I have a tick story.  My daughter lives in Northern Wisconsin. And they have many, many more ticks there than we have here. And so, when she came to visit a few years ago, she was brushing her dogs --  she has three Border Collies -- and she was brushing her dogs on my living room floor, and she found two ticks on them, obviously brought from Wisconsin. So, at the time, I had a garbage disposal in my kitchen sink, and she dropped them into the garbage disposal and turned it on for a moment and thought they were taken care of. Well, later, I don't remember if it was later that day or if it was even the next day, she had gone somewhere, and I was doing something at the kitchen sink. And here on the edge of the sink was a tick. And it's like, “Oh, my gosh! Where did that come from?” And then I remembered her dropping those two down the drain. And, obviously the garbage disposal had not taken care of them. So I picked it up, and I flushed it.  Okay. So, at that point, I wonder where the other one is. And I looked around and sure enough, the other one was on the floor. It had already climbed down -- climbed out the drain, climbed up the sink, climbed across the cupboard, climbed down the cupboard, and was on the floor. And I was horrified. So I picked that one up and I took it into the bathroom and flushed it also. So they are, they’re persistent and they, you have to be positive that you kill them when you see them.  My second tick story, was, took place in Staples, just, I think it was just last year. And there was another lady who was being helped to by a Staples employee. And I was waiting to ask the employee a question also. And she had her back to me, and on her back, on her shirt, on the outside of her shirt, was a tick, slowly crawling up her back, and I was like, “Gasp!” And, I said to -- I interrupted them, and I said to them, I said, I said to the lady, I said, “You have a tick on your back.” And she's like, “Oh dear, you know I must have gotten it out in…

Tell us about something that seemed like a major threat earlier in life, but turned out to be pretty irrelevant. Needles. Oh my gosh, was I afraid of needles. When I was younger. I was one of those types of kids that like when my parents told me I was gonna get a flu shot, I would be obsessing over it all day, like I would not sleep the night before, I would be freaking out at school. I would be thinking all day, "I'm getting a flu shot. I'm getting a flu shot. I'm getting a flu shot. Oh my gosh, I'm getting a flu shot." Would get home, immediately lock myself in my room. Like refuse to get out of the car. I actually jumped out of a moving car one time to try to avoid getting a flu shot. Lock myself in the bathroom at the doctor’s, kick and scream and like attack the doctors. Not that I like wanted to hurt the doctors but more like this was an involuntary action because I was just so afraid of needles. Having to get held down, until I was probably like 16, I had these issues. But I'm very proud of myself and how far I've come over the past three years where I can ki- -- like, I'm still like very afraid of it, but I don't have that crazy reaction anymore. And, you know, that's just a reminder that even if stuff like that kind of controls your life, that fear, that you can overcome it. If you work at it and just tell yourself like, "You can do it, you can get through this."

As a kid, I was very afraid of trains and train tracks. And I can remember in -- being in the car -- when we would drive over train tracks, I would -- I could feel the anxiety welling up in my chest and go -- and being so scared we were gonna, like, hit a train. Or when the train would come by and you'd have to stop at the gate, and the loudness of the train whistle and the train, would be so scary to me. And I would have to plug my ears. I'd be, like, humming so I couldn't hear it. But, I conquered that fear because I had a friend. Well, he was -- I guess he was a friend, but he was also, like, a big crush of mine in high school. This kid and I went -- we were hanging out at night, and I thought, maybe someday --  I was hoping we would be a couple. And we’re hanging out, and just -- in the middle of the night and stuff. And we went for a walk, and he took me to the train track. And I was like, “I am too scared. I am not going anywhere near that train track.”  And he was like, “It's fine. It's fine. It's nothing to be scared of.” And he's like, “You just don't have -- just don't walk on the track. You can stand next to it as it goes by. It's fine. And you're not going to get hit.”  And, I was like, “No, no, no. That's too scary. We have to get away. We have to get away.” And then a train, you could hear in the distance, was coming.  And he's like, “Nope, stay here. Stay here. We're not leaving.”  And so, he stood, like, pretty near the train track and then, I stood a little ways away and watched him. And the train came by and, like, it blew his hair back, and he just, like, closed his eyes and put his hands out and was, like feeling the wind of the train go by. And he just looked like he was having the greatest moment of his life. And I saw him do that, and I moved a little bit closer and I felt the wind, too. And then, I was like, “Hey, this isn't so bad. This…

