View from East Tennessee

Who Am I? Inspired Husband, Father to Freaktoe and Slappy

November 1st, 2004 at 2:11 pm (Family)

Angela and I were married in 1994. I’ve taken down her picture, but trust me, she’s gorgeous. She’s a full-time mom, and her only fault is that she merely tolerates, but does not love, UT football.

Angela inspires me to be all that I can be, and I love her with everything I am.

Freaktoe arrived in 1996, the summer before I started law school. Slappy came along in 2002. And no, those are not their real names. Call me paranoid, but I’m not the only one. James Lileks has actually experienced something I have feared:

I can now mention where [Gnat, his preschool daughter] attended school: the University of Minnesota. (I kept this detail obscure because of the whole Lindberg-baby thing; when you get mail hoping that we die in a nuclear attack so your kid doesn’t have to grow up knowing what a chickenhawk daddy was, you tend to err on the side of paranoia.)

Anyway, I was in law school during Freaktoe’s early formative years, so I was able to be home a lot, and we really bonded. She served as a great source of material and motivation for the character Jessie Riley in my novel Reasonable Doubt. Like Jessie, Freaktoe has two speeds — NASCAR and sleeping — and two volumes — NASCAR and sleeping. Despite this early bonding and my continuous attempts to indoctrinate her with the finer points of Tennessee football, she cares more about quarterhorses and computer games than she does about quarterbacks and game plans. She’s a voracious reader — 20,050 pages during a second grade reading competition — and, as of right now anyway, her grandest aspiration is to be an author. She’s already written a couple of short stories.

Why do I call her Freaktoe? Her pinky toe is double-jointed or something, and she can snap it sideways independently from her other toes. It’s, well, freaky.

Slappy is my last chance to have another football fan in the house. The outlook is dire because she’s a little princess. Into girl stuff. Everything is pink and frilly and fru-fru with her. Despite her apathetic view toward football, she’s an absolute joy to be around. I started calling her Slappy a couple of years ago because of the sound her feet made on the tile floor as she ran across it. Like her big sister, she walks nowhere. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. Pause. Slap, slap, slap, slap.

If you have a couple of minutes, have a look at the following posts about the kids: