27 months

In response to being tagged by Heather this week, I’ve been trying to conjure ten interesting facts about yours truly. She’d dropped the gauntlet—what else could I do? This reminded me a little of Jimmy Buffet’s “My Life (In Four Hundred Words or Less)” chapter that he uses to preface his popular memoir, A Pirate Looks At Fifty. I thought it was a cool idea, to summarize one’s life experience in 400 words. I’ve never drawn much inspiration from Jimmy Buffet’s life or music before then, but the guy is a heckuva storyteller (too bad the book was lost in a rainstorm).

So I took at stab at writing my own condensed personal history, but ended up feeling woefully inadequate trying to compete with Jimmy’s tales of adventure. I crash bicycles. Jimmy Buffet crashes seaplanes. I take off from work to join the US Peace Corps. Jimmy Buffet takes off in fighter jets from the decks of US Navy aircraft carriers. And so on.

Maybe this’ll be easier. Ten things, huh? OK, here goes:

1. In our early years, living on the island of Okinawa, my kid sister and I picked up Japanese before English.
2. For the last decade, the steel in my right leg routinely sets off airport metal detectors. It was a fun novelty at first that has since grown tiresome.
3. I can recite Hamlet’s soliloquy from memory.
4. Despite the fact that I lived on a houseboat in Seattle for many years, I’ve never seen the romantic comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
5. Unable to convince anyone else of the wonder of the idea, I spent two weeks alone in the backcountry of Death Valley, CA.
6. I once dined on a seven-course meal of cobra (including the snake’s blood, bile and beating heart) at a clandestine location in Hanoi next to a table full of drunk soldiers with AK-47s. A week later I ate a dog in Sapa near the Chinese border. I’d rather forget the latter.
7. I’ve ridden a horse with a broken leg (mine, not the horse’s) in the mountains of Peru (see #2).
8. My Uncle Bill had a speaking part in the hit TV series “Northern Exposure” which was partly shot in the very nice town of Roslyn, Washington in the Cascade foothills. (I only discovered this recently after Heather and Joe lent me the series on DVD.)
9. I can balance on a stationary bicycle with a beverage in one hand indefinitely.
10. Unlike Jimmy Buffet, I have never recorded a hit album.