Your parents.

[The Grand Nudger]

Grew up in a tiny crackerhouse near Treasure Island.   Mother was a teacher, father ran a landscaping company.  We had a nice backyard, St. Augustine grass.  It was a block from the beach on brick streets, caddy-corner to a spanish style one room schoolhouse where I went to elementary.  We had pecans, oranges, lemons, limes, chinese plums, avocodo, and starfruit...growing in the sideyard. Oleanders, hibiscus, birds of paradise and royal palms out front.  Lot's of lizards and snakes...and palmetto bugs.  Most of the time the sky was choked with parakeets.  Fished for black tip sharks and sheepshead off the Skyway Bridge.  Pulled blue crabs, mussels, and shrimp out of the bay.  We'd get redfish and trout from the estuary.  Speared grouper on a free dive at Johns Pass once, coastguard ruined our fun.  Caught a few flounder in the Paradise Island channel.  Chiseled oysters when we could find them. Played baseball, pitcher. My best buddy played catcher....our dads were the coaches year after year. You'll be hearing about him again, near the end.

Anytime I wasn't in school (and later, after my parents divorced) I was in N. Central FL with my grandparents, digging around in the sand screwing with peanuts and green beans, mostly.  We had aquarter acre of muscadine grapes and a few acres of corn, some sour apple trees.. wild pears...and a persimmon.   Two or three times a year we'd go out to the N. Gold Coast and snorkel for scallops.   Every weekend we'd hit the Suwannee or Lochloosa for crappie, bass, and crawdads (which I will absolutely pull out of a roadside ditch and eat with no reservations, lol).  We put a bunch of tree-stands up on the edges of our property and lured deer and hogs (and sometimes turkey) off the state park with apple-dusted feed corn and ryegrass.  Ran lines, set traps, fell asleep in the boat holding a half dozen cane poles.  Ate alot of vienna sausages..drank alot of koolaid. Played basketball (2nd place at state, forward). Met RL Stine at the young writers conference (actually missed half the finals to attend).

My grandfather, Buck, was an auto-body man so I spent alot of time in the shop and at the speedway (he worked on amateur stock cars, mostly).  He quit his job once...just walked off and went fishing every day for a year - then walked back in.  He's nearly 80 now, and I still don't know how he fits his balls in his pants.  Got schlepped around the US as a kid in a Grand Cherokee the color of juicy fruit, which my grandmother, Peggy, was constantly chewing.  Name a natural wonder in the US, and I've probably seen it - and she was deadset on making sure of that.  

I had a crush on the girl across the streets enormous breasts from about 5th grade till highschool...when I met my teenage sweetheart.  Skin was the color of caramel, smelled like green tea and tasted like coconuts.  OFC she broke my heart into a million tiny pieces, like teenagers do. A big part of the reason I joined the service was to get myself stationed in Hawaii (where her parents had taken her as a kid).  Wasn't an option, though, hit europe instead.   My best friend -since the cradle- hit that ass as soon as I left, somehow managed to bed my sister too. I'd always thought he was gay..........still like to -call- him gay. We still play ball every now and again, too, but he's not much for squatting down and I'm old enough to know that I don;t even wanna -try- to throw any heat.