Chapter One

Driving a truck cross-country gives a man a lot of time to think, especially when traveling through what seemed like an endless desert. That alone can stir up any long-lost memories as quick as a dust storm can kick up clouds of blinding sand. I was on my way back home to Okeechobee on a trip that started off in hell. . . Well. . . Hot as hell! Sin City. . . Smack-dab in the middle of summer. . . Here I was surrounded by nothing but vast desert, where every inch of land is withered from the scorching sun, so hot that even the tumbleweeds scurry to avoid the blazing heat.

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The forsaken land expanded my horizons, both literally and figuratively. I questioned why I was so isolated in the first place. And as if the barren desert demanded I give up my secrets, in an otherwise untelling territory famous for its many holes in the desert, I reluctantly began to travel outside of my comfort zone to dig-up the truth. Suddenly, I sensed personal growth, unlike the lifelessness that surrounded me. I also felt that a head-on collision with my past was imminent. Until now, I thought it was all left behind in the rearview mirror. I buckled up for the bumpy ride ahead, intuitively knowing I could now reckon with my past, to bring me home, full circle.

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As I kept trucking down the desolate highway, a rabbit suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and ran directly in front of my path. And just when I thought it would make it safely across the road it stopped dead-in-its-tracks. As I continued barreling straight at the little critter, it remained perfectly still. . . Frozen in Fear. I instinctively knew I could not swerve an eighteen-wheeler to avoid hitting a little rabbit, so the closer I got to the inevitable roadkill the more I blessed the vultures soon-to-be next meal. I cried out, "Don't move little' guy!" I did not want to look back, but I did. Not at the rabbit, but at myself. I looked all the way back, to the very beginning. . . . .

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The heat, the terror in that rabbit's eyes, together, it conjured up a story that my mom had once told me, a long long time ago. It was a hot sweltering night in mid July, the year was nineteen sixty, my mother, still seven months pregnant with me laid next to my father in bed, when suddenly, she recalled, my dad clutched his chest, then gasp, and by the time she had realized what happened he was dead from a massive heart attack! The tranquility that I must have felt in-utero had to become an abysmal environment. In an instant, both of our lives were literally turned upside down. My mom had just lost the father of her six children, and soon to be seven. Me, "Lucky Number 7."

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