A Most Unpredictable Life

It is the winter of 1983 in Shreve, Ohio. A nine-year-old is walking through the snow to the post office to see if the check came. It isn't there. The next day he walks down again, and it is — and he remembers how happy that made his mom. Weeks later the family is out of the house on Church Street, and he's the new kid in Wooster, halfway through third grade, in Apartment B of a house split in two. This is 1983. A move, a new school, and a year he remembers as happy. On his first day at the new school he gets two notes from three girls. "Do you like me? Check yes or no." He checks yes. "So I committed day one." A stranger in an orange hat knocks on the door and asks if he plays baseball, and drives him to every practice. His best friend Leon's dad works at Frito-Lay, the house is full of snacks, and there's a ColecoVision. Kick the can every night in the alley. The first time he ever hears rap music is from the back seat of Leon's big brother's green car. And one small metal square, sewn onto his swim trunks. Families on welfare got a free pool pass — and the pass also worked on the city bus. So all summer, a nine-year-old rides the bus around Wooster by himself, looking at the big houses, buying Mad magazine at City News, spending his arcade tokens next to the theater where he saw Superman III with his brother. Jeremy brought a prop this week: a real food stamp. "As soon as I saw this, it brought back…" There's a Fiat that only starts if a nine-year-old pops the clutch on the way down the hill. A giant Easter basket hidden behind the TV. His first fish, which he wants to put back in the lake. And one more move before Christmas — to a new apartment he thought was high class — and a plan: Mom's boyfriend is going to Florida to get things ready, and they're all going to follow. "I don't remember being unhappy." Terry's 1983: a band director with a church of twenty people, a year of substitute teaching everything from first grade to calculus — "I don't give hall passes, so don't ask me" — and a wedding receiving line where his brother introduces him to a girl named Kelly, and for the first time in his life he can't say a word. He married her three years later. Also this week: Crystal sends a "Best Lewis Ever" shirt, the bingo card gets easier (and now has trivia), and Terry sings "Every Breath You Take." Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show. Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com Follow @amostunpredictablelife on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

It is January 2003. The buses stop in the northern Kuwaiti desert, and there is nothing there. A sand berm somebody had pushed up with a bulldozer. Concertina wire around it. A few tents, two of them knocked over and lying on the ground. A pallet of cots. It is dark, and the instruction is: take a cot, find a tent, go to sleep. In the morning they walk to the wire and look out, and there is still nothing. "We're just out in the middle of nowhere." And Jeremy — a 29-year-old captain with 180 soldiers coming behind him — says the line that explains most of his life: "It's always wild how I end up in these spots where we're just the first ones there." This is 2003, part one of three. It ends on the first night of the war. In between: a colonel at the port setting up a paper easel who says "just be patient with us, we're trying to figure things out" — "it's like that example of building the airplane in flight." The fuel math, which turns out not to be about fuel at all: you can carry every gallon you need and still fail, because refueling a brigade in under an hour is a problem about nozzles. Ten 500-gallon bladders strapped to the tops of trailers. A platoon sergeant and a lieutenant out on the sand with a stopwatch, running the same drill until the trucks knew where to line up in the dark. A cousin who knocks on the door of the command post — 3-7 Cav has rolled in and nobody told him. A photograph on the wall of an Air Force medical tent that turns out to be a guy he went to college with: "Really? Yeah, that's my husband." A wrestling title, self-awarded, undefeated, disputed on air. And the dining facility burning to the ground in minutes, because of what they spray on the tents to waterproof them. A cook running up in tears: Sergeant Joseph went back in. He thought people were still inside. Everyone was out. And in the ashes, on the table they'd been using as an altar since the first sergeant started holding services there — the Bible, open, untouched. Then the last night. Jeremy asleep on the hood of his Humvee against the flat windshield. A sound like an F-15 tearing overhead. Less than five hundred metres away, missiles going up. He thinks they're Patriots intercepting a scud. They aren't. They're outbound. Terry's week: the seventh grandchild arrives, and a woman at a bar shows him photographs of her dog's output arranged into every letter of the alphabet. She wants to publish a children's book. He told her it was a terrible idea. Jeremy pointed out she'd probably make a lot of money. Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show. Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com Follow @amostunpredictablelife on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

