seven-minute bio

My Wednesday night men's group was given the assignment of presenting a brief biographical sketch. My response was to pile as many details as possible into a small container, shake vigorously, and see what comes out, although I think I went over the seven minute limit. In the interest of reducing, reusing, recycling, and revealing, I reproduce it almost verbatim here.

Born 1951 in a small town in Minnesota. It was the postwar era, I had three older sisters, both my parents had college degrees, and upward mobility was a major theme.

When I was three, we moved across the Mississippi to a larger town in Wisconsin. What I recall most vividly is the house on Market Street, riding my red Schwinn, and walking to Hogan School two blocks away. I remember learning to read and do long division, playing a lot of baseball, basketball, football, and war with the other boys in the neighborhood. The Milwaukee Braves, Minneapolis Lakers, and Green Bay Packers were our teams. In war it was still us versus the Germans. I spent a lot of time alone, and that was fine with me. My parents were a steady presence, and we were a close-knit family.

Grandpa Anderson died in 1960, just before we moved to Detroit, which was a whole new world populated by the Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and Lions, new schools, new friends, reading the Detroit Free Press, and some influential teachers and coaches. I cared about being on the team, getting good grades, getting to know girls; I read a lot of biographies and histories. My brother was born when I was eleven, and I enjoyed having and being a brother.

In 1966 we moved to a more affluent suburb, and I started to learn about wealth and status. I played basketball, found out I liked to write, and got some recognition working on the high school newspaper and then the town newspaper. I liked being known. I found out that having a car was important (this was Detroit in the 1960s) and I liked driving my 1966 Mustang. I also learned about limitations: I wasn't the smartest, coolest, fastest, strongest, or most talented guy around, and I never would be.

I went to school in Ohio for two years and tried to do everything. I was in the Honors College, dorm government, on the track team, intramural sports, into politics, and eventually serious 'partying'. When I transferred to Michigan, I got an apartment with two friends from high school and did more 'partying' than studying - but it was SERIOUS partying. In and out of school for two years, I had very little academic focus, but I did connect with a couple of really interesting women.

I moved to the Upper Peninsula with a friend in 1974, and a whole new adventure began. When not traveling to Texas, Georgia, Indiana, or Florida, I worked in a candle shop and a food coop, drove a school bus, lived in a tent, played ball, played music, and gradually migrated west from Munising to AuTrain to Deerton to Marquette, where Northern Michigan University provided my first exposure to yoga and modern dance - and a couple of really interesting women.

Instead of staying in the UP, I accepted my sister Jo Jo's invitation to go south. I moved to Strawberry Mountain Farm in north Georgia in 1976 and met my future bride. We worked and played for two years among a loosely organized group of people attempting to build a therapeutic community. Helping run health-related workshops with folks from the city gave us a lot of opportunities for gardening, hiking, fun and games, taking care of horses and cows, as well as human interaction, miscommunication, and conflict.

Gven and I moved to Chicago for a year, where I met an important teacher and started to study taiji. Gven made a lot of friends working at a great restaurant called the Heartland Cafe, and I worked first for a weekly newspaper and then for the phone company. We made good use of the resources of city life: museums, libraries, restaurants, theater, music, and public transporation. That December we returned to Atlanta to get married. We initially moved to Ithaca, New York, where we met a very good teacher, and almost went to school at SUNY Cortland, but changed our minds and landed in Oberlin.

We spent two years in Oberlin, where I met another important teacher and learned a little about philosophy and its relation to everything. I learned more taiji and got the chance to coach both basketball and track as a student assistant. I also had a nice job writing for the faculty-staff newspaper and learned a little about academic politics. After graduating, I got a one-year job teaching at New Garden Friends School in North Carolina. Shortly before Jessi was born in 1982, we migrated back to Atlanta.

Jessi and Zelda were born in Atlanta 20 months apart. We lived in three different houses in three different neighborhoods. I worked for a carpenter, a psychologist, a retail nursery, a landscaper, and a tree-planting crew. I taught taiji at Emory, Clayton, Georgia State, and a dance studio. When I got a paper published, we decided it was time for graduate school, so we moved back to Ohio. The kids were toddlers.

At Ohio State I connected with a couple of influential teachers and learned a little more about philosophy, history, literature, language, research, writing, and more taiji. I also connected with a couple of peers in a drinking and discussion group we called the Physical Club after our heroes William James, C.S. Peirce, and their friends, the original pragmatists, who called themselves (tongue in cheek) the Metaphysical Club. Gven went to massage school and had a thriving practice in Grandview. The kids were starting school, playing soccer, and making friends.

When I graduated, we went to south Alabama for a one-year teaching job that didn't work out. We moved back to Ohio, this time to Clintonville, where the kids made new friends in a new school and started to discover their own gifts. I worked here and there doing landscaping, baking bread, doing I Ching readings on the psychic hotline, teaching ethics and critical thinking at a community college. Freelance copyediting for SUNY Press helped me get into textbook editing at LDA, which helped me get into production editing at Megacorporate Publishing, where I've been for almost eight years.

Jessi and Zelda grew up in central swingstate and went through pretty good public schools. I was able to be present in their soccer teams, coach their basketball teams, scream my head off watching Jessi run track and cross country, go to Zelda's band concerts, and witness their friendships, adolescent struggles, and college transitions. Gven and I moved to a smaller house in Methodistville, and now the kids are grown, mostly on their own, but still very much part of our lives.

(That's over the seven-minute limit, but it's hard to decide what to leave out. It's also hard to tell what larger truth, if any, emerges, aside from the obvious horizontal mobility.)