I live in Dalton, Massachusetts with my wife and three sons, teach English at a prep school for girls, and direct Word Street, a drop-in tutoring and literary arts center.
This picture is obnoxiously large, and the short description of myself doesn’t nearly cover the length of the photograph, so I’m going to tell a story until it’s filled.
We’re in the process of painting our house now, and it has entailed positioning ladders so we may paint the upper portion of the house. Well, two of our sons, Jack and David, have a bedroom up there, and they got into the poor habit of opening the window and the screen in order to pester us while we paint and roll their cars off the porch roof. David once threw one of his bedtime music CDs like a frisbee out the window. Somehow, the window was left open for two days, probably because it was covered on the inside by a long and thick curtain. Anyway, I pulled out the driveway the other day and found not only that we had left the window to our sons’ bedroom wide open, but that we also left the ladder propped up against the house with full access to the top of the porch roof. It looked like we were inviting abductors to come and take our kids, even making it easy for them by giving them access to the roof and by leaving the window to the bedroom wide open.
I’m also not that pale all the time, and I weigh about eight pounds less now then when I had that picture taken, which is astounding to me, because I have a lot more hair now, too.