I’m 33 years old, very close in fact to 34.  I have a wife, two sons, and a dog named Bingo.  We have an SUV with two child seats and a plastic insert in our luggage area to protect our upholstery.  We are planning on adding a second car, smaller, sensible, fuel-efficient.  We don’t drink.  We don’t smoke.  We don’t go out after 8pm unless we’re on a mission for diapers or formula.  We have a mortgage, a growing collection of Wiggles DVDs, and a Winnie the Pooh growth chart.  When we watch the nightly news, we grumble about the teen drivers and global warming.  In every way, I would seem to be a normal, well adjusted person.  But … beneath this facade of suburban utopianism I have a little secret.  Back in the day …

I was a hellion.  A week smoking, beer guzzling, fist fighting, stealing, shoplifting, vandalizing, self-destructive hellion.  And I was in 5th grade.

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On March 20th in 2008 my wife gave me my first child.  A boy.

Its been an amazing two years with my little guy.  I used to hold him in my lap for hours, just talking to him about all the fun times we were going to have together as he grew up and up and up into a man.  Soccer practice, camping trips, ghost stories, birthday parties, tickle time, and more.  At 2 and 1/2, he’s talking with his cheeky grin and bright eyes, running around the house with heavy footfalls as he chases another day away in the adventures of childhood.  His best friend, his grandpa, sits on the floor with him and plays games, practices the alphabet, and plays hide and seek.  And despite all the fun that this little boy is already having, he has no idea just how great and how wonderful his life is going to get.

Tomorrow, on June 30th, my wife will give him a brother.

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I’m the youngest of my family.  The baby.  Or as I was known – Bibbity Bobert.  In my family, it goes girl, boy, girl, me.  And in my family, life was pretty damn tough.  It wasn’t enough that we were dirt poor or that we dressed in the leftovers from the Salvation Army.  In the cosmic scheme of things, I guess it wasn’t enough that the other kids laughed, teased, and bullied us.  No, there had to be more.  And that ‘more’ was my dad and my mom.  They were two of a kind and by that I mean that there have never been two people more poorly suited to parenthood.  Somehow they found each other and created the lot of us.

No child asks for it.  Its completely the luck of the draw.  Or bad luck, I guess.  I think back to my childhood and shake my head at the feelings that I remember being as constant as the night stars.  Fear, sadness, insecurity.  I know that I was lucky somehow.  My siblings coped the worst of it.  Somehow I was spared.  Maybe it was because I was the baby of the family. [Read Column]

I joined Phi Gamma Delta in 1997.  I was a junior.  My foray to Marquette University in frozen Milwaukee had ended in a broken heart and $30,000 in debt from just a single year of study.  I had followed a girl.  And it had failed, predictably so.  Still, I believe it was better to see it through.  I’m a romantic at heart, I guess.  Afterwards, I came home – to Stillwater – where I had always returned when life had given me a hard lesson and re-enrolled in Oklahoma State University.

In my absence, nearly all of my high school friends in one way or another had joined up with this fraternity known as Fiji.  A fraternity.  It was nearly a dirty word to me.  I hated the stereotype – drunken, half-witted alpha males – but I was told that this one was different.  This house was special.  It was blessed with young men that had true character – the kind of character and conviction that could change your life if you let it.  With reluctance, I signed and moved into the chapter house as a pledge.

Throughout my pledgeship, I looked to the brothers for proof of this character.  I studied them intently with a cynical eye.  I was surprised as I found many young men with considerable intelligence and promising talent.  Young men that I was proud to call friends, friends that I still keep to this day.  Yet among them all there was one person that stood before the rest.  I could see in him something else, something special,

His name was Wade.

He made me laugh.  He became my friend.  He became my roommate and my brother.  He changed my heart. [Read Column]

Mum was a mumbler.  She mumbled all the time,  an unending stream of Vietnamese.  She was talking to nobody, but she was talking to everybody.  It didn’t matter.  Whoever was in earshot was her audience.  Whether she was cooking, folding laundry, dusting, or any of the other thousand domestic chores that made the day, her sweet, but hardly audible voice was always at work.  Mostly she complained.  About the weather, about aches and pains, about her in-laws, about no one listening to what she had to say.

Mum would mumble and Cha would roll his eyes with feigned exasperation. [Read Column]