I got into teaching at age sixty. You might say I was late to the bus. Then I didn’t know when to get off. I was a few days shy of seventy-two when I did.

I grew up on a small cotton farm—it seemed much bigger back then—in Northampton County, North Carolina. Though my father was there, my grandma and aunt raised me. I went to 400-student Gaston School for first through twelfth grades, then attended NC State University School of Design for a long minute—but I have a valid reason for such brevity: I wanted to be an artist ... my father insisted I become an architect ... architecture was more math than art ... and I sucked at that kind of math. From the day I dropped out, I never again had a grand plan for my life. In a long-ago Reader’s Digest article, Allen Saunders famously said, "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." I am living proof the same thing happens when you make no other plans.

When I dropped out of college, I barely had time to clear out of my dorm room before receiving my draft notice, which landed me in Vietnam. Once out of the military, I went to work for IBM, then Exxon, then Sheraton, then GE, before re-enrolling at NC State; not having a degree had gnawed at me for twenty-seven years. I graduated in 1993 with a BA in Art and Design and worked for several ad agencies, both big and small, until 2003, when I fell into teaching at a public middle school in Granville County, North Carolina.

“And now,” as Paul Harvey used to say, “for the rest ... of the story.”