If I’m not mistaken, we moved to Mobile, Alabama when I was less than a year old. We lived there for a year or two and then we moved to Lutz, Florida. We lived on a two-acre place, I remember my mom’s saying. I went to first grade there and learned to swim. Things I remember from this time include riding a bicycle and swimming.

My parents separated soon thereafter. When I was about four, my mother and my brother and I moved to Tampa. I started second grade there and I think we stayed in the same house after that. It was 4605 Trask Street, and I lived there through high school with my mother and my brother.

After we lived in Lutz, we moved to Tampa when my parents separated. My mom started teaching kindergarten, and was a teacher throughout the whole time that I was growing up.

I got along with my mother quite well although she had alcohol problems. By the end of high school we were not getting along very well but we worked things through before she died.