If I had it to do over...

I'd tell my children more of my own personal story:

• what it was like to grow up on a dead end street in midtown Memphis.
• what it was like to go to a Catholic parochial school in the fifties and early sixties.
• what it was like to go to an all male Catholic high school in the sixties.
• what it was like to come to doubt everything I'd been taught.
• how much I loved basketball and baseball.
• how I tried out for high school football but found out what football was really like the first day we wore pads.
• about the day JFK died.
• how I was a product of the 60s (although the 60s arrived in Memphis Tennessee somewhere around 1971)
• how I felt the night Martin Luther King was killed
• how I was opposed to the Vietnam War and what I did about it
• how and why I became disenchanted with the church in which I was raised
• how I went to live with a dying man during college.
• how I fell in love with their mother but once we were engaged I had second thoughts but went ahead with it anyway
• how my church tried to keep us from getting married.
• how our relationship deteriorated to the point we couldn't live with each other anymore.
• how we were both heartbroken when our first child was still born.
• about the nights each of them was born.
• how much human rights means to me.
• how much I loved watching them play volleyball, a sport I never dreamed of playing.
• how much I dreamed of a career in academia.
• how much I loved mathematics.
• just how good I was at my job.
• what it's like to live with clinical depression for twenty years.
• what it was like to stay up to watch the first steps of man on the moon. 

I think I have some emails to write.