My Family 3

My brother Patrick the giant was born in 1986, he was a huge kid. He now stands 6'3" or 6'4". But he was big for a baby also. My brother Kevin was born in 1991 he was huge also. He's not quiet the giant that Patrick is, but he's still got a lot of growing to do. So our family grew to six. Anyways, we moved out of Akron in 1993. We "fled" to the suburb of Green and I went to public school for the first time. Yes, of course our school colors were orange and black, you don't expect things like that to make sense. I liked school for the most part, girls liked me, I played baseball. I do have to admit there was one guy who had it out for me though and made some of my highschool time pretty miserable. He was a big stocky kid who was pretty much Eric Cartman from Southpark. Even Cartman and I made peace though by the end of High School. I worked at Camp Carl in the summers. It was the most fun part of my life. First I was on maintenance crew and then I was a counselor and boat driver. My life was shaped spiritually while I was there. I was put in situations where I was taking care of kids and this gave me patiences and kept me sharp to what God's word said. While I was out there though I got into a car with a girl... dum dum dum... We hadn't gone more than a mile when she wrecked into a ditch. I looked over at her, she was unconscious. And in my shock I pulled her out of the smoking car and put her behind a nearby boulder. I was dizzy and couldn't think straight, but the ambulance came and the paramedics asked me to take a walk with them, they strapped me onto a stretcher and away we went. The girl was fine. She woke up with the feeling of a mild hangover. I had hurt my back. cracked disk. Suck. No more baseball for me. I spent the better part of the next couple weeks in bed. I tried to play baseball the next year, but it hurt too bad to run. Finding nothing else to do, I picked up my dad's old guitar and taught myself some chords. I sucked. For a long time. Sorry mom.

I found my good friends in high school. Troy, Josh, Jim, Charly, and Kevin were always around. We smoked our first stogies together. We played "extreme flashlight tag" with Roman Candles and bottle rockets. We helped each other in girl relationships by giving high maintance girls the "pink slip." These were good times.

All the while, things were fine at home. I was the typical teen, gaining my independence. It wasn't a time of being super close as a family, but we all loved each other, we were just trying to figure out where our freedoms were.

College was the place where Dad became my friend. He drove me down to Cedarville one time and for some reason the pressure to be Dad and Son wasn't there. We were friends. Good friends. I told him about my life. I asked him for wisdom. He shared about his life. The next thing you know, I've met the most wonderful girl in the world in Suzanne (my friends were jealous, there was no pink slip this time). We knew right away that we were going to get married (this is a story in itself, but I'll spare you for now) and we knew that we wanted my dad to do the marriage counseling. No one else would understand us. So he drove two hours to Columbus four or five times, to meet with us. We not only had his blessing, we felt empowered by his wisdom and assurance that we were adults and were handling life as well as anyone could expect to.