In case I haven’t already shared too much

Twenty-five random facts about myself:

1. If one thing truly surprises me when I look back at the first 75 years of my life, it’s that probably the thing I did better than anything else was being a dad. I never knew my birth father and when my mother remarried and gave me a dad, I had tremendous conflicts with him from about age 11 on. Not his fault, mine. Kids don’t get to make the rules.

2. I can be weird about songs I like, especially when I first discover them. If I’ve got one on my iPod, I’ll keep paging back to the beginning and listen to it five or six times before moving on. And now that I have Amazon Echo, all I have to do is say “Alexa, repeat,” and the song plays over and over and over again.

3. Little things can be some of the biggest things. 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. They are 44 and nearly 40 now and both are having wonderful lives without ever stepping on or hurting other people.

5. I love movies, and they don’t always have to be good ones. I’ve probably seen “Hanover Street,” with Harrison Ford and Lesley Anne Down, 25 times. “Think of me when you drink tea.”

6. Golf can be so frustrating … and so amazing. Within the space of 15 minutes, I can practically whiff on one shot and then hit a nearly perfect one. Same ball, same club.

7. My three grandchildren — Artemis Nicole, Lexington Wesley and Albanie Yvonne — are the greatest proof to me that there is a God.

8. I have never been able to sing.

9. I always thought it would be cool to have a sidekick. But believe me, it’s not much fun to have a sidekick who keeps claiming he isn’t your sidekick.

10. On balance, I regret more things that I didn’t do than things I did. Although it’s understandable for people who grew up in the Depression, my parents inadvertently raised me to be frightened.

11. I am both an Anglophile and a Francophile, which can be confusing at times.

12. 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.

13. One of my greatest regrets in life was not appreciating my dad when I was growing up.

14. I started out as a liberal, became more conservative for a while and now I’m probably well to the left of center.

15. 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.

16. I love my wife Nicole more than anything in the world.

17. Few things annoy me more than Christian nationalist types who tell me I’m “not a Christian” because I’m Roman Catholic.

18. Most of my professional problems — when I had a career — came from conflicts with short, balding men.

19. 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.

20. I played musical instruments for eight years and was actually pretty good at it, but I can’t even read music anymore.

21. I always wanted to live in California, but L.A. would not have been my first choice.

22. Or my second.

23. My high school graduating class of 804 had one Asian student, and she was an exchange student from South Vietnam. I my first 12 years of school, I had one class with an African-American. I was definitely not prepared for multiculturalism.

24. Other than people, the one thing I really love in the world is baseball.

25. If there was one point in our lives, one key turning point where we make a key decision, it would be nice if at the end of our life we could see the road not taken.