One thing that has always fascinated me about Facebook is the Memories tab, where I’m shown things I posted or saw on this date in history. I joined FB in late 2008, and posted this on January 26, 2009. It was basically 25 random things about myself. Here they are 13 years later, complete with comments on a few of them.
1. I never thought that the best thing I would do in my life would be being a father. My birth father deserted us when I was 2 and I had tremendous conflicts with my stepfather when I was growing up.
2. I can be weird about songs. If there’s a song that really strikes me, I’ll keep flashing back to the beginning and listen to it five or six times before I move on to the next one.
Lately I have been doing that with a song that is more than 10 minutes long, Taylor Swift’s wonderful “All Too Well.”
3. Little things sometimes aren’t so little. One of the five best moments in my entire life came when my daughter Pauline (technically my stepdaughter), who had always introduced me to her friends as “my stepfather,” introduced me as “my dad” at Christmas 2006.
4. I think my kids might be the two best people in the world.
Looking back at No. 1, I really ought to clarify that it’s a lot easier to be a good dad when you have wonderful children.
5. I love movies, and they don’t always have to be good ones. I’ve probably watched “Hanover Street,” with Harrison Ford and Lesley Anne Down, 25 times.
“I love you enough to let you go, which is more than I’ve ever felt about anyone in my life.”
6. It’s tremendously frustrating to me that I can hit what is literally a perfect golf shot and then follow it up with one that is a total failure.
I actually got pretty good at golf about 10 years ago. I broke 80, which is truly amazing, and I actually had eight pars and a bogey for a 37 on the front nine. Pretty sure I’d have trouble breaking 100 now after years of inaction.
7. It’s very strange to me that after never gaining weight until I was an adult, I’ve been fighting a losing battle with my weight ever since.
I lost 116 pounds in 2010, gained most of it back, and have lost 77 pounds so far this year.
8. One of my greatest regrets in life was not appreciating my dad when I was growing up.
9. I started out as a liberal, became more conservative for a while and now I’m probably slightly left of center.
10. I always thought it would be cool to have a sidekick.
It helps a lot when your sidekick doesn’t think you’re his sidekick.
11. I’ve never been able to sing.
One reason I always loved “Sing” from “A Chorus Line.”
12. The best way to be a friend to people is to listen to them, and I’ve found the best way to be friends with people I wasn’t friends with in high school is to write a book about them.
Sadly, the book only got half-written.
13. I love my wife Nicole more than anything in the world.
14. Few things annoy me more than born-again types who tell me I’m “not a Christian” because I’m Roman Catholic.
Of course it isn’t just Catholics. I’ve heard plenty of evangelicals dismissing all liberal Christian sects as well.
15. Most of my professional problems — when I had a career — came from conflicts with short, balding men.
Ah, the Napoleon Complex.
16. Old friends are better than new ones, because you have a history with them. My closest friend in the world, Mick Curran, is someone I probably wouldn’t hit it off with if we met now.
One of the saddest moments in my life came in 2016 when I lost a 50-year friend to a brain aneurysm,
17. On balance, I regret more things that I didn’t do than things that I did.
18. I played musical instruments for eight years and was actually pretty good at it, but I can’t even read music anymore.
19. I always wanted to live in California, but L.A. would not have been my first choice.
20. My high school graduating class of 804 had one Asian student, and she was an exchange student from South Vietnam. I was definitely not prepared for multiculturalism.
21. I didn’t eat pizza until I was 15.
22. My favorite book is William Manchester’s “The Glory and the Dream,” a social history of America from 1932-72. I’ve probably read it 20 times.
23. I am an Anglophile and a Francophile, which can be confusing.
England is half my ancestry, Frances is where my wife is from.
24. If it was completely up to me, which it isn’t, I would retire to the Front Range of Colorado.
We moved to Georgia instead. My only visit to Colorado was an in and out the same day for my friend Tom’s funeral.
25. Other than people, the one thing I really love in the world is baseball.
Nuf sed,