey was a good friend.

The Flaming Azaleas of Gregory Bald

After graduating from Western Carolina University in May 2000, I packed up all of my belongings into my 1995 Nissan pickup. I left my home in Sylva, NC and drove through the Great Smoky Mountains into the National Park, crossing the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, until I came to the site of my new job and home for the next six months- Cades Cove.

Hired for the season as a Park Ranger by the National Park Service (officially, my title was "Visitor Use Assistant"), the job was a challenge for me.

My duties included leasing camping spaces to visitors of the park, along with assisting the law enforcement rangers with "carry outs," when someone got hurt and stranded in the mountains.

I had trouble getting enough to eat during those six months. I was not a very good cook to begin with, and the nearest convenience store or restaurant or anything was about 10 miles away in a very small Tennessee town called Townsend. There was no grocery store in Townsend as I recall. That was in Maryville, an approximate 45 minute drive one way from Cades Cove. This may not sound far, but the road up and down the mountain was very winding and slow going, especially after I had a long day at work. I remember boiling a lot of noodles and microwaving whole potatoes for my meals, but it was not enough to keep the weight on or my energy up. To my embarrassment and the irritation of my coworkers, I completely gave out on one trip into the mountains where we had to carry out a rather heavy woman with a broken her ankle.

Truthfully, I was relieved when November came and my job ended.

The location was absolutely incredible, though.

In May, the pollen was so thick in the air at times that it looked like yellow rain in a downpour.

Until I finally learned to carry a flash light with me, night was so dark when I got off work that I had to drag my feet to know that I was still walking on the paved road from the campground office hut back to the cabin where I lived. On one of those night time walks, I got charged by a grunting deer. The buck stopped just a few feet in front of me. We stared at each other for a moment before it went galloping off into the woods.

I also came across several black bears during my bike rides and hikes through the park during those six months, and I saw a flying squirrel one night.

When the leaves changed in October, the mountains were beautiful shades of orange, red and yellow. The leaves took on a silvery tint as well that I had never seen before and which only lasted a couple of days.

In June, I remember being given a full day to go on a hike while on the clock with the Park Service. I chose to make this a 12 mile hike to Gregory Bald (called a bald because hardly any trees grew at the top of the mountain), six miles up in elevation, and six miles back down. My colleagues had told me that Gregory Bald was covered with flaming azalea bushes, which were in full bloom at that time.

The only catch was that I had to wear my Park Service uniform and carry a radio with me, which I put in a holster on my belt.

For most of the hike up into the mountains, I was alone. I came across a black bear that paid me no mind. It was eating blueberries, I think. Toward the top, I caught up to a husband and wife who I assumed to both be in their 40s. The husband was agitated that his wife could not keep up with him, and in his frustration at how quickly I was able to pass them, he mocked my walking style and said something sarcastic to me.

During the hike up to the top, I noticed increasing pain in my hip on the side where the radio was holstered. When I got to the the actual mountain top, I had to sit down and give my hip a rest (The next day it would be even more painful, and I realized that it was the weight of the radio on one side during the 12 mile hike that had caused it).

It was too bad that I was in discomfort, as I am sure that I did not represent the Park Service very well. People who were already on the mountain top saw me in my uniform and came up to have a conversation, but I really wanted to be left alone to rest my hip and enjoy the tranquility of the moment. I remember the look of disappointment on one woman's face in particular when I was probably a bit abrupt with her.

But the sights at the top were worth the trip. The azalea bushes were some of the most incredible things that I have ever seen in nature. To my surprise, in the wild these bushes grow much taller than me. The various colors also amazed me. They weren't just orange and red, but white and pink and purple as well. Each bush had its own color. To have seen these bushes from the air would also have been impressive.

Photographs that I have looked at on the internet do not do Gregory Bald justice, because they fail to give you the panoramic sweep of the scene and the many, many bushes and colors of the flowers that you can take in at the same time.

Still, here is a link to a good description of the hike:

http://www.hikinginthesmokys.com/gregory.htm

My hike up to see the flaming azaleas on Gregory Bald is one of my favorite experiences in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Port and Acka-Dacka-Ooh

I lived in Wilmington, North Carolina for the first five years of my life. From there, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia. We lived in Augusta for only six months before returning to North Carolina, this time Wake Forest- just north of Raleigh. Most people think of Wake Forest University when they hear that name, and the school was in fact founded in that town. However, in 1956 the school moved to the city of Winston-Salem, NC and the old Wake Forest campus became Southeastern Seminary.

When I was a child living in Wilmington, I can remember the first time that I became fascinated with a word.

The word was "Port." I had heard it on the TV, and the way the person said it sort of tickled my eardrums. I went running to mom in my excitement, who was in the kitchen of our apartment. I can't remember what I said to her, but it probably wasn't very coherent. I was trying to explain to her that I knew a word, but I don't think she understood.

In my head, the mental image that came to mind with the word "port" as the person on TV had said it was actually a microphone, the larger type of metal microphone, used at radio stations and which had holes in it. The tickling sensation that the sound of the word made in my ears was sort of synonymous with being able to touch the metal microphone and feel all the holes on it. I'm not sure why I made the association between "port" and a microphone. Perhaps the person on TV had said something like, "Plug the microphone into the port." But I really don't know.

This all might seem a little "out there." My memories from Wilmington are my first memories, though, when I was able to make even less sense of the world than I can now as an adult.

The more that I write about these early memories, the more that come back to me, which is what I wanted to happen when I started this blog.

The same tickling sensation in my ear drums returned when we lived in Wake Forest. Mom was a school teacher by trade, and she taught me at home for the first year or so. I never went to pre-school or kindergarten, but started my formal education in the first grade.

This was at Millbrook, a kindergarten through 12th grade school. Mom worked as a teacher's aide at the school, and it was a tough start to each day when she took me to my classroom and then had to leave me there. I remember one anxiety filled morning in particular when I was there in the classroom, waiting. Mom had to leave me there before anyone else had arrived. I sat there all alone on a bean bag with the lights turned off.

Anyway, mom always made me lunch, which I kept in my metal lunch box. She often included seedless grapes for me to snack on later in the afternoon.

One of my friends at Millbrook was an African-American boy. I can't remember his name, now, but I do recall that he spoke with a bit of a lisp.

At the end of each day, we would all be sitting at our desks, waiting for the intercom to call students to their buses. He rode the bus, but I waited for mom to come and get me.

The boy, who sat at his desk across from me while we waited, saw me eating my grapes. He said that we could play a game with them.

I was interested, so we began the game. It consisted of the boy mimicking the rhyme of "eeny, meeny, miny, moe," except he used words and phrases that I had never heard before. I can't remember them all, but one phrase he used a lot was "acka-dacka-ooh."

He would tap my desk and then his own, back and forth as he chanted the phrases. Whenever he stopped the phrase, that's how we would know who got a grape.

Of course, he ended up getting most of the grapes, but I did not mind. Listening to him speak those strange words with his lisp while he tapped our wooden desks with his fingers tickled my ear drums. It was comforting to me to listen to him, and I was disappointed when the intercom called his bus number and he ran out of the class.

There have been other times when I hear something that tickles my ear drums, but it is very rare.

I can give you a first hand example of one, though. I enjoyed watching the late painter, Bob Ross, on the Public Broadcasting System.

Here is a link to one of the episodes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPPOpWBMFx4

When he talks, that is often enough. But especially when Ross talks and at the same time knocks the knife against the palette, those are pleasing sounds.

Perhaps I am the only person who gets this. What tickles my ear drums may seem weird to everyone else, but this blog is about my experiences. I hope that reading about it is enjoyable for at least some people.