I truly didn't. Honestly. I was just a happy-go-lucky teenager. Things happened that were out of my control. Again, I didn't ask for this.
Norm Wood is a sports journalist at The Daily Press, a newspaper based out of Hampton, VA. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1998, Wood moved back to his hometown of Newport News and covered high school sports for two years. Wood started on the Virginia Tech football beat in 2000 and currently lives with with his wife and twin daughters in Suffolk, VA.
It's been a long a winding road to get to where I'm at today. That goes not only for what I'm going to talk about today, but for every aspect of life. I find that I've been looking inward pretty frequently as of late. I'm starting to see the changes in myself as I continue to mature into the man that I will become.
I find it rather peculiar how my thoughts and feelings about my hometown have changed over the years. No matter where you are born and raised, there's always that distinct "connection" with your home. You know the roads, the alleys, the "communities", the landmarks....everything. It's as much an extension of you as anything else.
There are certain things about moving and starting a new life at a university that have been said many times over. We've all seen the articles telling you how much fun it will be, how many new people you will meet, etc. etc. etc. Every bit of that may be true, but we never see anything about the other side of the coin. The struggle that happens before all that can begin.
The party's over. There comes a time when it must end. Everything ends, right? This is no other, although it seems a much larger ending than most things that I have been through in my life. I've been through leaving home heading to kindergarten, leaving school after school on the way up to high school. I've seen the end of my high school days come and go. Jobs, friends, family; it all ends.
So tomorrow is March 12th, 2015. To nearly everyone else, that day is your typical mundane "just-gotta-get-through-two-more-days-until-I-can-get-shitfaced" Thursday. But for those like me, it's the date of our birth. Yes, I will indeed turn twenty-five tomorrow. As my mom aptly put it, I'll have been on this Earth for a quarter of a century. And that, my friends, is absolutely terrifying......
This is the story of a letter. No, not a letter of the alphabet. No, not a letter of the law. This is about a singular letter. But, before I get to that letter, I should start this story a few years back….
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AuthorI am a twenty-six year old living in southwest Virginia. This is my story. Archives
September 2016
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