When I was about seven years old, my stepbrother would take me around to the neighbors and bet them that I could spell any word they asked me to spell. Fortunately, his friends weren’t scholars by any means, so I never got asked anything I couldn’t handle. One of them asked me if I could […]

Between the ages of 5 and 9, we lived in Norwalk, California on Oracle Street. It was an interesting place to live. Across the large street was the California State Hospital for mentally ill patients. We would often get late-night visitors at our back door, inmates who had escaped and climbed over our brick fence. […]