1984-Present

It’s a new year! For some that means starting over. Fresh starts. Beginning and becoming something new, or become the person they want to be. For most this means hitting the gym three to five times a week, making plans to go back to school, saving the money, spending less, or becoming better sons, daughters, mothers, and daughters. There’s only one problem. Somewhere around the middle of February or beginning of March something happens. People fall back into old habits. The person they were replaces the person they said they wanted to become. Dr. Jekle gets a little itchy and next thing you know Mr. Hyde is roaming the frig for a pint of cookies n’ cream. The problem is, people forget. They forget the previous year, and everything that went along with it. Before traveling down that road of sugar highs and caffeine headaches that I will venture down in a few months I’m going to remember a bit of the craziness of 2013.

Looking back I know I did way too much last year. In the fall I coached high school track. In the summer I taught summer school, began graduate classes at Johns Hopkins, and prepared new teachers to enter Baltimore classrooms with New Teacher Institute. Oh yeah, throughout this entire process I was working with developers to refurbish, find grants, and buy my first house. In the fall I thought it would be a good idea to take three graduate classes instead of the usual two and teach two new grades when I knew my daughter, Mirus, would be born in December. Needless to say I was a little burnt out when the New Year came around.

I don’t have any lofty plans for 2014, but I’m also not going to slow down. I’m still taking graduate classes with hopes of getting my masters in the Science of Education by the fall and the first novel in my young adult trilogy will be released in the next few months. I still plan on coaching track, and preparing new teachers to enter the classroom, but my greatest, most difficult, and most rewarding adventure will be raising my daughter. I’ll still run as much as possible with hopes of running in a few races this summer and I’ll still be writing. But I also will try to not forget how I got to 2014. I just won’t remember the year 2013. I’ll also remember 2010 when I married my wife and worked three jobs as a substitute teacher, pizza maker, and paperboy to support my family to make sure I don’t take for granted anything I have. I’ll remember working at Old Navy from 4am- 12pm and Payless from 1-9pm in 2008 and being unsure of the direction my life was heading. Friends Adam, Pat, Bryan, and Jordan will always be in the forefront of my 2003 Peoria High School senior year, Bowling Green withdrawal from classes, and two years of homelessness with relatives after losing my home to foreclosure. New friends will always be compared to old friends Jessica, Shannon, Leila, Lindsay, Marcus, and Andrea and be reflected in each and everyone one of the characters I write. I’ll remember these places, people, and events because they all amount to who I am today. To me being a writer means remembering all those years, changing the details, imagine new circumstances, and putting them down on paper. The people I loved, lost, and wish I still knew as I did then can still exist with a flick of my pen, or movement of my fingertips over the keyboard. The point I’m trying to make here folks is remember the years that make you who you are rather then forget and try and become someone new.

Pictures of Mirus are below.