Another example: I think I was constantly underestimated on the basketball court. I don't have the appearance of someone who would be outwardly amazing at the game. I usually did not walk around with an air of confidence or cockiness and I'm relatively unassuming, you know, I am 6’3”, which is tall for most sports, except basketball. And basketball, it makes me look like just a pretty normal guy. And I will say, I took joy in being underestimated on the basketball court. I think that usually meant I was constantly surpassing expectations, which feels good in a way, but you know, it's more because the expectations are probably so low to begin with. I know when I went to the University of Michigan basketball camp, I learned after the first year, you know, they would take these hundred plus campers on the first day of the camp and run you all through a bunch of drills. And then the coaches would all go back to their quarters afterward and draft teams for the week based upon all those drills and watching us play. And because I was just so unspectacular, you know, fundamental but inherently, you know, I don't really catch people's eyes. At least I didn't at that point in time. Because of that, when I would come back in and check the teams, the next day, I was always the last name. And it wasn't written alphabetically! I was always the last name on my particular team, which meant that I was among one of the last players drafted, because they were just writing the names down in the order that they were selected. But then inevitably I would play myself right into the starting lineup and then by the end of the week, I lived for this, but by the end of the week, you know, it seemed like coaches would quickly realize like, “Oh my God, like, this guy's a gem.” Not from a superstar point of view, but I was such a -- I loved working hard and doing all the dirty work. You know, clearing the glass, doing whatever I needed to do to win, really. If I had to be the guy to score, I could, but a lot of times there were more talented scorers on my team. So then it was like, all right, I'll take the charges, I will…

Back in the 1900s, when I was but a mere teenager and waitressing midnights at Denny's,  we had a lot of regulars, you know, who would come and sit along the counter and smoke their cigarettes and drink their coffee. And most of those people were honestly my favorite people in the restaurant. I ended up marrying one of them, as a matter of fact.  But so, a gentleman would come in quite often and sat up there and went by the name Spit. S P I T. And this guy looked like he rarely, if ever, washed his hair or got a standard haircut, had like a cut-off jean jacket, lots of tattoos including neck tattoos, face tattoos, and this guy flirted with me a lot. And I ended up going down to the pool hall with him once or twice, but only with groups of other people. But, the one thing about him that was the huge warning sign that I said, “You know, I cannot be with a person like this. This is a mentally unwell person,” is this person would sit at the counter smoking their cigarettes and drink glass, after glass, after glass of whole white milk. That is correct. A human being would go to a restaurant, sit at a counter and drink whole white milk glass, after glass, after glass. Lord, you know there's something wrong with him there.

Your email mentioned someone who took off from work to see a movie. That happened in our office too. One of our new hires -- there was this huge -- I think it was an annual ev- -- an annual sale, or big blowout sale. And this new hire, she loves to shop. I mean, she's, yeah she's one of those people who just loves to shop. So she called in sick, and she went to that huge sale at Ala Moana shopping center, A L A, next word, M O A N A. You might have heard of it. It's the famous shopping center in Honolulu, Hawaii, near -- right off, right off of Waikīkī. Right by Waikīkī. But, the news cameras all went to the sale to interview people and to report on the shopping and show people shopping in the frenzy of this massive sale that was across the entire shopping center. And guess who one of those people was that they were showing on the TV. It was our, our staff member who had called in sick. So we saw her on TV in the midst of that big shopping thing. I mean, she could’ve just said, “I'm gonna take the day off from work so I can go to that big sale.” And we would have let her, except she wouldn't have gotten paid because she had sick leave benefits but she didn't have -- I mean, none of us have the, the personal time benefits. She didn't -- personal time off benefits, so if she had just told us she was going shopping, she wouldn't have been paid for that day. So that's why she called in sick. And there she was on TV with the reporters standing there, showing everybody shopping. She was there. We saw her on camera. And it wasn't just that one TV. We, we flipped the switches. All three of the news stations caught her. Um, she must have been at the really popular part where -- if all three of the news stations were at that particular point at sometime or sometime during the day. But um, you know, she got -- I mean to be caught like that on TV, when you said you were sick -- when you called in sick, so you could get paid for -- on the day that you were going shopping!…

