Storied Mind

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Quite some time ago, Immi tagged me on Facebook with the 100-facts-about-me meme. Apologies for not following through, but I doubt I can count that high, let alone think of that many facts, at least true ones. But I’ll give it a try, at least a partial try.

Here’s a first installment – and I can’t promise there will be a second.

• I love Battlestar Galactica.
• I once stood in the room where Dostoevski wrote Brothers Karamazov and felt like I’d entered a tiny cathedral.
• For the high school play, I was Cyrano de Bergerac. I had a nose for it.
• I thought I would be an actor for a while.
• I thought I was going to be a poet after taking Robert Lowell’s seminar.
• Among my favorite movie directors are Peter Weir, the Coen brothers and the Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony)
• I’ve read about half of Philip K. Dick’s 35 novels and will someday read the rest.
• IMHO, Henning Mankell rules the world of mystery writing.
• At all times I keep well hidden my two beautiful (when new) titanium hips.
• Long, long ago, I met Francis Ford Coppola in Rome and joined his group for dinner. I had no idea who he was.
• I have a brother who emigrated to Australia, became a citizen and still lives there.
• When young I lived very comfortably in the West Village, paid $85 a month in rent and lived on $15 a week for food. Today, multiply by 25-30.
• I once had a transforming experience in a Lakota sweat lodge ceremony on the Rosebud Reservation.
• I became a vegetarian after taking one bite of a roasted Leghorn chicken we had raised.
• As a kid, I came within half a dozen firmly rooted grass blades from drowning in a flooding brook a block from my house.
• Thanks to my wife, we have home-grown fruits and vegetables at every season and month of the year.
• My best friend and I once climbed countless stairs to the top of the Washington Monument in August. Of course, when we got there all we could see were a bunch of sweating people gasping for air at a few narrow slots cut in the thick walls. We joined them.
• As a lapsing Catholic in my teens, I was told the dreaded penalty for missing communion at Easter was excommunication. But after I stopped taking part in that last sacrament, I realized – who in the Church is going to go to all that trouble when they don’t even I know exist?
• I’m part of the second generation of my family, on both sides, born in the USA.
• My grandfather on my mother’s side was born in 1856 in Mannheim, Germany. Needless to say, he had children very late in life, as did my mother.
• My grandmother told me that as a very young child, new to the US, she saw the Statue of Liberty when it shone like gold.
• I’m tired of using a nom de blog.
• When my wife and I married in the 1970s, we put our names together with a hyphen. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t know what a hyphen is. Of course, computers don’t know either, so we wind up with about 20 different versions of our name, including misspellings. Hence, very few computers know who we really are.
• I am a genius at starting new projects and finishing one in twenty.
• Apparently, I live in a little town that Rush Limbaugh, who started his broadcasting career in nearby Sacramento, loves to make fun of. If he hates it, I’m proud to be here.
• I’ve lost count on this round, but there is one more thing. As I say, I’m tired of anonymity and false identities and have been giving them up elsewhere on the internet.
• My real name is John Folk-Williams. There now, I’ve said it.