Just do it

There never will be a good time or a right time to start. There is only now. Fear has to fall away. You'll be branded self-obsessed. You won't have enough dialogue. You'll change tenses and jump back and forth from one period to the next and back again. Who cares? There must be some reason you stay awake at night listening to the birds chirping floating in your open bedroom window. There must be some reason you can't sleep and your thoughts conjour words while you lay with your eyes closed, head on the pillow and mind sailing through time and space as puzzle pieces reconfigure and draw portraits of your life and experience on the darkened backs of your eyelids. You were the only one there inside your brain all those years. You were the only one thinking those thoughts. No one else saw exactly what you say, felt what you felt. But when it all comes down to it, you are the everyman. Do you have what it takes to pull no punches? Can you let it all hang out? Expose every detail, every fear, every noble, tragic, comic, horrific, spine-tingling moment? I bet you do. I've put my money on you from the start. You get in that race boy.

I was born in Beckley, WV in 1972. I was welcomed into the world by two loving parents and two older sisters. I was born 17 days late. I was predicted to have arrived into the world on May 10, 1972. I finally acquiesced to birth and life on May 27 at noon. I weighed over 10 lbs. My heart was beating too fast when I was born. There was a lot of fear that I wouldn't make it. I was a "blue baby." The doctors saved me. After a week my mother I was discharged from the hospital and taken home. My first home was a two-story house on Dexter Avenue in a middle-class neighborhood in Beckley. I only lived in that house for a year before my parents bought their first home, a brand new house on King Street in a beautiful neighborhood in the center of town. The neighborhood did not have a name but it was known by claiming one of the main streets in the borough, Woodlawn Avenue. It was an interesting mix of homes of people, that neighborhood. There were families such as my own and older folks too. There were small bungalows and sprawling mansions. Two West Virginia governors had homes there, a United States congressman, and several state legislators, local mayors, minors, bankers, architects, salesmen, doctors, attorneys. All my memories of childhood are linked to that house and that neighborhood. I don't remember the Dexter Avenue house. The only memories I have of it were developed from photos and home movies my parents shot while my family lived there. I grew up on King Street. That house on that street was the stage for the first act of the play of my life.