So, when I was in college and I, I got a cat -- a kitten and he was basically my best buddy for you know, 10, 11 years I think is how long he lived. And he did everything with me, he moved all over the place with me, he was just my, my buddy. And I feel like I'll never get another cat like him. He was, he was the best. His name was Venom. Uh, well, Venom and I had a special relationship where I always knew what was going on with him. I could just look at him and I would kinda instinctively and intuitively know how he was feeling. So I could avoid getting swatted, I could avoid being attacked, because he liked to play. Or I could tell he would want to come sit on my lap. There was, you know, we had our routines. It was really cute, whenever I’d get home, I would go, "Hello.” Or what would I say? “Hi Venom! Hi Venom!” and then he would go [meow, meow] like in the exact same notes that I had just done. So we kinda had this like greeting down pretty well.  And the funniest time, I guess it's not really that I was communicating with him, but that he was communicating with me. Um, so back in like, 2003 I would say, I had an answering machine, I didn't have a cell phone, I had a landline with an answering machine. And on my answering machine, the message that would come on, would be, "Hey, you've reached my name. Venom is listening to you right now. So, say hi to Venom and then tell me what you wanted you know, to -- why you were calling me. Thanks. Bye." And so, so I’d get people calling and they'd be like, “Oh, hey Venom." Well, it was so cute, one day I came home and I hadn't checked my messages yet. And Venom was like, [meow], like  “Hey!” And he runs over to the answering machine and h- -- and there's a big button that like just says play. And he tapped it with his, um, with his paw, and immediately my dad's voice comes on and he goes, "Hey Venom, this is [diarist’s name]'s dad. Can you just tell [diarist] to give me a call back? Thanks Venom." And then he like…

The other game that I've played more recently is a card game, but it also has a board. So, cribbage. Probably considered a card game, but you can't just play with a deck of cards unless you -- I guess you could keep track, like on a piece of paper of the score. That game, I used to play with my grandpa. He might have been the one -- he -- I don’t know if he was the one that taught it to me or if my mom did. But even after he had lost much of his memory and was very much in the throes of dementia, he could still play euchre -- I mean, still play cribbage. And that was something that we did up until the December before he passed. We played in December and he passed in February. So, he was still, still with it enough to, to remember most of that game. I think we sort of helped a little bit, maybe with the counting or something, but he, he was able to still, still remember that. So my mom every once in a while wants to play cribbage, and if she does I usually will try and play with her because it's memories of her dad, and, and my grandpa.

I would rather be the hero. I would never ever want to be the villain. I have been the villain, in certain situations, as we all have. But my true desire is to never be the villain in anyone’s story ever again. We've all done harm to others, and I really, really want to dedicate my life to helping others and being just, a little light in this world like, you know, like the old song says, you know, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." You know, be the hero, be the light in the world, and I know I'm not that yet, but I hope to be that. And me and my wife have a little joke that she's the poor man’s Batman, because if she had his money, she could have everything he had and do everything he did. Because if we really think about it, Batman's just a regular guy. He doesn't have any superpowers, everything that he has is a gadget or a gizmo, that his, his inordinate wealth gave to him. So really, if we had the resources, me and my wife would be Batman and Robin, the best we could. Runnin’ around trying to save Gotham, and boy are we in Gotham.

But then, in the afternoon, I got a message from them that -- him and his mom, that he had wanted to do a Day of the Dead celebration. So, he learned about it in Spanish class, and his mom took him to Target to get some crafts and he made an ofrenda. Pretty much by himself, like they worked together but you know, he did some crafts. He did some, you know, they had some, some, skulls, and he had oranges, and he also had pictures from his, his great-grandma who had died and his great-grandpa, well, both his great-grandmas. And then a pet that he had lost, and it was a very, very nice -- He made that on Saturday, and he called and they invited me to go, and I took, took a picture of my son who had passed away, and then also great-grandpa. So it was a really, it was a really beautiful experience. One of the things that they talked about was having food that the person really liked, so they decided to have English muffins, with strawberry jam. Which was my mom's favorite thing to have. So, that was really sweet, and then they asked me what did, what did my son like to eat? And the only thing it could really think of was chicken nuggets. From McDonald's. And so they said, “Well, we just had chicken nuggets. We're having chicken nuggets for dinner right now.” McDonald's chicken nuggets, McNuggets. So that was very cool. That was on Saturday night so they had leftovers then to celebrate, but it was a very, very sweet, moving experience. His other grandparents came on Sunday, to see the ofrenda and to share memories, and we shared memories about our people. And it was really a very, very sweet, nice, a nice experience. And I was really proud of him for, for, just for his empathy and, and, kindness that he shows. And you know he's so sentimental. And he takes everything, he takes everything to heart."