It is 1994. A guy on the floor says he could take Jeremy in a straight fight. So everyone goes downstairs. The dorm basement had activity rooms nobody used. They pushed the couches back, somebody agreed to referee, and the two of them went at each other bare knuckles, three rounds, no gloves. One rule: no takedowns. Which is the whole problem. Jeremy is a wrestler. Take a man to the ground and put him in a choke and it's over — "100% of the time. I never had a problem with that." Standing up, punching, with his one advantage ruled out, he figures it out fast. They bloodied each other's faces and stopped when they'd had enough. Nobody won. "I'm never going to sign up for a bare-knuckle match again, because you're just going to get punched in the face." They called it founding the UFC. It had, in fact, already been founded. That's the junior year at Illinois Tech. Also in it: two guys down the hall who ran an actual bar out of their dorm room — posted hours, monthly membership dues, custom glassware with a ship's wheel on it, and beds engineered to fold flat against the ceiling so you walked in and there were none. "The bar is open." Scott and Phil's Bar and Grill. Nobody ever worked out where the grill was. Turning 21 at 11:50 at night and getting carded in downtown Chicago: "Look at your watch." An electric car built from a bag of parts and a pegboard, second place by a fraction of a second. Captaining the Ranger Challenge B team as a first-year competitor, taking events off his own school's A team, and finishing one and two in the whole state of Illinois. A summer at Mansfield Plumbing, where the whole town said they "worked at the pottery" — and he still has the metal shavings in his hands. And a best friend who spent that year as an extra in The Shawshank Redemption, shot up the road at the Mansfield Reformatory, for minimum wage and a hot lunch. Terry's 1994: the fourth baby arrives on October 24th, one day before their eighth anniversary. Three in diapers at once. A three-year-old who sat her parents down and formally requested a baby sister. A father-in-law who opened a conversation with "I think my daughter is done having children." And a life-size cardboard Omar Vizquel that his wife put up in their bedroom — which ended up in the closet for fifteen years, and came down the day Terry found lipstick on it. Two things we asked on air and actually want answers to. If you're a guitar player: tell us what that fanned-fretboard, slap-and-harmonics style is called. The kid at O'Nellie's was unbelievable and we don't know what to call what he was doing. And if you ever got served at Scott and Phil's Bar and Grill, we know you're out there — find us and say so. Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show. Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com Follow @amostunpredictablelife on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

2002. Jeremy is a brand-new captain with 130 soldiers, a wedding in ten weeks, and a war nobody will give him a date for. This is the year he corrected a lieutenant colonel for not saluting him — thirty minutes after leaving a meeting about enforcing salutes — and then laughed about it, which did not help. The year he and Lorrie moved into a garden-level apartment in a Savannah mansion that turned out to be genuinely haunted: banging in an empty hallway upstairs, a door that opened on its own, smoke rising above a lamp, and one night, a woman's face beside the bed. The year he cancelled his honeymoon over a deployment date that kept moving. And the year he signed one piece of paper releasing a staff sergeant from a stop-loss so the man could follow his wife to Korea — which is how that sergeant came to be home in Georgia on leave the day he won $150 million. Along the way: a company that nearly mutinied when he jumped them into the deepest woods on Fort Stewart, a full-bird colonel who opened the wrong vehicle door at the worst possible moment, fifteen soldiers crammed into a van singing Hootie and the Blowfish, a saber arch, a brother who was carried home from River Street and immediately ran back downtown, and a Christmas spent playing the same video game for three days straight before an announcement that changed everything. Terry's 2002: four kids, two in the marching band, and a 16-year-old who came home and said he'd like to take a girl to a dance — right after they'd finished reading a book together about not doing that. Also in this one: an argument about Ohio State that takes three minutes and a live Google search to settle, a bobblehead Terry built himself out of scrap wood and ballpoint pen springs, a mailbag message from the woman who introduced Terry's parents to each other seventy years ago, and the house at 104 West Gaston Street — built in 1856, where an infantry unit received its colors before marching off to war, and where a company commander would live 141 years later, getting ready to do the same thing. 603rd Aviation Support Battalion: if you were there, say so in the comments. And help us name Terry's bobblehead — best name wins merch. A Most Unpredictable Life is the true story of Jeremy Lewis's life, told one year at a time, with co-host Terry Lewis (no relation). New episodes every Wednesday.