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 You are listening to The Book of Donovan, Episode 85, Day 20,666.

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 Recently, I've debated whether I should write a book about my life.

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 I know it's comical to think that my life, this life, is worthy of a book, much less worthy

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 enough for someone to take the time to read it.

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 Think about it.

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 Our lives, your life, my life, they're nothing more than a collection of stories that will

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 soon be forgotten unless someone, anyone, writes them down.

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 And why shouldn't I be the author of my own story?

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 Why shouldn't you be the author of your own story?

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 I waver, I waffle, I bristle at the thought of what I might include in my story.

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 How truthful should I be?

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 How detailed of a narrative should exist?

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 Who could it potentially hurt?

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 And furthermore, should I even care?

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 My wife has told me more than once she believes I suffered from some form of childhood trauma,

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 trauma that I've blocked out and can't remember, and I find that notion a bit laughable, but could

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 she be right? My parents weren't anything special, rather than being my parents. My father had a

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 rough upbringing, based on the stories that he would tell ad nauseum. My mother, if I remember

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 correctly, was married to my father when she was 16, but over the years of my existence, additional

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 information found its way through the cracks. My father was seven years older than my mother.

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 I'm sure you can do the math, but I'll help you. She was 16. He was 22. Now, I know 16 plus 7 is

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 23, but they married in June and I believe he would have turned 23 at the end of the year as

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 he was a December baby, whereas she was a January baby, as am I. Rumor has it, however, they started

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 dating when she was 14. I suppose it's what one did back then, but modernity recoils at the notion.

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 It would take five more years before I came along. That was probably for the best

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 since the doctor told her no more after I was born. And to this day, I still don't know why.

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 I never heard if it was a difficult birth. I don't think so, but I truly do not know.

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 It would be some years later when she came down with a life-threatening disease, the doctors told her, she would perish from in a few short years.

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 But the woman was stubborn, and that stubbornness borne out that she would continue to live past my father, who left this mortal coil in 2013 at the age of 70, about five months before his 71st birthday,

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 when she finally gave up in 2019, also at the age of 70.

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 It's this coincidence that it's probably not a coincidence that frames my outlook toward the future.

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 Is my life on a timer, one that I may already know when it dings?

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 And if so, that gives me about 14 more years to wrap up my story.

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 But before we get to the end, let's start at the beginning.

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 I was born in 1970, January.

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 In the Chinese Zodiac, my sign is Earth Rooster.

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 Hold the cock jokes, please.

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 In the regular Zodiac, I'm a Capricorn.

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 My birthstone is Garnet.

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 Now, Earth Roosters are known for being highly practical, sensible, and focused on building

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 solid foundations, observant, methodical, rarely missing a key detail.

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 known for a strong work ethic, loyalty, and taking responsibilities seriously.

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 Now, I've always taken sun signs with a grain of salt.

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 They're fun to entertain, but as with horoscopes, I don't live or plan my life around them.

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 I'd love to think that I'm all the things an earth rooster should be,

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 but for most of my life, the one aspect that revealed itself is the cocky aspect that could be derived from the name.

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 My earliest memories from my childhood start on a farm.

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 My father was a farmer, even though he had attended vocational school for radio and electronics repair.

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 Unfortunately, that was a skill set he never put to use in a job setting.

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 My mother dropped out of high school in the 10th grade.

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 So without a high school diploma, not to mention being a woman in the 70s, her job prospects were few.

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 She, along with my grandmother, worked in a local sewing factory.

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 And until I was around four or five, I was in daycare.

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 On that farm, I learned to ride a bicycle.

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 On that farm, I almost cut off my father's arms while he was working on a combine.

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 You see, I love buttons.

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 So I was up in the cab, and apparently, I had an overwhelming urge to press this one big button,

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 not realizing it started the damn combine.

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 Let's just say until that day, I'd never really heard or seen my father that angry.

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 He chased me off the combine, told me to get into the house and not to come back out until he told me to.

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 My mother, of course, was a bit more sympathetic, but also realized what I had done could have had severe consequences.

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 Fortunately, he was okay.

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 On another day that ends in Y, we were having lunch and my father went to take a nap afterwards.

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 Suddenly, I heard him screaming, and I saw my mother trying to calm him down in the bed.

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 I was frightened, to say the least.

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 I had no idea what was happening.

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 Sometime later, an ambulance showed up, along with my uncle and my cousin, and it would be

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 sometime later in my life that I fully understand what happened after it was explained to me.

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 My father had contracted encephalitis.

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 He worked around cows, but don't confuse this with mad cow disease, as they are not the same.

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 Ecephalitis simply means inflammation of the brain.

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 It is an overarching medical category rather than a single specific disease.

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 When a virus or autoimmune response attacks the central nervous system, the brain swells.

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 Symptoms usually come out fast and resemble a severe flu accompanied by confusion, fever, seizures, or movement issues.

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 Mad cow disease is often contracted from eating contaminated beef.

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 Instead of causing rapid inflammation, prions clump together and destroy brain cells over

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 months or years, leaving microscopic holes in the tissue until the brain resembles a

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 sponge.

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 Because prions are not living organisms like viruses or bacteria, the body's immune

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 system doesn't launch an inflammatory response.

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 Okay, enough of the science lesson.

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 I've been told by my grandmother and others in the family that after his episode, his personality changed.

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 He apparently went from the type of person that would give you the shirt off his back and help you any way he could to more of a get off my lawn type person.

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 For me, I'd always known him as the latter individual, not to say he was cruel because he wasn't, but his focus was on his immediate family, me and my mother.

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 Around age six, the owner of the farmland my father was farming lied to him.

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 He told him that he would sell him the farmland, but then gave it to his son.

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 In hindsight, dad probably should have known this was coming.

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 Fortunately, this was a good change for him and the family.

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 My uncle was working at Delco Rimi, the battery plant owned by General Motors.

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 This one was located in the small town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, a.k.a. where I was born.

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 My uncle was able to get my dad a job there, and that's where he stayed until he had to retire after an accident around 1992 or 93.

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 The battery plant was one of, if not the highest paying jobs in the area, probably only bested by the railroad.

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 Today, the Delco Rimi building, eventually known as Delphi, is gone.

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 The fence is still around the area, but viewing it today, you'd never know.

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 There was once a massive building there that produced car batteries.

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 We also moved that year, albeit just up the road about two to three miles.

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 But it's the home that I remember most.

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 We rented it first and then dad entered into an agreement with the owner to buy the property.

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 I sold that same property in 2023, 1.97 acres for a mere $30,000.

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 There's a story behind why I sold it for so little, but that's for another episode.

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 My formative years played out on that property.

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 I made friends with the only neighbors we had, and a few years later, they moved.

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 We raised chickens on that property, 200 head at one point.

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 And yes, for a while, I hated chickens.

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 We had a garden, not a small garden, but one that took up about an acre, if not a bit more.

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 I hated summers when we had that garden.

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 Up at the crack of dawn, scooting down the rows of dewy butter beans and peas and other

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 plants, picking what was ready to be picked.

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 And I never liked the taste of okra, but honestly, the texture of picking them was almost worse.

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 And I think that's where I'll end this episode.

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 It's going to take me a while to remember and decide on what is worth putting into an episode and what is not.

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 So if you don't see another episode drop for a bit, that's why.

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 In the meantime, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast if you happen to have stumbled across it.

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 And check out other podcasts from Tifton Media Works at my membership site, tiftonmediaworks.com.

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 Email for this podcast is podcast at bookofdonovan.com.

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 We'll talk again soon.