I'm a Nashville native. My portfolio will give you the detailed details, but here's a quick rundown of my lives this incarnation:

Born 1950 to a middle-class family and grew up with two brothers, Ed and Bill. My dad was a commercial refrigeration salesman, a traveling salesman, yes, and he worked for my grandfather's company, Gardner Refrigeration. I recall accompanying him on long driving trips into rural Tennessee, collecting quarters from the meters backwoods store owners would have to keep fed with them in order to keep their goods cold in the meatcases those quarters would eventually pay for. My mom was a housewife and mother, and both my parents are now deceased.

After graduation from Hillwood High School in 1968, I put in one year at the University of Tennessee Knoxville before dropping out to work several years in the UT Library, writing poetry and songs and working through a marriage to an older woman who eventually left me for a bank vice-president. I left Knoxville in 1975 to travel to Alaska, where I became a folk musician of some note, marrying a California girl and becoming lead guitarist/mandolinist/songwriter for the Last Frontier Band, official Iditirod Race band in 1979. I also worked for the Alaska Repertory Theatre for a year, then spent a year in Los Gatos, California playing music and another on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Moving back to Nashville I became a TGIFriday's master bartender, divorced again, eventually moving down to North Miami Beach and marrying my dear wife, Lee Ann. As I write this, tomorrow is our twentieth wedding anniversary and we are blessed with two incredibly good-hearted and talented children, Miranda and Colin.

We moved back to Nashville to start our family close to the families we had left behind, and I managed restaurants for several years, including Ruby Tuesday and Slice of Life, leaving the restaurant service industry after Miranda was born to return to college, this time for a teaching degree. Shortly after graduation I took a job teaching elementary school at University School of Nashville where I was lucky enough to have enjoyed working with children, learning from them and teaching them what I can, since 1996. I left that position in August of 2010 to take up the role of "Virtual Learning Curriculum Specialist" at Metro Nashville Public Schools in the Virtual Learning Office, Leadership and Learning Department. Our assignment is to create a virtual school for all Metro Nashville Public School students that will serve them in ways that traditional education will not.

Until 2009, I served as Teacher-in-residence at the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach, where I facilitated interactive videoconferencing and helped with the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt, and hosted/produced the Snacks4theBrain! podcast.