Most of what I write on this site is about the work I am doing now. This section is different. It is the story before the work. I wrote it down because I had asked myself, more than once, what to tell my children about how I came to be the person they know. It is the answer.
I have organized it as ten short chapters, each ten or fifteen minutes to read. You can start at the beginning and go straight through, or you can jump to whichever part is useful. The chapters are short on purpose. They are also honest, which is a different thing from impressive.
Names of family members beyond my father are not used. The reasons are religious and personal, and I have written about them in What's in the name. My father is named because honoring him is the point.