I was born at night — 12:08 a.m., on a balmy August 7th evening in Stoneville, North Carolina while my mother was reading The Exorcist, a novel so terrifying that to this day she maintains it hastened my early arrival. It’s a depressing little town in Rockingham County, just down NC770 from Mt. Airy — the town that was the model for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry — and nestled right on the border of Virginia. How close to Virginia? We spent plenty of weekends visiting family in Martinsville, catching the amateur dirt track races, the even more amateur regional wrestling at the city park, and visiting the historical Martinsville Speedway, the shortest (and one of the first paved) NASCAR tracks.