| FAMILY, LIFE |
2014-10-31 |
 marty had parent teacher conferences so i was solo with the kids. whenever a parent is gone, the family drops into team effort mode. i left work early to pick up the boys. bella put the finishing touches on the dinner marty got going in the crockpot that morning.
the dinner table is also a very different affair when we're down a human. most surprisingly, conversation seems much more effo...
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| FAMILY, LIFE |
2014-04-23 |
my employer recently began a toastmasters group. the second i saw the opiton, i enrolled. one week ago today was our club's first meeting. and at this meeting i had the honor of being our club's first speaker. the first talk you are asked to do as a toastmaster is a six-minute ice-breaker. below is the transcript of my ice-breaker speech.
INTRO
the name of my talk is who i am and why i'm here.
for a man of my mature years, defining oneself can be a little tricky.
so, i'm going to solve this by starting with my birth and ending at this very moment right here.
that may seem an ambitious goal to achieve in six minutes but i'd guess that for many in the room, standing in front of an audience and told to entertain them for six minutes will feel like a lifetime, so it's actually rather fitting.
BULLETED LIFE
to begin.
my name is troy lane dearmitt.
i was born and adopted in lancaster pa.
when i was six, my parents poured their combined wealth on a twin bed in a one room space they occupied. the family fortune on this day came to 23 dollars and some change.
a few months later, my family left the state of pennsylvania in the dark of the night, my father, after fitting as many of the family possessions in the car as he could, rolled it down the hill past the landlord's house to escape detection.
we drove west along the canadian border until hitting the rocky mountains where he turned left.
the money ran out in fort collins colorado. this is where we'd spend the next twelve years. (the story goes, if gas was cheaper in cheynne wy, that is where i would have grown up, but my dad, ever the stickler for a good price at the pump, even to this day, didn't like what he was seeing in cheyenne and thought he could pull another sixty miles from the tank).
aside from puberty wreaking havoc with my hair, the twelve years i spent in colorado were quiet and uneventful which worked well for my demeanor.
when i was 18 my mother started a second career as an std woman for the cdc. translated this means a sexually transmitted diseases woman for the centers for disease control. and yes, your assumption is right, there is not an 18 year old boy on this planet that wants his mom working, publicly at least, in venereal disease, but i'd need another six minutes to get into the neurosis this brought on, but to give you a taste, i'll add the picture that i was usually the only boy in my college class who when pulling his book out of his bookbag would have five condoms spill into the aisle.
six months after arriving in st. louis i was thunder bolted by a st. louis girl. for those that might not know what getting thunder-bolted means, it means after seeing a person, the next thought to come from your mind's printer contain the words 'that is the girl i am going to marry'. and yes, this is like the greatest, most important, most valuable piece of knowledge a young man can ever receive. there is only one exception to this informational windfall and that is when the girl you were thunderbolted by did not get the same message, which was the case here. thus, i got to spend the next eight years convincing here i was the man she should marry (she had many suitors) which in time she did.
as our relationship solidified i assumed between st. louis and colorado we'd be living in colorado. but it is very true what they say about st. louis girls white-knuckling their zip codes because here we are some twenty years later.
and that is how i came to be in st louis.
WHY I'M HERE
next, as promised, let me share how i've come to be specifically in this room.
everyone i've mentioned this toastmasters affiliation with, who knows me, has expressed surprise.
the reason for this is for the past twenty years, every job i've had has included or been solely about public speaking.
so people who have seen me talk or work wonder why i'd join such an organization.
the reason is i have a secret.
the secret is before every speaking engagement i've ever done, a war has been waged in my mind.
a war full of shouting and intimidation.
this war was waged before i gave my first talk twenty years ago.
this war was waged last week when i guest lectured in a class of graduate students.
this war will be waged again this friday when i give an hour long talk to 100 law students.
and yes, this war was waged before this talk today.
the good news is in the last twenty years i have never lost this war. i've never avoided a speaking opportunity and every time i said i'd speak, i spoke.
but the smartest among us say that the true victory is not in winning the battle—the true victory is avoiding the war.
that is my personal goal—to not have the war.
and that is why i have come to be in this room today.
and that is who i am and that is why i'm here.
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| FAMILY |
2009-08-26 |
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while walking home from work i ran into two women. it was a mother and daughter. they were visiting the university i work at, considering it for the daughter for next year.
i met them by asking if they were lost or needed help finding something because they seemed perplexed about things. their faces lit up with surprise. then they said they did not need help but immediately commented on how nice it was that i asked. they went on to say that people everywhere here were so nice. nothing like at harvard or yale or the eleven other schools they had visited. i quipped that we run a happy campus but there are a few old cantankerous cranks around, we just don't let them out much. after a few more pleasantries i noticed the woman, the mother, intently staring at my face. when i turned to her, she said in a methodical and careful way that i had a very cuban forehead (i now assumed that both of these bronzed women were themselves cuban). she moved her hand over my forehead like she wanted to touch it but resisted. after a pause while i processed her comment making sure i heard it right, i assured her she was the first person to ever say that particular string of words to me and that i've been told i look like eddie munster plenty but never that i had the forehead of a cuban man. she then told me it was a good forehead clapped me on the shoulder in a familial way and with that we parted ways, everyone the better for the moment we shared.
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| FAMILY, LIFE |
2007-01-24 |
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at a housewarming party last weekend, a fellow adoptee pulled me to the side to talk about an opportunity he was presented with to find his biological parents, the mother at least. he asked what i felt about the practice of adopted children finding their birth parents.
i told him about a guy i met through work several years earlier. this fellow was about my age, well educated and impressively accomplished in his field. i liked him quite a bit and would lunch with him when he was in town. on one of these outings he told me about his search for his birth mother. after revealing the mechanics of the quest, he went quiet and stared off for a long moment. i asked him if he ever found her and he said he had. i asked him if he got to meet her and he said he had. i asked him what it was like and while still looking away he sedately said 'you can never take it back'.
here's the deal, in youth adopted children assimilate what it means to be adopted (obviously, i'm talking about children who know they're adopted). part of this process inevitably has them create some mental representation of a biological parent. in my fanciful vision, my birth mother was young, empathetic, kind and the victim of dumb luck. my introspective lunch date had far more grandiose notions regarding his lineage. he had a quick mind, athletic physique, winsome charm, basically a lot of positive and innate qualities were handed to him and he, quite logically, transferred larger versions of these inherited traits onto his mind's version of his parents. when he finally came to meet his birth mother he learned she was a truck stop waitress, living in a broken-down trailer, dealing with numerous health issues and had him after a short-term, abusive fling with a guy who didn't shower a lot. many decorative vases lining glass shelves in his mind toppled on this day. and as he continues to reflect on what he has come to learn and compares it to what he long believed, as he appeared to be doing even while simply talking to me about it, these fancy pieces of brain-crystal continue to unsteadily wobble.
after telling this story to the house-warming guy, i watched him as he considered my friend's journey. during these seconds, i recalled that this same house-warming guy came to me years earlier about wether or not he should circumcise the son he was about to have. let's just say i think a certain head-hunter is about to be asked to name and locate the uterus my contemplative friend once slid out of. oh well, this is just another reason it's fortunate i like the sound of my own voice.
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