“I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to be a firefighter.”
I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and my earliest clear memory is, I was three years old. And I was gonna go to the store and buy milk with my mom. So we were in the car, and we drive out of our little neighborhood towards the main road. And there, at that intersection, in the street, in the middle of the street, there’s a car on fire.
So my mom throws the car into reverse — this is long before cell phones. So she, she throws the car into reverse and reverses, just flying backwards, back through our neighborhood, to get back to our home so that we could call 9-1-1, so we can go back inside [to use the phone].
And, after we’ve done that, we get my dad and we all walk down, back to this intersection. There’s a big crowd of people. And my dad put me up on his shoulders so that I could see what was going on, and we watched the firefighters putting out this car in the middle of the street. And in that moment, I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to be a firefighter.
Which I did not do, even a little bit. But in that instant, boy, I was so impressed.
