000000_HanksBook_CopyrightUpdated_091118_FB

a character in a show called, “Goof Troop.” I used to refer to this character, Pete, as “A Bad Buddy”. I would later refer to children who could not behave as “A Bad Buddy”. I also collected Veggie Tales movies and watched each one of them. My top five characters in that series were BobtheTomato, Larry theCucumber, JuniorAsparagus, Mr. Nezzer, and Laura the Carrot. The things that I can recall that I learned from the movie are selfishness and rumors. My parents used to call me the “rumor weed” whenever I was gossiping about people. Every day, I would go to Liberty High School with my parents before and after school. My dad was a math teacher and a basketball coach and my mom was a computer teacher. I would ride the bus to and from Liberty High School and Bedford Primary School. In the mornings before school, I hung out with my dad in his classroom and in the afternoons after school, I hung out with my mom in her classroom. Whenever I hung out with my dad in his classroom, I would draw a number line on the board and I could add and subtract positive and negative numbers. I could also add alphabet letters like A + B = C or C + M = P. It took my dad a while before he figured that I was associating letters with numbers. I would also subtract letters. I moved to Lexington, Virginia in second grade because my dad accepted an assistant basketball coach’s job at Virginia Military Institute. The school I attended never had an autistic student before. At first, they were going to put me in a special classroom, but my parents insisted that I belonged in a regular

- 36 -

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker