Ephemeral Me

Timothy Haywood was born in England during the last years of WWII. His mother was English; his father a Georgia farm boy with 25 missions as a tail gunner in a B17 under his belt. His parents brought him to the US when he was three months old, and he grew up on a Georgia farm with no running water or electricity. He joined the army at 18 to learn a trade in electronics, and a year later found himself at Camp David in the service of the President. He spent time hiking and fishing in the Catoctin Mountains, where he wrote the first lines of his poem "A Promise". In 1965 he caught a Greyhound bus from Washington DC to Athens, Georgia and began his journey as a student of physics at UGA, while writing "An Identity". He earned a Ph.D. in physics and embarked upon post-doctoral studies at Cornell. While teaching at UNCW in North Carolina in 1977, he found himself buried under the responsibilities of teaching, research and family, and his poetic ambitions fell by the wayside. But upon leaving UNCW for the unknown in Colorado, where he settled in as a software engineer until his retirement at age 72, it was reawakened. Finally, his journey took him back to the coast of North Carolina for the final chapters, and he has finally begun to discover who he is.