000000_HanksBook_CopyrightUpdated_091118_FB

hallways to try to control it. I had a hard time making friends. My seventh grade English teacher and my seventh grade history teacher were probably two of the best teachers that I had in my school career also. The most humorous thing that happened was that my seventh grade English teacher nicknamed her husband, “Mickey-D” because he drove his car over a bush at McDonald’s one time. That story fascinated me. Every time I saw the man I would call him, “Mickey-D” to his face. An interesting thing was that my seventh grade history teacher’s husband was the head football coach at Pulaski County High School. She and I would talk sports every day in class. I always loved going to every Cougar football game and every Cougar basketball game and that is something that I still love doing today. One summer, my family took a Disney Cruise. They knew that I had a fascination with Disney characters and they thought that it would be something that I would enjoy, but I felt like I was hostage on the cruise ship. In my mind, I thought that I could wear shorts and short sleeve shirts every day in the summer time. There was a rule on the ship that I had to wear long pants to dinner. It was the summer and I only liked to wear shorts. One evening when they had that rule, I was so angry and I wanted to jump in the water off the ship. To this day, I only like to wear short sleeve shirts with short pants and long sleeve shirts with long pants, no mixing! That summer my family took a vacation to Williams- burg, Virginia. During the vacation, we went to an amusement park called Bush Gardens. I rode a roller-

- 46 -