Fifteen people stared at me with a mix of attention spans. Some doodled long before I stepped to the front of the room. Some looked out the classroom window, pining to be outside on that late spring day. The rest dutifully watched me, though I wished they wouldn’t. Public speaking has always been, and still is, one of my greatest fears, second only to public reading.
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We called him Bud. Or Buddy. But the name on his city registration read: Buddy Boy Paisley Robinson. Not only did he have our family’s last name, but he’d been given a middle name as well: Paisley—my grandmother’s maiden name, my father’s middle name, and my middle name. He was part of the family, name and all.