It was a dark and stormy night that March. Ten inches of snow had already fallen and more was coming. Normally, this would have been of little concern to the Moorman family of Carrollton, a small-town at the meeting of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers. But, Mrs. Moorman was pregnant with her fourth child. As the snow continued to fall, it became clear that the child was going to be born on this night, storm or no storm.
And, so I was. I was born the son of a (poor) Kroger store manager in Carrollton, KY during a snowstorm which dumped thirteen inches of snow on the town-not bad considerting it was March 23.
As time went by, I aged at the normal rate for that time period-approximately one day for each day which passed. However, it was noticed as the years went by that I was lacking one ability which most other children seemed to possess-I was unable to talk coherently. Oh, don't get me wrong, I could babble with the best of them. But, until I was six, babbling was the extent of my communicative skills. I have often thought that it was this initial inability to speak which led to my later interest in researching issues involved with communication. For example, there are generally accepted to be (about) 46 phonemes which make up English. (Some languages have only about a dozen, other languages can over well over a hundred). For me, until I began speech therapy at least, I could only pronounce six.
After graduating from Carroll County High School (notice the large amounts of material left our of our story); I attended college at Transylvania University. While there, I acquired a compute science and mathematics double-major and a history minor (with an unofficial focus on Soviet studies). I also met the woman who would eventually become my wife, Carla Kay Smith. We met in our first May Term course (a four week semester at Transy) studying The History of Socialism under Dr. Craig Patton.
I went on to the Georgia Institute of Technology and received my Masters in Computer Science, my PhD in the same field, a Cognitive Science Certificate, and a graduate minor in Cognitive Psychology. While there, I acquired a love of teaching. Thus, I turned away from my original goal of becoming a corporate researcher and set my sights on teaching at a liberal arts institution.
The crowd will notice that the music has gone to a minor key, if there were any music. What this means to the layman, according to Harry Chapin, is the plot is about to thicken.
Since you are reading this, it must seem obvious that I ended up almost where I began, at Transylvania University.
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In the latest news, I am now the father of a baby boy named Matthew Bryan Moorman. Some may shudder at the thought of me with a son, but that's too bad. At least, refrain from laughing too loudly where I can hear you. |