Like the fact that little chocolate eggs wrapped in colorful, shiny foil fell out of the sky early one Easter morning and landed in mine and my brother’s shoes. Or the fact that our neighbor was a murderer who barbecued his victims every Friday night after work, and even once tried to shoot us while we were innocently jumping on our trampoline. Then there was the time a famous basketball player came to wake me up for my early-morning paper route, and the day I found a pickle tree growing in the back corner of our yard. My brother came from outer space. A lady on our street talked to lizards. My principal stirred his coffee with the lead-end of his pencil—and liked it. My art teacher chased me with a shovel after dark. And I once knew a kid who was caught picking his nose during class and, as punishment, was forced to continue picking it until he had filled up an entire thimble. It took all recess long, and by the time he was done his nose was so deflated it looked like a popped balloon.
 

Such was the life of an impressionable boy growing up on the poor side of town with a brother, three sisters, lots of family time, good books and good movies, and, despite all my desperate pleas, no Nintendo--thank you Mom and Dad!

Now, all stories have an end--that, I’m afraid, is an irrevocable truth; although often those endings are really just beginnings in disguise. Either way, when my story reaches its end, and the Golden-Spurred-Man-Upstairs calls for my guns and holster and hat, and I finally get the chance to rewind the tape of my life, I am sure I will see—perhaps—that some small embellishments were, indeed, made in order to add flavor to the monotony of every-day-living. But should I discover that absolutely everything I once held to be fact was all along fiction, and everything that I took for fiction was really fact, I shall still be pleased to say I lived a happy, adventurous childhood, and what I discovered along the way—be it real or imagined—was mine to live, mine to imagine, and mine alone to share. And that is precisely what I have set out to do.