"When our column advanced, and we saw what we'd done, we were sure that we could never tell the folks back home," said my father to me, I had just turned sixteen, and we were walking from my school to his apartment alone. And he said, "You'd think the world you're in would always remain, but some worlds can just disappear. Some worlds you enter just for seconds at a time, and some last until you're forgiven.

When my mother and me take the drive into town, I can't tell if she's lost in thought or lost where we are. She turns the radio to 92 Star, where Ronnie Milsap sings what he would not have missed it for, and she says, "What do you think you're gonna do with your life?" And I say, "You've got to teach me to drive." She just laughs at that, and musses my hair, and says, "Kid, you're lucky to be alive."