elengrey.com

I was born in the Show Me State, which I like to think of as the Barefoot State, and spent my years of lower learning there. This is why I know the difference between a mosquito, a tick and a chigger.

My love of reading was born of going barefoot, as Mama Nature intended. I still do it today. But, barefootedness has its peril. Okay. It has lots of perils. For me, it was the nail. If there was a rusty nail anywhere in the Missouri Bootheel — my early stomping grounds — well, I stomped on it. Summers were spent between the pages of a yummy read with one foot or another propped on a pillow. There are worse tribulations.

Later, I gravitated to the Windy City, aka Chi-Town, and its finer suburbs. These were my transportation years. I fell in love with all things train, having had more than a few rides on the rail to visit my Missouri grandmother. Come to think of it, all of my early when-I-grow-up-I-wanna-be had to do with transportation. I wanted to be a pilot until I went up in my uncle’s four-seater. The little moo cows were really cute, but the vertigo was not. I wanted to be a steamboat captain (thank you Tom Swayer and Tug Boat Annie), but refer to dog-paddling below. I wanted to be a race car driver, but I’m too claustrophobic to be strapped into an itty, bitty, metal container bolted to hunks of rubber. Motorcycle racer, baaby! The wind, the speed. Oops. The skid, the gravel. The legs looking like yesterday’s roadkill. Wait! Aha! I could create characters… in stories… who could do all these things and more. A writer is hatched.

The Girl Scouts should get a medal for teaching me to float. It took two weeks of camp in my 4th grade summer! In 14 agonizing, bug-ridden days, I was transformed from the non-floater to the non-stop floater. Let’s not speak of dog-paddling. It’s just too painful. That pretty much sums up my eye/hand/foot coordination and middle school years. I did go on to excel in contact sports. By excel, I mean that I could catch any ball anywhere, anytime, usually with my face. I moved on to handball and racquetball in my adult years. You can do a lot of crashing into walls in those sports. I think it’s a requisite. For once in my life, I looked totally cool.

I’ve held countless jobs from working the penny candy counter in a cigar store to selling real estate. This makes my resume look like a prototype for Where’s Waldo?

I married my very own tall drink of water who used this pick-up line to score that first date — “Are you that statuesque blonde I met in the office?” Webster’s Collegiate Tenth defines statuesque thusly: resembling a statue esp. in dignity, shapeliness, or stillness; esp : tall and shapely. I stand five feet five and one-half inches tall. FYI — That half inch is very important to me. Don’t mess with the half inch! Since I’m not overly tall and my legs only go to the floor, am I easy or what?

The tdow is why I now call Canada my home and wear socks to bed from September to May. Since I actually like digging in the same trench with the guy I married, it seemed like a good move.