Yeah, baby. I wanted to be Batman.

I didn’t have the money. I thought I was okay looking, but nothing to look cool in a tuxedo at a charity benefit. In fact, I had never seen anyone in a tuxedo, or anyone who wanted to wear one. The only charity I knew about was us. We were poorer than the proverbial one-legged church mouse with a respiratory problem. I did study all the disciplines Batman studied, in a small child sort of way. I read books on chemistry and rocks and astronomy and insects and the human body, and before I realized my dad was in fact an excellent wrestler, a fair boxer, and a hell of a former country self-defense fighter, I read the one book I could get on weight training, exercise and self-defense. I don’t remember the title, but it was mostly about exercises and lifting weights, and in the back were a few self-defense techniques. I probably got it from the Gladewater library on our trips there to visit with my cousins, returning it when my mother or father went in that direction. My dad tended to do that a lot, as he was a troubleshooter for a company, gone now, called Wanda Petroleum.

But, what I’m trying to tell you in this long-around-the-block manner, via the alleyways with a look in the trashcans and a glance at the sky, is, I wanted to be Batman, and I tried. Even to this day, that character has influenced my life, leading to a thirst for knowledge. I never mastered the disciplines Batman knew. After I found out how to make baking soda boil over, my chemistry skills hit the wall. When it comes to math, once I run out of fingers and toes, I’m done. I still look at the stars, but I remember very little beyond: Oh, pretty.

What Batman did for me, though, was make me understand that the world was bigger than I knew, that there were things beyond getting out of high school and going to work and waiting for retirement. Like Batman, I wanted to be something special.