Kissed MLK, didn’t trust turquoise, etc.

On her Facebook page, 4 years ago, I “liked” my niece Margot’s self-revelations, so she assigned me to write 12 of my own. I  got mixed up and thought she said 20.

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  Jessica Reynolds Renshaw Twelve things about me you may not know. Okay, here goes: I was born in the Year of the Monkey. I’m the daughter of an Earl(e). I grew up in Ohio. I grew up in Hiroshima. I grew up on a boat. In high school I was chosen to greet Martin Luther King with a lei and a kiss on the cheek. My P.E. classes were archery and hula. My favorite food is left-over spaghetti. I once had to recite A.A. Milne’s Now I am Six in public and I was mortified–because I was seven. My first crush was on a Japanese samurai (chambara) movie star. I have almost no visual memory. I never graduated from high school but I have three college degrees, almost four. My favorite book is still Winnie the Pooh. I was living in Hawaii when it became a state. For years I didn’t trust the color turquoise. I have DID (check the DSM-IV). My first book was published when I was 14. I had nothing to do with that. When I was 12, a calf I watched being born in South Africa was named after me. I still remember the Japanese word for “anthropologist.” I became a teenager on the Amazon River. I’ve held a hedgehog and a boa constrictor and been in the cage with a lion. I like all furry animals except tarantulas. And I can’t count.

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  Our friend John Thiel responded: I agree, Jessica. Turquoise has always been a bit suspicious.

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  To which I replied: Turns out I didn’t trust someone in my life whose favorite color was turquoise. . . Just hadn’t realized the connection. I remember a Chinese friend I had in college, male, who was afraid of 4-holed buttons! The Lord brought back to his mind an experience when he was four, the oldest of three children. (The other two were girls.) His father had been taken forcibly from his wife and children by the communists. One morning there was a knock on the door and his mother sent him, as the man of the house now, to open it. He found himself facing armed soldiers–facing their shirt fronts because he was so small–and his sense of terror and helplessness was somehow transferred to their buttons!