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weird expressions and strange behavior. As a kid, I used to feel really bad about that, because I was just being myself. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
    Now I see things in a different light. I’ve learned that other people have certain expectations for how I should look and act. If I don’t meet their expectations, especially during a first impression, they won’t be friends with me, work with me, or even answer my questions. The onus is on me to act as expected and make a good impression.
    To accomplish that, I needed to learn exactly what was expected, how to act “normal” in the situations in which I found myself. The first step was to figure out what “normal” really meant. To my surprise, the answer to that turned out to be simple: To many people, normal means “well-mannered.”
    Manners were always something I lacked, according to everyone involved in raising me. I can still remember my mother turning to me when I had food on my face and saying, “Look at you! What would your grandmother say?” She meant to admonish me, but comments like that never worked. I don’t think I even grasped the idea that I had food all over me, much less that anyone else could care. With no understanding of those basics, how could I possibly make sense of what she said?
    Yet I heard her, and at some level, at that early age, I knew there was a problem.
But what?
    My grandmother Carolyn always complained about my manners. She tried to improve them whenever I stayed with her in Lawrenceville, down in Georgia, but I wasn’t very trainable. I found her instructions arbitrary at the time, and I’ve always been resistant to following orders I felt were foolish.
    She was forever comparing me to Leigh and Little Bob, my two first cousins. My cousins said, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to every grown-up who spoke to them, and she was always pointing out their resultant “good speaking manners” to me. I, on the other hand, tended to ignore or question adult commands that I didn’t think made sense. When Little Bob said, “Yes, sir!” and I said, “No!” or “Why?” it never went over too well with grown-ups.
    “Why should I talk like that?” I asked my grandmother. “It’s a way of showing respect for your elders, son,” she said. Carolyn had an answer for everything. But they weren’t showing respect, and I knew it. They were justacting, playing a game. As soon as the grown-ups walked away, Little Bob and Leigh made faces at them and laughed at what they said and did. Then when a grown-up reappeared my cousins straightened up and went right back to “Yes, sir!”
    I realized they were just like dogs who lay down where you told them when you were looking but, as soon as you turned away, jumped all over the furniture and ate food off the table. It aggravated me to no end when my dogs did that, and Leigh’s and Little Bob’s fake manners aggravated me, too.
    I wanted grown-ups to like me. I wanted to help my family. But I also wanted to play and have fun like kids my age did. And I was truthful. So that made it very hard for me to say, “Yes, ma’am!” when my grandmother asked me to carry the bags in from the car and I was in the middle of solving a complex puzzle.
Couldn’t the food wait? My puzzle was far more important!
“No!” I would reply, truthfully.
    After enduring years of continued resistance my grandmother eventually gave up on me ever saying “Yes, ma’am,” but she never gave up on the rest of manners. As she explained, “The whole thing—manners, behavior, and all … it’s called etiquette. And that’s what you need to get by in life, honey child.” She kept repeating that, even after I was fully grown.
    Carolyn kept at it long enough that a few things actually stuck. For example, she taught me the right way to hold a knife and fork. Maybe that worked because it made sense. I still don’t know of any better or more functionalway to do it. Making a fist around the