Autobiography

1193 Words3 Pages

I’m an Aquarian by birth, but I’ve never been one to put too much emphasis on astrological signs. However, I am a water baby. I was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I learned to swim before I could walk, I learned to fish before I could talk, and I learned to ski before I was riding a bike. I can’t remember a time when water wasn’t a part of my life. I grew up canoeing the bays and lakes and tubing the rivers and creeks. I even took up surfing for a few years until I got cracked in the head and almost drown. I learned a lot about myself because of that environment, and I believe it truly shaped who I am today. I graduated high school in ‘93 with hair down to my waist and no vision, so I decided to take a year off to “find myself”. I didn’t actually look too hard. It turns out that I was right there the whole time smoking weed. I did somehow manage to enroll in the local junior college by the fall of ’94, but that’s only because I was getting a little pressure from my folks. Looking back, I think I started before I was serious enough to make an effort. I really wasn’t able to get my head into it. I did do well in the classes I liked, but I wondered through the rest of them in a self induced fog. Time marches on, so a half dozen girlfriends and two years later I was still spinning my wheels, and I wasn’t even close to my associate’s degree yet. Back then, I spent my nights slinging sandwiches. Since I was only clearing a couple of hundred bucks a week, I decided I may as well start looking for a “real job” that didn’t require a degree. Although $90 a month for rent wasn’t bad, living with 3 roommates truly sucked. I needed to make some money fast, so I started browsing through the want ads. One fateful Sunday I caugh... ... middle of paper ... ...amount of money. Luckily, on our own, we proved them wrong. We stumbled across a diamond in the rough, closed 30 days later, and have been living there happily ever since. Now, I’m a first time dad, and that is truly what my life is all about. We were blessed with a son in March of 2005. By the time he was born, he had already managed to squeeze in a couple of tube trips in his momma’s belly. He took his first boat ride in his little life jacket when he was just two weeks old. Now, he’s an old pro. He was only 3 months old the first time he went swimming, and now he’ll shrivel up like a prune if you let him. With any luck, I’ll have him holding his own fishing pole by this spring, and I’ve already got my eyes on a little pair of water skis. Who knows, maybe 20 years from now, he’ll be writing an autobiography about how growing up on the water help shape his life too.

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