It was a broken community. My mother and I lived with my grandparents in Denver for a while when I was young. Life on the block included many broken homes. Alcohol, physical, substance and even child abuse existed in more than one of the houses on our block. Alcoholism seemed
When I was 8 years old, I had a yellow t-shirt with a picture of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ironed on the front. I was proud of it until the day I wished I had never worn it at all. For a kid on my block, the ultimate dare was to knock on a certain
Knowing the end result makes all the difference. When I was a kid in Denver, we had mass in our house each Sunday. We weren’t Catholic. My family massed around the television to drink the Orange Crush-flavored Kool-Aid of the early 1980’s Denver Broncos. As they fought for every inch
The Little Lady’s hand used to terrify me. When I was a boy, one of the older neighborhood kids liked to scare me with a broken-off Barbie doll arm. He would stretch the tiny, plastic arm toward me, promise me the “Little Lady’s hand was going to get me”, and
I used to get paid to worry. When I developed software several years ago, it was my responsibility to figure out what could go wrong with a program and code to make it bulletproof. It didn’t always go as planned. I would think a program was ready-for-prime-time only to find
